ARI sat down with Future Battery Minerals’ executive chair Mike Edwards to chat about the company’s exciting lithium discovery at Kangaroo Hills.
With a foot in Western Australia and Nevada – two of the world’s most exciting lithium jurisdictions – Future Battery Minerals (FBM) is poised to play an important role in the world’s green transition.
The company made an exciting lithium discovery in November 2022 at its Nepean nickel project in WA called Kangaroo Hills, which was the culmination of a diligent exploration journey for Future Battery Minerals technical director Robin Cox.
“In November last year, our technical director Robin Cox was drilling a couple of IP (induced polarisation) targets to the north of our Nepean nickel project,” Future Battery Minerals executive chair Mike Edwards told Australian Resources & Investment.
“That area has pegmatites everywhere and every time we drilled a pegmatite, Robin would assay for lithium, but we had never really hit anything of significance. Then we hit a relatively narrow, high-grade spodumene-bearing pegmatite.
“This showed to us that we’re in an area where fractionation has occurred, and the pegmatites have changed from barren pegmatites to high-grade spodumene.”
Future Battery Minerals rode the momentum of the lithium discovery to raise $2.65 million in early December, which allowed the company to hit the ground running in January.
“We drilled at both Nevada (FBM’s US lithium project) and Kangaroo Hills,” Edwards said. “Robin and his team had been mapping the whole Kangaroo Hills area and we found some significant outcrops of high-grade spodumene-bearing pegmatite which helped us target the first phase of drilling there.
“We completed that drilling in mid-February, the results came out mid-March, and we hit 29 metres at 1.36 per cent lithium. This was only from 38 metres deep, so very shallow, wide and high-grade mineralisation.”
Following these results, Future Battery Minerals quickly carried out another drill program at Kangaroo Hills, with results released in early May. These holes were step outs north, east and south from drill hole KHRC011 which delivered the 29m intersection.
As announced in early May, drill hole KHRC017 would intersect 27m at 1.32 per cent lithium oxide from 64m, including 4m at 2.5 per cent lithium oxide, while several other drill holes would intersect thick high-grade lithium mineralisation as shallow as 8m below surface.
Edwards said drilling had demonstrated a pegmatite that is shallowly dipping to the north with a width of 200m and a strike length of more than 300m.
By early July, several new pegmatites had been discovered at Kangaroo Hills and a Phase 3 reverse circulation (RC) drill program had begun to explore the Big Red prospect. Big Red was first discovered in April and has delivered intersections of 29m at 1.36 lithium oxide from 38m, and 27m at 1.32 per cent lithium oxide from 64m.
Kangaroo Hills sits within a Tier 1 lithium province in the WA Goldfields. This region also hosts the likes of Mineral Resources’ Mt Marion lithium operation, Covalent Lithium’s Mt Holland lithium mine and Global Lithium Resources’ emerging Manna lithium project.
“We’re in a pretty hot part of the world and it’s very accessible,” Edwards said. “There’s main roads all around us, big players all around us. It’s a very strategic part of the world.”
Future Battery Minerals took possession of its Nevada lithium project in June 2022, seeing this as a strategic opportunity to establish a presence in this mining-friendly jurisdiction.
“Nevada was really starting to gain a lot of interest and there’s a lot of big companies that started investing there,” Edwards said. “We managed to pick up four very strategic packages of land relatively cheaply.”
The Nevada lithium project is different from Kangaroo Hills in that lithium is hosted within clays instead of hard rock, which Edwards said lends to more cost-effective exploration.
Future Battery Minerals completed its maiden reverse circulation (RC) drill program at Nevada in March 2023, with thick high-grade lithium claystone intersected at the Western Flats and San Antone East prospects.
“The interesting thing about Nevada and the reason it’s become such a hot part of the world, is it’s one of the only places in the US where there’s lithium,” Edwards said.
“Nevada is the most mining-friendly state in the US and hence, all these big companies are now really starting to focus on Nevada. You can’t pick up any more ground there at the moment.”
Edwards said FBM is surrounded by major companies looking to capitalise on Nevada’s rich lithium reserves. This includes American Lithium Corporation and its TLC project, which boasts a measured and indicated resource of 8.83 million tonnes (Mt) lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE).
American Battery Technology Corporation’s Tonopah Flats project is also nearby, which has an inferred resource of 15.8Mt LCE, as well as the only lithium-producing mine in the US – Albemarle Corporation’s Silver Peak mine.
“Lithium clays are relatively new, but once you get onto them, they’re easy to define,” Edwards said. “They’re like coal seams – they’re wide but they’re low grade, so the key with these deposits is the processing, and it’s the extraction of the lithium from the clays.
“That’s where all the time, energy and money is going at the moment – these big billion-dollar American companies doing research into the extraction of lithium from those clays.”
Future Battery Minerals’ maiden drill program at Nevada intersected lithium mineralisation of up to 109.7m at 766 parts per million (ppm) from 135.6m depth, including 29m at 1010ppm lithium. These results were announced in mid-April.
Edwards said these were significant results compared to the company’s neighbours – made even more impressive by it being a first pass drill program. FBM commenced follow-up drilling at Nevada in early June, with RC drilling intersecting potential extensions to lithium mineralisation discovered in the maiden drill program.
Alongside its Kangaroo Hills and Nevada projects, Future Battery Minerals also has a suite of nickel sulphide assets, including its Saints and Leinster projects, both of which are located on the Norseman-Wiluna Greenstone Belt in WA.
FBM released a Saints scoping study in April, which demonstrated the project’s potential to support a simple toll treatment operation within close proximity of several third-party concentrators operating in the Leinster-Kalgoorlie-Kambalda region.
Metallurgical testwork from saleable concentrate returned grades of 10–14 per cent nickel with excellent recoveries of 80–87 per cent nickel, 95 per cent copper and 84–92 per cent cobalt.
The operation would be centred on the St Patricks and St Andrews deposits, with an estimated $10–12 million of capital needed to develop the mine.
In mid-June, FBM announced it had sold its Nepean nickel project to Rocktivity Nepean for $10 million. This will further support the company’s exploration efforts at Kangaroo Hills and Nevada.
Future Battery Minerals not only has exposure to two of the most important materials for the world’s green transition – lithium and nickel – but holds assets in strategic, Tier 1 jurisdictions.
And with plenty of high-grade ground to follow up at Kangaroo Hills and Nevada, there will be plenty of news to come out of the FBM camp in the next 12 months and beyond.
This feature appeared in the June–July edition of Australian Resources & Investment.
The story has been updated to include announcements made after the article was published in print.