Canada Unearthed: The hype is real — Li-FT hits 79m at 1.13% lithium at Yellowknife

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• Li-FT Power hits highlight 79m at 1.13% at emergent Canadian lithium district of Yellowknife; a 45,000m drilling program is underway
• The underexplored region is tightly held by a small number of listed stocks
• “If LIFT can lock down ~100Mt from multiple pegmatites [the region] will start getting quite a bit of attention”: MM1’s Mark Calderwood

Our Canada Unearthed column wraps the news driving mining and exploration stocks listed in Canada, mostly on the TSX and TSX.V.

For most ASX and TSXV investors it was Patriot Battery Metals’ (ASX:PMT) Corvette project that put James Bay on the map as Canada’s (and the world’s) next lithium hotspot.

Numerous hits, including a highlight 83.7m at 3.13%, have culminated in a 109.2Mt at 1.42% Li2O maiden resource at the CV5 Pegmatite.

Huge. It places PMT as the owner of the second biggest spodumene resource behind Liontown Resources’ (ASX:LTR) 156Mt at 1.4% Li2O Kathleen Valley development in WA, which will produce 500,000tpa after first concentrate in mid-2024.

But its popularity means James Bay is now packed tight with TSXV and ASX hopefuls hoping to replicate PMT’s success.

It may be time for lithium explorers to look further afield.

A few weeks back we wrote about another emerging lithium region in Canada which is just starting to pop up on investors’ radars – Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories.

Yellowknife is historically a gold and diamond mining district. Everyone knew the lithium was there but, until recently, no none cared.

The Patriot analogue at Yellowknife is a company called Li-FT Power (TSXV:LIFT), which just last week reported some speccy results in maiden drilling at its Yellowknife Pegmatite Project (YPP), including a highlight 79m at 1.13%.

All 5 holes reported thus far at the Fi Southwest pegmatite hit thick, high-grade lithium paydirt, including:

So far there’s lithium over 320m length to a depth of ~150m from surface at Fi Southwest, which remains open in all directions.

All up, eight different pegmatites at the YPP will be drilled with 45,000m metres of drilling utilising six rigs.

Point the drill. At the lithium pegmatite. It’s just that easy.

Excited to have kicked off our 45,000m drill program at Li-FT Power’s Yellowknife Lithium Project. It’s taken a while to get this off the ground, off to the races now tho!https://t.co/7au8CxQD5H pic.twitter.com/LOlTi5APST

— Francis MacDonald (@el_francis_md) June 7, 2023

LIFT’s emerging success is great news for a bunch of other stocks in the province, including Midas Minerals (ASX:MM1), Loyal Lithium (ASX:LLI), Patriot Battery Metals (ASX:PMT,TSXV:PMET) via its JV with LLI,  ION Energy (TSXV:ION), North Arrow Minerals (TSXV:NAR), Gama Explorations (TSXV:GAMA) and Far Resources (TSXV:FAT).

Is Yellowknife the next James Bay?

MM1 boss Mark Calderwood says the area is riddled with pegmatites.

The spodumene ones occur in clusters. Individually they aren’t as big as [PMT’s] CV5 deposit, but there are lot of them and they are of a good size,” he told Stockhead.

“There is no reason why we couldn’t find similar pegmatites [to LIFT] on our side of the granite.”

Calderwood says the region is going to hit its straps in the next 12 months as exploration and resource drilling programs ramp up.

“If LIFT can lock down ~100Mt from multiple pegmatites [the region] will start getting quite a bit of attention, I suspect,” he says.

“I think there will be quite a few things found in the region, and hopefully a bunch of those discoveries are on our ground.”

The region, unlike James Bay, is tightly held

“It is fairly tightly held because huge areas are non-stakeable,” Calderwood says.

“There is some privately held ground, but not a lot of it.

95% of the good ground has been locked down by that small number of listed companies.”

Loyal Lithium boss Adam Ritchie says all this good ground was snapped up in a period between November and January.

“People are now going really north, like 200-300km north, and are finding stuff but I’m pretty confident they will become stranded assets,” he told Stockhead.

If you aren’t close to infrastructure, like we are, you need a whopping big asset to justify [development].”

Clean lithium ore at Yellowknife = capex, opex advantages

There’s more to a quality lithium deposit than grade and size.

Lithium here has low impurities. That’s important, says Ritchie, who is former project director at Pilbara Minerals (ASX:PLS) flagship Pilgangoora mine.

“Impurities are low straight away. The mineralogy on the ore itself its nothing but spodumene, quartz and feldspars,” he says.

“There is minimal iron and everything else. It’s pretty clean stuff.”

The geological and metallurgical ‘simplicity’ of the lithium ore at LLI’s Hidden Lake project lends itself to low-cost mining and processing.

Dense Media Separation (DMS) separates lithium ore from the waste rock before sending it downstream for concentrating.

The advantages of “ore preconcentration” can not only lower operating costs but also lower capital costs by reducing the size of the downstream beneficiation circuit.

At Hidden Lake DMS works sensationally, Ritchie says.

“From the test work that has been done on DMS the most remarkable statistic is that over 50% of the mass is rejected in the first stage of DMS,” he says.

“If we are underground, for example, we can have a small DMS unit or some form of first pass pre-processing waste removal remove 50% of the waste before we even get to surface.

“Our capex will be low, our opex will be low.”

TSX and TSX.V Winners & Losers

Here’s how TSX and TSX.V-listed mining and exploration stocks performed last week:

Scroll or swipe to reveal table. Click headings to sort. Best viewed on a laptop.

Stocks missing from this list? Email [email protected]