RE:Lithium Snapshot: Six juniors with active projectshttps://www.northernminer.com/news/lithium-snapshot-six-juniors-active-projects/1003793606/
With electric vehicle production ramping up globally, lithium explorers and developers are lined up for a year of substantial activity across the Americas, targeting both brine and hard rock deposits. Below are six such juniors.
------------AVALON ADVANCED MATERIALS Don Bubar-led Avalon Advanced Materials (TSX: AVL; US-OTC: AVLNF) has refocused in recent years on its Separation Rapids hard-rock lithium deposit, 70 km north of Kenora in northwestern Ontario, while putting on the back burner its Nechalacho rare earth element project near Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories.
At last count, Separation Rapids’ measured and indicated resource stood at 8 million tonnes grading 1.29% Li2O, 39% total feldspar, 0.006% Ta2O5, 0.021% Cs2O and 0.352% Rb2O. Another 1.6 million tonnes at similar grades lie in the inferred category.
Avalon completed a preliminary economic assessment at Separation Rapids in September 2016 that looked at producing high-quality lithium hydroxide from Avalon’s concentrates of the lithium mineral petalite using a hydrometallurgical technique that it developed in the late 1990s, and optimized in 2016.
In January, Avalon kicked off a $500,000 diamond-drilling program at Separation Rapids of at least seven holes totalling 1,500 metres to increase the total lithium resources in the main Separation Rapids lithium deposit, which is open for expansion at depth below 200 metres, as is a lepidolite-rich sub-unit of the main pegmatite.
Avalon aims to build a $25-million, demonstration-scale processing plant at an old industrial site near Kenora, funded in part by potential customers for Avalon’s lithium products.