We need them to get some noise happening with our lithium ground!!
Nick Evans - The West Australian on May 17, 2016, 1:14 pm
Near enough good enough for lithium
A nearology rush in full flight is a wonderful thing to watch.
And there’s a doozy going on with lithium, and on two fronts.
The first is into the commodity in general. Late last year, the number of companies on theSpinifex lithium watch list was in single figures.
This week it breezed past 40, with the late week additions of Capital Mining, Paynes Find Gold, Prospect Resources and Quantum Resource.Spinifex calculates that, if the exponential growth continues, by the end of the year the entire ASX will be made up of junior lithium explorers.
The second front is the rush back into the Pilbara, where explorers are pegging ground at a rate not seen since the heady days of the iron ore rush in the mid-2000s.
That is due to the extraordinary success of the Ken Brinsden-led Pilbara Minerals, now worth $816 million.
Map shows where various explorers have pegged ground in the nearology lithium play in the Pilbara.
For context, that values the company about $250 million more than Western Areas, and within a sniff of Sandfire Resources and Saracen Mineral Holdings. The buzz around Pilbara Minerals has led to the inevitable rush of tenement pegging around its Pilgangoora project, as explorers jump in — and it’s worth noting that the map on the right is almost a week old, so is probably already a bit out of date.
Be that as it may, the map shows a few things of interest. First, Metalicity has built up the biggest package of ground of the new players. It is promising to get the drill rigs spinning soon, so is worth keeping an eye on.
Second, Atlas Iron and Fortescue Metals Group still hold a lot of ground. While neither show any signs of becoming lithium plays in their own right, who knows what their tenements hold.
Also of note is that Global Advanced Metals holds a big bit of land around its mothballed tantalum operation, where it has a concentrator. GAM’s major shareholder is Resource Capital Funds, which also holds about 8 per cent of Metalicity.
RCF are no dummies, and aren’t afraid of specialty minerals. If there’s a deal to be done, they may be the ones to facilitate it.
EXC Price at posting:
4.2¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
