Hm not bad!
How Chariot outsmarted a major to get a mountain of lithium. Literally, a mountain
Chariot Corp’s ‘surround and conquer’ tactic wrested key land at Black Mountain from a lithium giant. All it cost was $4 million, royalties and someone’s finger.
Full points for effort
The story how CC9 got its hands on Black Mountain is wild
A couple of lithium majors were already examining the Black Mountain project when it came across Pathmanathan’s desk.
“I was sitting in my driveway in Perth, got the call, and the vendor — who is now working with us as COO – told me that a couple of lithium majors were already looking at it,” he said.
But the property around these claims was all open, so CC9 sent a crew up in the middle of the bitterly cold Wyoming winter on a staking mission.
“While we were bidding on these claims, we sent a crew in negative 25 degrees Celsius to stake around the two claims getting auctioned,” Pathmanathan said.
“We staked 89 claims. It was a bold move; someone lost their finger through frostbite it was that cold.
“But the two claims are in the middle of the mountain. We had 89 claims around those two – for us, it was like a donut and the hole was missing.”
A billion-dollar capped NASDAQ-listed lithium major won the auction for those two claims in the middle of the mountain, but backed out of the deal on discovering CC9’s strategy.
“There is a lot of spodumene in those two claims, so we definitely wanted them,” Pathmanathan said.
“We then paid $US4 million plus a royalty for those two - a rich price, but it is the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle for us at Black Mountain.”
A maiden 4900m drill campaign to test the central portion of the Black Mountain pegmatite dike swarm, comprising a 1000m long by more than 100m wide zone of LCT pegmatite sub-crop and outcrop, is now under way.
Initial results are due in January.
A conviction play, all the way
As a former oil and gas investment banker at Macquarie, Pathmanathan lived through the heady days of oil.
Now, he says, US lithium is like “buying oil properties in the US, 200 years ago.”
“I’ve had a conviction on lithium since I left oil,” he said.
“I also believe in having conviction and investing through downturns – that’s where you make your money.
“I built this company from scratch. This is not nearology, we have spent $14.8 million to this point to put this package together, and sold off the rest.
“We now have the largest lithium exploration landholding in the United States. This is ‘pioneers of the world’ type days.”
