Whenever a junior in a region delivers new and better results than previously known, it provides a powerful boost for area play psychology and in this regard Brunswick Exploration is particularly well positioned to benefit from the latest news by Patriot Battery Metals. I have Brunswick as a Fair Spec Value rated 2023 Favorite because the junior has been assembling land packages with LCT pegmatite potential since early 2022 when Bob Wares first wondered if he was too late for the lithium pegmatite hunt in Canada. It turns out he wasn't. Bob, his CEO Killian Charles and other members of this team have been going through the Canadian assessment archives digging up records of pegmatites encountered in the course of a century of exploration for base and precious metals deposits.
To their surprise much of the land with recorded pegmatite bodies was still open. Brunswick has staked claim packages in Atlantic Canada, Ontario, Quebec's James Bay region, and, just this week, 80,000 ha in Saskatchewan - most of the so called Trans-Hudson claims are within a triangle bounded by Flin Flon, La Ronge and Southend within which bottom-fish rated Searchlight Resources scooped the Jan Lake pegmatite field late last year when it came open. It isn't obvious that these will be LCT type pegmatites, but there is no evidence anybody ever tried to assess their potential, so who knows.
The stock took a small hit at the start of 2023 when Brunswick provided an update which reported that it has downgraded the potential of its Atlantic Canada prospects, the North Shore prospect on the St Lawrence, and the Pontiac area south of Val D'Or. This was accomplished by putting boots on the ground armed with XRF guns to see if any of the reported pegmatites kicked rubidium, meaning they were potentially LCT type, and visibly large enough to be worthwhile targets. In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia it turned out that not much was visible, meaning a lot more work to identify worthwhile drill targets is required. And at North Shore sampling did not show promising lithium values, as was the case at Pontiac. But at the Hearst project in Ontario, which they first staked in April but did not announce until October because it took that long to option an inlier claim, they have some serious size pegmatites they will be drilling by early February.
The biggest coup, however, was when Bob as an Osisko founder used his connections to secure 90% options on the Anatacau and Plex projects from Osisko Developments which inherited them when Osisko Gold Royalties merged with Andre Gaumond's Virginia Mines. The Corvette package was originally owned by Osisko which optioned it to Patriot in 2015 because Dave Hodge wanted to jump onto the Lithium Mania 1.0 bandwagon. Patriot's predecessor never got much done because lithium prices tanked in 2018 and did not revive until 2021 when Australians adopted the twice rolled back junior.
Andre Gaumond was never interested in lithium pegmatites but the claim packages he staked for their greenstone hosted base or precious metals potential typically straddled that portion where evolved pegmatites show up. Back then Francois Goulet was a junior geologist for Virginia and he recalls how Andre absolutely forbade the crew to waste time and money collecting samples from the bare ridges where they preferred to sample because there were no mosquitoes or bush but which Andre knew were pegmatites that never hosted gold or copper.
In late November Brunswick announced the Plex and Anatacau deals which are not cheap, but with the machine like method Brunswick developed in 2022 these will very quickly reveal any lithium pegmatite potential this summer. In the case of Anatacau that claim package includes a claim that adjoins to the east of the Cyr pegmatite which Paul Matysek's Lithium One delineated in the early 2010s before being acquired by ASX-listed Galaxy which ultimately merged with Allkem, currently permitting the proven and probable reserve of 37.2 million tonnes of 1.3% Li2O. On January 13, 2023 the Canadian federal government gave approval for Allkem to develop the Cyr project, though to go ahead the Quebec provincial government must also approve the project.
Galaxy had apparently intersected lithium enriched pegmatite at the eastern end of its property within 100 m of the Anatacau project but never followed up. Bob Wares thought that was strange but was happy to option Anatacau which will be drilled in late February and could have an extension or repeat of what is now called the James Bay project. In a curious turn of events Allkem came knocking on Osisko's door in early January to inquire about the Anatacau claims, and was surprised to learn they were too late. Were they just getting around to tying up a loose end that didn't really matter, or were they asleep at the switch, allowing Brunswick to snag a play will be be quick and easy to make or break with a Q1 drill program?
The Patriot news at Corvette is most relevant to the Plex project which straddles the same greenstone belt that hosts the Corvette trend, except it begins where the southwest-west trend inflects into a northwest-west trend. Being part of the Virginia land package it has never been assessed for its pegmatite potential and clearly does not have as much outcropping as the Corvette area or Patriot would have begged to option that also from Osisko. Francois Goulet who ran Harfang Exploration for Andre Gaumond until late 2021 is now Brunswick's exploration manager for Quebec with the task of figuring out all those ridges he was forbidden to prospect more than a decade ago. Brunswick finished 2022 with $10 million working capital so does not need to finance during H1. With potential results flowing from Hearst and Anatacau in late Q2, the market will be primed to see what the western extension of the Corvette trend yields. The main significance of the latest Patriot results beyond helping its stock price higher is that they elevate the market's perception of the James Bay region's potential to a new level. That news may be the tipping point that turns the James Bay region into an area play where everything gets staked up regardless of the relevance of the geology for LCT type pegmatite emplacement, and a combination of Australian, ex-cannabis and Canadian capital floods into James Bay projects. If this turns out to be true, Brunswick, which has been using geology and archival research to drive its staking and optioning strategy, should become a major target of speculators looking for the next CV5 discovery by an early stage junior. |
