As far as I know nothing happens at Buldania. TO said on an interview with HC The Floor (published here) that they are not doing much there because they want to preserve cash. I even said my opinion about Buldania on my email to TG after the $760m loan was cancelled and suggested to sell Buldania if we can get a reasonable price. ( I thought MIN was very keen to acquire projects at that area).
Frankly if I were the LTR management I wouldn't do anything at Buldania. That resource is nothing in comparison to what we have at KV. It's just 15mt at 1% grade resource. We already have huge amount of high grade unexplored pegmatites (as the extension of existing ones) waiting for new drilling at KV project.
I never say other than the facts here. Buldania is ours, we know what we have there as we extensively drilled it. We can keep it for the future, but it's not an economical resource at this low lithium price at this time. We wouldn't spend $300m-$400m for a DMS only plant for a 1% grade resource and expect it to make money. (Even there is good advantages of Buldania 1) At surface resource, close to big towns, next to national road and power, etc.)
We will need money for exploration of very high grade underground resource in KV.
I think we can add at least 50mt at 1.50% grade by making more exploration drilling at KV site.
I mean "at least" though. 50mt would be conservative according to my work done on the existing pegmatites and their probable extensions.
Then our resource size will go over 200mt at 1.40% (at east again), and the mine life will be over 30 years with 4mt ore process and 700kt spod production.
Or we can upgrade the plant for 1.4mt spod production (like Greenbushes capacity now) for a 15 years mine life if we want to be rich quickly. Greenbushes will not be online as a high grade mine after 7-8 years later anyway.
I have posted a lot of info about those open resource over the years. Some of their graphics are here, showing the open positions of drilled pegmatites.
The red material is our pegmatites at KV projects. The black lines are the drill holes.
The resource is open to NW and to depth (downdip).
The KV resource is a monster. One single pegmatite with very high grade ore.
The image below is a part of the above image. You can see the very thick pegmatite which is keep going but we don't have anymore drilling after that, so we don't count it in our resource.
There was even very thick and high grade pegmatite at the section I marked by yellow arrows at the below image. We didn't drill it yet.
Look at that very high grade pegmatite, it's still going to NW. But we haven't drilled it continuity yet. There is definitely a lot more there.
Maybe only that extension has more resource than whole of Buldania.
When I asked to Tim Goyder and David Richards during an AGM (I think on Nov 2020) "Why aren't we drilling more and prove more resource as we stopped drilling at the edge of very high grade pegmatites?", he said "This is enough, we have enough for a big Tier-1 project, we need to start mining now". Yes, the KV resource is a monster. One single pegmatite with very high grade ore.
We have already underground mining in place.
The underground tunnels will be going everywhere under the ground. Then we will be able to reach any new pegmatite resource which will be explored later on.
(20min delay)