I'm not a current or past holder in Raiden but I'm interested in what is happening in ASX listed exploration play's. Provided below are some thoughts on their recent announcement that hopefully some find useful.
The 250m zone referenced is from 308.4m to 558.0m (249.6m). It includes two thicker peg's. The first is 40.25m, a quartz vein of 1.35m and another 12.8m peg. The second was where the drill bit got stuck after drilling 56.81m of Peg. Between these two thicker peg's are 11 narrow pegmatite instances with a maximum width of 5m with the narrowest being 0.3m. There's some ultramafic rocks and "altered intrusive" between these thinner peg's. The legend on the cross section clarifies that the altered intrusive is Biotite alteration. Biotite is a type of mica with 8.3% iron oxide. Its not a 250m intercept as some have stated but excluding the thin peg's there is 110m of combined pegmatite instance in this drill hole and how thick the deep pegmatite actually is remains unknown.
Some details about Biotite
Is the ASDD023 pegmatite lithium mineralised?I don't know. I do however know if the geologist is any good they will have done visual inspections looking for Spodumene. They would have also sought useful tools to do their job well such as a hand held Raman detector. They would know Spodumene shows under UV light. If ASDD023 contained useful levels of spodumene they should have known this before sending it to the lab. There were no references to spodumene, no UV light pictures and no drill-core pictures of ASDD023. Through the trading halt they had time to do assessments like UV light. This isn't conclusive but more often than not if there is an ability to confirm an unknown grade spodumene intercept, companies will release that information even if the ASX doesn't like it. The absence of anything is a modest at least amber flag - but its not conclusive of anything.
Non-mineralised pegmatitesIf you zoom into this portion of the picture of ASDD007, the pegmatite intercepts are in red. The Mafic/**bro host rock is green. The yellow was the 0.1% to 0.5% intercept identified. These two intercepts identified are not on the pegmatite. From this picture none of the pegmatites reached the 0.1% mineralisation cut-off being used. What contains some mineralisation is the Mafic material to the edge of the pegmatite. This could be worth further exploration but at that particular point, the pegmatites are barren re lithium making them basically useless.
Its a different company, but the two drill intercepts below show that you can get mineralised Mafic and mineralised ultramafic with grades up to 0.3% Li
20. To the best of my knowledge, these mineralised Mafic and Ultramafic intercepts don't have commercial potential because of the higher iron levels that are part of Mafic and Ultramafic material. I don't have the geology experience to know why this is happening, but mineralised Mafic would appear to be what is occurring in the middle and lower intercepts in the Raiden cross section picture above.
Target area 2This zoom-in for Target 2 shows the location of 8 drill holes in this area. Clearly there are interesting surface expressions for the pegmatites in this area but in this instance ASDD004 is the most down-dip drilling instance on the pegmatite. ASDD004 had two reported mineralisation instances. The first was 1.15m @ 0.12% from 17.05m. This is the yellow tag in the middle of the pegmatite. The second was 0.65m @ 0.11% from 26.35m. This is the yellow tag just below the pegmatite and would appear to be another instance of mineralised mafic. While the pegmatite is over 10m wide, the most down-dip instance drilled and reported contains almost no mineralisation. Most pegmatites are not being mineralised and those that are lithium mineralised are the exception not the rule. With some patcy mineralisation that fades out only slightly down-dip, it would appear more likely than not that this top pegmatite quickly becomes non-mineralised.
The pegmatite at about 80m below surface on the left of the fault and 100m below surface on the right has no yellow bar's. While presumably assayed, the results came back below 0.1% and its also a non-mineralised pegmatite.
Overall
At least in the drill results reported so far, Raiden has a bunch of stacked, primarily non-mineralised pegmatites. There's companies with stacked mineralised pegmatites at a fraction of the MC of Raiden. IMO Raiden is going to need to hit much better mineralisation in the remainder of its current drilling program than it has so far if its going to keep its current market cap.
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