Kula Gold has doubled its reverse-circulation (RC) drill program from 1000m up to 2000m at the company’s Kirup lithium project, in a bid to get a better geological understanding of the pegmatites at its Cobra prospect.
Cobra sits just 20km from the world-famous Greenbushes mine - known as one of the world’s biggest hard-rock lithium deposits – and hosts pegmatites that have been mapped at surface.
Mapping and sampling has extended the strike length at the prospect to about 3.2km, with a width of up to 500m. The sudden plans to double the drill campaign to 2000m come on the back of recommendations by Kula’s technical team.
Early exploration at the prospect has proven positive, with Kula mapping pegmatites with a lithium content of up to 240 parts per million. Earlier pegmatite sampling revealed anomalous lithium results returning up to 240.8ppm and 71.9ppm lithium.
Management says its maiden RC campaign has been designed to test the entirety of the pegmatite for lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) mineralisation.
With what we are intercepting, we have doubled the Cobra Lithium Prospect RC drill programme, including Hole 23CPRC001 which will be re-entered and extended deeper. The first RC hole went to a downhole depth of 168m and the second hole 23CPRC002, to 174m. The 4m composite samples for all of the first 252m of drilling have been submitted to the laboratory for analysis. Kula Gold managing director Ric Dawson
The company’s mapping at Cobra recently identified a new prospect dubbed “Falcon”, where rock-chip samples have returned positive results for beryllium, with a strike length of about 2km and up to 300m wide. It says beryllium is a strong pathfinder for LCT mineralisation and it has also mapped pegmatites at its new Thunderbird prospect.
Kirup covers 117 square kilometres and sits about 20km to the west of the world-class 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.
The company rubber-stamped a deal with Sentinel Exploration in March to pick up a 70 per cent piece of the project’s deposits of lithium and related minerals. Initial investigations undertaken by Sentinel identified 11 pegmatite locations at the site, with early due-diligence work undertaken by Kula also alluding to the potential of the prospective patch to house lithium-bearing rock types.
But for now, the company’s technical team has clearly liked what it has seen in the first part of its current drilling program, prompting the thought that 2000m will be better than 1000m.
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