Kula Gold says it has hit visual pegmatites in 11 holes sunk at its Kirup project, varying from an interpreted 3m up to 55m in thickness at the company’s Cobra prospect near the world-famous Greenbushes lithium mine.
Early exploration at the prospect has proven positive, with Kula mapping pegmatites with a lithium content of up to 240 parts per million. Previous pegmatite sampling revealed anomalous lithium results returning up to 240.8ppm and 71.9ppm lithium.
Management says pegmatite rock chips with high lithium content containing muscovites, tourmalines and garnets have been mapped at surface and have increased the prospect’s strike length to about 4.2km.
Last month, the company doubled its maiden reverse-circulation (RC) drill program from 1000m up to 2000m at Kirup, which is in Western Australia’s South West region, in a bid to get a better geological understanding of the pegmatites at Cobra. The plan to double the drill campaign came on the back of recommendations by Kula’s technical team.
Cobra sits just 20km from the Greenbushes mine - known as one of the world’s biggest hard-rock lithium deposits – and hosts pegmatites that have been mapped at surface.
The maiden Cobra RC drill programme intersecting the appropriate rock types that traditionally host LCT mineralisation is a positive start. The combination of encouraging outcrop, geochemistry and geophysics is now evident in the subsurface drilling. Kula Gold managing director Ric Dawson
Just last month, the company’s share price jumped more than 184 per cent to reach 3.7 cents from a previous close of 1.3c after it outlined a series of promising lithium drill targets at its Kirup and Brunswick projects.
The nearby Greenbushes mine has a long history of mining dating back to the late 1800s. The deposit has a resource of 360 million tonnes at a grade of 1.5 per cent lithium oxide.
The first lithium mining began at Greenbushes in 1983 and by 2021, it was producing about 38 per cent of the world’s hard-rock lithium product. In the 2022 financial year, the mine produced 1.14 million tonnes of spodumene concentrate.
Kirup covers 117 square kilometres and sits about 20km to the west of the Greenbushes mine, which is a structurally-controlled LCT pegmatite of Archaean age. It complements Kula’s other lithium project Brunswick, which is 20km to the north, and both projects are within greenstone terranes in the south-west of the Yilgarn Craton.
The terrane is considered prospective, greenstone-hosted gold, epithermal gold and Julimar-style copper-nickel-platinum group elements (PGE) mineralisation. Kula returned grades of up to 7.95 grams per tonne gold at the site from early-stage exploration last year.
While the initial drill results from Cobra show the intersection of visible pegmatites and will require laboratory analysis to prove the presence of lithium and other battery metals, the minimal distance from one of the world’s most famous lithium mines means the market will be keen to see the results of the final assays.
Like the snake of the same name as its prospect, the company seems to be poised to strike.
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