Brunswick Exploration Inc announced on July 13, 2023 that it had identified multiple spodumene bearing dykes on its 90% optioned Anatacau Main project east of Allkem's Galaxy-Cyr project where Brunswick's Anatacau West property hosts the eastern extension of the Galaxy-Cyr system at least 300 metres onto Brunswick's property. The northern part of the Anatacau property hosts the continuation of the Galaxy-Cyr structure 22 km to the east, and Brunswick managed to have boots on the ground for 5 days in late May before sending the team off to the Mirage property where it spent a day outlining a spodumene enriched pegmatite boulder field about 200 m wide and with a 1,700 m strike perpendicular to the ice direction. Brunswick would have spent more time at Mirage to track down the bedrock source but on June 6 the Quebec government issued a forest access ban due to the fires in southern Quebec whose threat to infrastructure and communities forced the requisitioning of all helicopters to support firefighters.
The James Bay region is still subject to forest access bans, but these are expected to be lifted soon as heavy rains make their way across Quebec. Southern Quebec has in fact shifted to flood warnings as severe thunderstorms pummeled the Montreal-Ottawa areas and spawned tornadoes. The government has been letting fires in the James Bay region burn because they are not near infrastructure and the setting of height-challenged spruce tree stands separated by lakes and swamps makes wildfire spread in this region a much smaller threat than in the incendiary south. Resource juniors are lacing up their boots in anticipation of a green light next week.
The market reacted strongly to the news, bidding the stock as high as $0.82 on just over 1 million shares of trading after touching $0.68 on July 12 when the Red Cloud unit financing done at $0.85 in March came free trading. The stock had stalled as the market waited for a surge of clip and flip selling from Canadians no longer gripped by fear of missing out on Lithium Mania 2.0. But it was not obvious what the market was so excited about. The news was that prospecting had identified a cluster of parallel pegmatite dykes within which the largest was one that outcropped for 100 metres and at surface was 15 metres wide. Brunswick took 19 grab samples which assayed 1.2%-3.8% Li2O, generally above 2%. The Main dyke has light grey spodumene crystals up to 20 cm long and so these values are not representative but do confirm this is an LCT-pegmatite. The company did not disclose this outcrop earlier because it is small, similar to the Decoy outcrop at the Hearst property in Ontario where the absence of an update from a 1,000 m drilling program that began April 24 hints at disappointment. Brunswick wanted assay confirmation for the Anais showing before announcing it.
As Brunswick makes clear, its exploration strategy is one of search and destroy; if a property survives the first pass boots on the ground, it is followed by drill to kill, a massive process of elimination strategy. With properties in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada the junior's hope is that a discovery will emerge sooner than later. The forest fire ban has sabotaged this goal as far as its James Bay properties are concerned, for these have the highest potential to deliver a discovery comparable to PMET's CV5 pegmatite on its Corvette property.
It wasn't until I talked to Brunswick CEO Killian Charles that I discovered why they were so excited about the Anais showing at Anatacau Main. Unlike at Galaxy-Cyr and Anatacau West 22 km to the west where pegmatite occurs as an en echelon series of short northeast oriented dykes within an east-west shear structure, the Anais cluster of pegmatite dykes is oriented in the same direction as the structural zone they call a "deformation corridor". Whereas the Galaxy-Cyr pegmatite system outcrops so extensively it is visible using Google Earth, this is not the case to the east which consequently has seen little exploration for LCT-pegmatites. The Galaxy-Cyr dykes are filling Ridel dilation zones within the deformation corridor because the wandering pegmatite bodies exploited these openings. The risk with this type of system is that the dykes, while high grade, can be narrow and separated by wide spaces of country rock. Since this has to be open pit mined the grade of the resource will be the average of mineralized dyke and barren intervening rock. This is the problem with the Pontax lithium dyke system on which Cyngnus and Stria are working.
If, as seems to be the case at Anatacau Main, the pegmatite bodies exploited the weakness of a corridor in the direction of its strike, as has clearly happened with PMET's CV5 pegmatite for which brokerage analysts are estimating a resource exceeding 100 million tonnes of 1% Li2O or better, there is greater potential for significant pegmatite strike length to develop. The next step once the James Bay forest access bans have been lifted will be to channel sample the outcropping dykes to get a representative grade across the width and to step beyond the projected strike of the outcrop to see if it does indeed project under overburden. Brunswick has, apparently, already decided to permit a small drill program for the Anais showing because that is the most efficient way to establish the strike of a pegmatite body of which only a portion outcrops. The permitting cycle is about 45 days and is unaffected by forest access bans. It is Brunswick's goal to have a drill start roving from target to target in September.
The immediate priority will be to get back to Mirage and track down the source of the boulder field for which Brunswick should soon have grab sample assays. The prospecting team never made it to the Plex or Mythril targets in late May before the fires shut everything down, but these will become a priority in August, assuming a hot dry spell does not reappear. Killian also mentioned that Brunswick now has boots on the ground in the Hanson Lake area of Saskatchewan where there is a lot of outcropping pegmatite that could turn into low hanging fruit if prospecting confirms they are decently enriched LCT-type pegmatites. It remains to be seen how big the Anatacau Main pegmatites turn out to be. The company was able to option 90% from the Osisko group based on analysis of satellite imagery which revealed subtle signs of pegmatite. That, of course, is not sufficient to make the pegmatite LCT-type, so when the boots on the ground confirmed they were LCT-type with decent lithium grades, that was a boost for second order targets in the southern half of the James Bay region, and bodes well for juniors like Dios Exploration Inc which have developed similar second order targets in the southern half of James Bay using additional proprietary data sets that include lithium in till values. For me the key immediate milestone is finding the bedrock source of the Miraga spodumene boulder and confirming that its 1,700 m length corresponds with a similar length pegmatite body. |
