Last week I talked about how the forest fire closures in Quebec's James Bay region had been lifted thanks to the arrival of rain in southern Quebec, but on Monday June 19 came the bad news that the Quebec government had reinstated the closure all the way south to include the Abitibi region due to lack of rain. It is unclear when the James Bay area will reopen and many Quebec based service providers are preparing to offer their services elsewhere in Canada. Brunswick Exploration Inc has already given up on the James Bay region until the middle of July and is putting all its boots on the ground into other parts of Canada not yet hit by fire closures.
Brunswick apparently has good reason to hit its properties in other provinces hard while James Bay remains off limits. In last week's Kaiser Watch June 16, 2023 Episode I discussed the spodumene-bearing boulder field Brunswick reported on June 14 finding at its Mirage project in the eastern part of James Bay. I inferred from the news release that the 1.7 km long band of boulders was parallel to the ice direction which is roughly southwest. Brunswick emphasized that the boulder field was at the southern end of a land package that stretched 18 km up ice. This implied an up ice source which to be meaningful had to also be oriented in the ice direction. The downside risk was that the pegmatite body was either a narrow dyke or a short body with limited strike, neither of which had tonnage implications. If I had talked to Killian Charles last week I would not have gotten more than what was in the press release about Mirage which was deliberately vague because it turns out they have been scrambling to expand the land position based on a new understanding of the area's potential.
The team spent only 6 hours at Mirage and they had with them the geologist who found the spodumene boulder a couple decades ago to show them where to start looking. They were blown away by what they found. The 1.7 km long band of boulders is 200 m wide and its limits were not cut off because they had to leave the field. The boots on the ground were like kids in a candy store who just didn't want to leave. The stunning tidbit I gleaned from Killian was that the band of boulders is perpendicular to the ice direction. What they found so far straddles both the 100% optioned Globex ground and the BRW staked ground. The geologist who found the original boulder is actually a geomorphologist, an expert on how the physical landscape is shaped. He himself was surprised at the extent of the boulder field.
The situation is in fact much better than I assumed last week and I am now confident that Brunswick has a major "first order" discovery at Mirage. There is no way this boulder field can be described as a glacial train, and the abundance of sub-rounded and sub-angular boulders rules out the idea of glacial erratics from far away. If this narrow field of boulders stretching 1.7 km perpendicular to the ice direction were glacially transported it would have a fan like down ice dispersal pattern. The topography is flat, so it is not a case of boulders rolling off some mountain into a valley bottom. The source is very local and likely parallel to the strike of the 200 m wide band of boulders. The size and quality of the spodumene crystals, which needs verification by assays, suggests this is a major discovery. I have been grumbling about the lack of geology Brunswick includes with its disclosure graphics, but they have deliberately withheld geology about the Mirage property because it has implications for the potential of a wider region than initially staked by BRW. They are so optimistic about the Mirage discovery that they are initiating drill permitting with the goal of drilling by September. Quebec's permitting rules for drill holes are flexible enough to figure out later this summer where exactly to spot drill holes.
Killian Charles did attend the Fastmarkets Lithium Conference held in Las Vegas June 20-22. This conference focuses on lithium supply and demand but also included rare earth talks. Killian, who attended as a delegate, estimates about 1,000 delegates participated. Many of them were representatives of government agencies and downstream processors and fabricators, but in terms of the lithium supply side the conference was dominated by Australians who are aware of Canada's major lithium supply potential. They are shaking their heads at the lack of North American interest in Lithium Mania 2.0, namely the hunt for LCT-type pegmatites beyond Australia in secure jurisdictions like Canada. Why are Canadians and especially the financial community on Bay Street oblivious to this enormous potential in their own backyard? I think the answer is simply that they do not understand how to convert lithium grades into rock value and appreciate how pathetic Canadian precious and base metal plays are in comparison. |
