Former Pilbara Minerals managing director and chief executive officer Ken Brinsden enlightened the Resources Rising Stars Summer Series about what is required to develop a Tier 1 lithium project.
“You need great geological hosts, you need coincident infrastructure and support to grow a big mining operation,” he said. “And, of course, you need the market. They’re the things I’m going to hit on … as I talk about the direction Patriot’s taking with the Corvette discovery.”
After Brinsden officially stepped down as managing director and chief executive officer of Pilbara Minerals in late July, he was appointed as Patriot Battery Metals’ non-executive chair in late August.
Located in the upper James Bay region of Canada, Patriot’s Corvette project boasts the CV lithium trend, which was first discovered by the company in 2017. Patriot owns 100 per cent of over 210km2 along a 50km lithium pegmatite trend.
“The James Bay region itself is becoming particularly important in the lithium world,” Brinsden said. “There has already been some discoveries, and there may well be more. But it’s a great place to be building a mine.
“It’s exciting because of the scale that’s emerging in the (Corvette) discovery. The key outcrop is what’s called the CV5 trend – that’s where we’ve done the bulk of our drilling – but the outcrops are dotted over a serious length or strike extent. And that’s where another parallel to Pilgangoora is important to reference.
“When you stood at the centre of the Pilgangoora operation … you could look five kilometres to the north and see the monster outcrop, you could look four-and-a-half, five kilometres to the south and you’d see Altura’s outcrop, and you’d see the south end.
“As it stands today, Pilgangoora’s strike extent in the key project area is roughly 13 or 14 kilometres. So here we are at Corvette with about 20 kilometres of strike extent of key outcrops known to host spodumene.”
Brinsden said Corvette is not only sizeable but also fertile.
“We’ve now centred on the first 2.2 kilometres of drilling, this is the CV5 trend,” he said. “In there, you have some incredible intercepts. A couple that come to mind – 160 metres at 1.6 per cent lithia, another 75 metres of about two-and-a-half per cent lithia, within which 40 metres is over three per cent.”
Corvette’s potential is what motivated Brinsden’s next chapter post-Pilbara Minerals.
“There is a lot of what you might call coincidence and or deja vu in my experience getting introduced to Patriot (Battery Metals) and the Corvette discovery, given what happened at Pilbara Minerals,” he said.
“Going back over time, in 2015, I was looking at the Pilgangoora project with a view to participating at Pilbara Minerals. And as much as I knew very little about the lithium world at that time, when I rolled out to geological maps on the kitchen table, I was excited about what I saw because there was huge potential in the geology.
“The area – Pilgangoora – felt like and, and on the face of it, the geology indicated that it was going to be a big body of mineralisation.”
Brinsden said seven years on, Pilgangoora has become one of the biggest lithium mines globally, generating plenty of cashflow to boot.
But his time at Pilgangoora was coming to an end.
“Roll forward to May 2022 and I’m winding down at Pilbara Minerals and having a look at the Patriot geological maps … and thinking to myself, this is feeling a lot like Pilgangoora in 2015, because the geology at the Corvette discovery feels like it’s going to support another big project over time,” he said.
“It’s early stages in exploration but already there’s evidence to indicate that it’s going to be one of the bigger discoveries in the last decade or so.”
Brinsden is not the only senior executive in the Australian resources sector to make the move to Canada. Former Core Lithium managing director Stephen Biggins was recently appointed as Winsome Resources’ new non-executive chair, while former Mincor Resources managing director and CEO David Southam joined Cygnus Gold as managing director.
Winsome is advancing its flagship Cancet and Adina lithium projects in Quebec, while Cygnus is developing its Pontax lithium project in James Bay.