- 01500Mt MRE grades 0.61% LCE; 3.03Mt contained.
- 02By-products: 2.67Mt SCE and 12Mt magnesium.
- 03Metallurgy underway ahead of scoping study.
Venari Minerals (ASX: VMS) has confirmed the addition of strontium and magnesium by-products to the previously announced lithium mineral resource estimate at its flagship Red Mountain lithium and strategic metals project in the US.
The new inferred MRE across the North and Central zones sits at 500 million tonnes grading 0.61% lithium carbonate equivalent, 0.53% strontium carbonate equivalent, and 2.4% magnesium for a contained 3.03Mt LCE, 2.67Mt SCE and 12Mt magnesium.
The project now boasts the only MRE in the nation with a strontium content, highlighting its strategic importance as a potential new US source of supply in an environment that is currently import dependent.
Magnesium is also on the critical minerals list within a rapidly growing global market, and the US is currently 59% import-dependent for magnesium compounds.
Red Mountain Project History
The greenfields Red Mountain discovery was made after a project generation exercise and subsequent field reconnaissance by Venari’s in-house technical team that identified highly mineralised lithium clays at surface.
The project was staked in August 2023 and a project-wide soil sampling grid was conducted soon after, delineating large-scale lithium anomalism in soils over an 8-kilometre strike.
Follow-up rock chip sampling defined enough outcropping lithium-mineralised rocks to justify a maiden drilling campaign in mid-2024, during which Venari intersected 59.4 metres at 1,300 parts per million lithium to indicate the discovery had strong potential to be higher grade than most sedimentary lithium deposits in the US.
The company has since completed three more drilling campaigns, with a total 30 of 32 holes intersecting lithium mineralisation.
Metallurgical testing of Red Mountain samples has demonstrated that the lithium is highly leachable (up to 98%) and beneficiation work revealed the mineralisation has excellent character for the removal of gangue minerals while retaining valuable lithium-bearing clays and reducing acid consumption.
Unique Strategic Dimension
Venari chair Tony Leibowitz said the addition of significant quantities of strontium and magnesium offers a unique strategic dimension for a US domiciled critical minerals project.
“These by-products add considerable potential economic value as we advance Red Mountain toward a scoping study in the first part of next year,” he said.
“Strontium is particularly interesting given its strategic application and the country’s complete reliance on imports, [and] having a large-scale resource with strontium in Nevada provides us with a potentially valuable point of differentiation as the US continues to strengthen domestic supply chains for strategic materials.
“Our immediate focus is now on metallurgy and we are conducting comprehensive testwork to understand how these materials may be recovered alongside lithium and whether they can contribute additional value to the future development of Red Mountain.”
Specialty Metals
Strontium is a specialty metal used in US defence applications such as tracers in ordnance, flares, and other pyrotechnics, as well as in alloys, ceramics, glasses, and nuclear batteries.
Global strontium market demand is in the order of several hundred thousand tonnes per year, with US demand typically hovering around tens of thousands of tonnes when including processed forms.
Strontium carbonate (which is the metal’s common processed form) typically commands US$2,000 per tonne with high purity compounds selling for over US$14,000/t.
Magnesium in metal form is primarily used as an alloying agent to reduce weight in automotive and aerospace applications, while magnesium oxide or magnesium chloride is used as feedstock for magnesium metal and the hydrated sulphate compound known as epsomite has diversified uses in fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, and industrial water treatment as a flocculant.
The global market for magnesium sulphate is around 2.7 million tonnes annually (of which the North American share is estimated at 25%), and expected to grow to 3.7Mt by 2034.
The US currently imports 59% of its magnesium compounds, mainly from China.
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