If you don't know this - spodumene in weathered pegmatite has low contained Li2O. Most of the good pegmatites are weathered, no exception here.
Luckily a huge bulk of weathered / altered pegmatite at Manono has already been removed by 60-70 years of mining for cassiterite.
They did perform a limited 6 years of mining the hard rock pegmatite on Kitotolo between 1950 - 1956 and produce around 7.8MT of spodumene rich tailings that will be useful to commission our plant with. We do have large 100MT+ inventory of Tin rich tailings (thanks to the terrible processing techniques they used there's plenty of tin in there) but this smaller fresh rock sourced tailings dump was the basis of Feasibility studies by Geomines to produce spodumene concentrate and convert to lithium carbonate, approx 4KTPA for 10 years using the initial tailings.
Below are some cross sections from the Kitotolo Pit that shows this mining. In case the legend is not clear most of the altered / weathered pegmatite has been removed in prior mining (Yellow). And the red zones are where fresh/hard rock was mined.
You can see the vertical lines are the drilling done to date which ended in mineralisation (we haven't hit the bottom)
View attachment 446606
Below are some assays from bulk rock samples taken from that exact area:
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As mentioned previously geomines conducted extensive studies later on converting the tailings from material they mined in that location from 1950-1956 to lithium carbonate. As a part of this they conducted met tests on the tailings from the red zones above, very high recovery from just DMS, and the summary:
View attachment 446618
The above for me is empirical... we have good recoverable Spodumene and fantastic co-products in Tin, Tantalum and Niobium.
The question is now how much of it, consistency and the zonation. Well zonation at least won't be a big impact on us due to our approx 20km of strike and the average pegmatite width of 450m. Why do I say 20km and not 13km.
There are some authors who believe the pegmatite connects between Manono and Kitolo and continues both NE and SW. Certainly our initial inspection of the extensions license supports this theory. Its only a theory but illustrated below in the cross-section, the map is to show scale of cross section.
View attachment 446621
Coming back to that cross-section I attached above, I hope we start our drilling there...
The above are sourced mostly from Geomines historical company reports scanned at a library in Belgium, I need to ask them for permission to reproduce full documents.
