When Azure Minerals presented at the 2022 RIU Sydney Resources Round-up, the company showcased the Andover nickel project, but things have evolved significantly over the last 12 months.
“Last year when I presented here, it was the Andover nickel project, but I’ve had to shorten that down to just ‘the project’,” Azure managing director Tony Rovira said during his 2023 RIU Sydney Resources Round-up presentation.
“(This is) because not only have we got nickel, copper and cobalt sulphide mineralisation and deposits there, but we’ve also identified some very high-grade lithium-rich pegmatites, so this has very much become a battery metals project.”
Azure identified more than 700 outcropping spodumene-rich pegmatites at the Andover project in 2022, many of which the company believes are joined together to form larger bodies. This is confirmed by mapping Azure has completed at the project.
“These pegmatites are all located in a single ‘swarm’ as we call it, or a pegmatite field, which is 9km-long east-west and 5km-wide,” Rovira said. “Individual pegmatites are up to 1600m-long and 200m-wide in places, so there’s early-stage evidence that there’s substantial volumes of pegmatites on the ground.”
Surface mapping and sampling undertaken by Azure in 2022 returned significant lithium grades across Andover’s outcrops, with 21 samples returning up to 4 per cent lithium oxide.
“When you’re getting three, four, up to five per cent lithium oxide in outcrop, those are some of the highest sampling numbers that have been returned from any pegmatite or lithium project in Western Australia,” Rovira said.
Azure has been carrying out diamond drilling to test beneath outcropping pegmatites at its AP0011 and AP0012 prospects, where surface sampling returned high-grade assays of between 2–4 per cent lithium oxide.
The company completed four holes first, each of which intersected spodumene-rich mineralisation. The first two holes, ANDD0201 and ANDD0202, each intersected a single pegmatite of 22m and 27m in width, respectively.
The following two holes intersected two pegmatites, with ANDD0203 drilling 12.1m and 52.9m-wide pegmatites and ANDD0204 drilling 29.7m and 39.6m-wide pegmatites.
Early-stage exploration success has Azure believing it’s onto something big, which Rovira explained in more detail.
“We believe that there is the potential here for a very large volume of pegmatites and lithium mineralisation,” Rovira said. “I’ve set the exploration department the objective to this year go out there and come back and tell me, ‘Do we have potential for over a 100 million tonnes of lithium resources?’.
“If this was to be the case – with over 100 million tonnes – it would put Andover in the top ten hard-rock lithium projects in the world by size.”
Azure will be conducting 40,000m of diamond and reverse circulation (RC) drilling in 2023 to determine the scale of Andover, with 13 high-priority pegmatite targets to explore.
The company had $23.2 million of cash in the bank at the end of the March quarter, which was bolstered by a recent $20 million cornerstone investment from SQM, which is part owner of the Mt Holland lithium mine in WA.
This gave SQM a 19.99 per cent stake in Azure and will see the global lithium company provide technical expertise to support Azure’s exploration.
Subscribe to Australian Resources & Investment and receive the latest news on commodity prices, resource developments, executive movements and more.