Artemis Resources (LON: ARV) (ASX: ARV) (OTCQB: ARTTF) shares are up 16% in Australia today. ARV shares are up on confirmation that there’s lithium in their recently announced find. We should point out that this is still early days in the proof that there’s an economic deposit worth mining there. But it is a positive step along that road.
The announcement itself: “A lithium bearing rock chip sample was provided for mineralogical analysis at ALS Global Laboratories. Recent geochemical analysis undertaken by ALS on behalf of the Company reported lithium assays in the range 1-1.8% at Kobe and up to
3.6% Li2O at the adjoining Osborne JV. The higher-grade sample was submitted for
mineral characterization by the XRD technique. The XRD analyse reveals that
Spodumene is the dominant lithium bearing mineral in the sample.” That’s a nice and high lithium content. But it’s also the one, carefully chosen, rock chip. So we’d not even begging to suggest that the field, or deposit, is at this level.
Artemis Resources share price from Google Finance
We’ve looked before at Artemis Resources: “The point for us to understand here is that this is still at a very early stage. Yes, the right rocks (pegmatites) have been found. Also, some interesting lithium values have been found in some of those rocks. It's even true that this seems to be an extension of a mineral deposit from the claims next door. But that's all we've got to so far. This is not proof that there is indeed a lithium deposit there worth mining. Thus the rather muted reaction to this news. Plus, and this is something that we think rather than it being a general market view as yet, there are so many lithium finds being made that each extra one is of ever less value.”
We’ve now moved to the next level of proof. We used to know that there were pegmatites there. Then we were told that there’s spodumene there. Now we’ve got that next stage - at least some of the spodumene contains lithium. Don’t forget, not all spodumene contains lithium, not all pegmatites contain spodumene. So we are advancing, step by step, along that pathway of proof.
The next stage is to continue drilling and to do two things. Show that the lithium mineralisation is widespread and also to work out how much of it there is. When we know how much of exactly what there is then it’s possible to do the calculations about whether it’s worth mining or not.
