There's good progress continuing at both Crystal Palace and Black Cat. Nothing seems to started yet at Blue Jay. The drilling at PLS seems to have gone into a hiatus - nothing appears to happening in the area adjacent to Zakanaka, or in any of the areas further north on the PLS lease.
On the gold front, there appears to be more interest in gold with it's price now around AU$3,000 per oz. Also, the BRICS countries, which now include Saudi Arabia, are wanting to create a gold backed currency. Here's a link to the article:
https://rrst.live.irmau.com/blog/tide-will-turn-on-gold-bellevue-s-stralow?ExtraId=28320387And here are some excerpts:
Now onto the drilling at Roe Hills. Firstly, let's have a look at Black Cat.
Here's the Black Cat drill plan for reference, taken from the
10-08-2023 announcement:
There appears to be preparation activity underway at the northern area across the road. It appeared on 04-10-2023 satellite image following a week or so of missed images due to cloud cover. It appears as a very faint line on the middle right of the gif, just north of he road on 04-10-2023. Here's the gif:
And here's a close up of the area:
Here's my interpretation of where things are at.
Red - No activity yet
Orange - Interpreted drill pads
Green - Interpreted completed drill holes
Yellow - Historical gold drill holes
Blue - Alchemy Resources lithium drill holes
Next, Crystal Palace. The drilling at Crystal Palace appears to be complete. Here's the reference drill plan; Crystal Palace on the top right, Blue Jay to the left of centre:
Here's the gif for Crystal Palace showing the latest satellite image from 04-10-2023. Note that there appears to be a reorientation and increase in number of the drill holes completed (from 3 planned to 5 actual (?)) on the last sequence (near the centre of the image) when compared to the original drill plan.
And here's my interpretation as to what's happening - same colour legend as before:
This is just me thinking out loud, but looking at the priorities KAI have for the drilling, it would appear that they have applied the following logic:
- Black Cat south of the road is seen as the number 1 lithium prospect.
- Crystal Palace is probably number 2 down the list of lithium prospects.
- The gold/lithium target at the north of Black Cat is number 3 (?).
- Blue Jay (rare earths), number 4 (?).
So, in summary, there's continued progress at Roe Hills, Gold continues to look more promising for Mount York, PLS have gone into a hiatus, and we'll have to wait and see about geophysical work around Zakanaka (KAI side of the boundary).
There was an interesting take out from TKM's
recent report from its maiden drill program. It wasn't what the the traders wanted, but they reported success at identifying lithium targets using geophysical investigations (demagnetised zone from aeromagnetics). This may have implications for KAI, which is in all likelihood sitting on lithium deposits which are sub surface, similar to the indications found at Lucky Sump last year.
Aeromagnetics from 2016 plus 2D seismic investigations may provide a pathway for help KAI target potential sub surface lithium deposits.
It's early days yet, and I might be proved wrong on this, but the new board appear to be adopting a different exploration approach to the previous board. From what I've observed, when a target is identified, it's followed up with a substantial drilling campaign to test it it and see what's there. For example:
- At Lucky Sump some rock chips were found. This was followed up with 18 fairly closely spaced drill holes to find out what was there. Not 3 or 4, 18.
- Mount York was hit hard last year and for the first time we had core drilling completed, The combined result was an additional 500,000 oz of gold taking the reserve to 1.6 Moz, and because of the core samples, we've now established that the resource can be processed via a low cost, technically proven, and low risk process route. There's also further "Programming of drill testing gold anomalies for near-surface resource additions."
- At Roe Hills, extensive soil sampling (multiple passes) were carried out, along with arranging the sharing of technical information via a joint technical committee with GL1. In simple terms, the board has done some serious homework before embarking on a maiden drill program comprising of 76 drill holes.
From what I'm observing, the new board is doing their homework, then committing to targets with extensive drill programs. It appears to be be a very focused approach, which has paid off at Mount York in terms of increased reserve, and let's hope we see something similar for lithium at Roe Hills and Zakanaka.
GLTAH.
(20min delay)
