Nevada Lithium Resources Inc (CSE:NVLH, OTCQB:NVLHF) on Monday reported new drill results that significantly extended high-grade lithium mineralization at its Bonnie Claire project in Nevada. Company CEO Stephen Rentschler spoke with Proactive following the release to further explain why the results are important to the project’s development.
Proactive: You had some big news on Monday, which was initial core results from the 2023 drill program. Before we get to the results themselves, tell us a bit about the program and what the design of the drill program was expected to do.
Stephen Rentschler: When everybody sees it, you're going to see why we're so excited. It's almost like Bonnie Claire gave us an early Christmas present. But to refresh everybody's memory, we have a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) on Bonnie Claire, that was done only two years ago. And we're in the process of upgrading that by basically doing an infill drill resource upgrade program.
So this is infill drilling that we're basically doing with very deep core holes. These are diamond drilling types of rigs that essentially give us the entire core hole so that we can have very accurate measurements of everything that's going on below ground. And we typically go to 2000 feet in depth.
This time, we've extended that and we've gone down actually to the geological basement to 3000 feet in depth. And what we've encountered is very large intercepts of very high mineralization going down for hundreds of feet.
So that when we go and we put this all together, we have these extremely large swaths of higher-grade mineralization than we've encountered before. To put things in reference, our overall resource grade at Bonnie Claire is 1000 parts per million, so 1000 ppm, and now we're seeing hundreds and hundreds of feet, of 2000 ppm and hundreds and hundreds of feet of 3000 ppm.
Now it will be up to the engineers to tell us how this all comes together, perhaps in the prefeasibility study (PFS) or an updated PEA. But clearly all else being equal this tells us a lot about the potential for higher grade mineralization at Bonnie Claire.
Proactive: It really adds an interesting twist to the project as well, because as you mentioned, what you had before was one thing, but now with this first hole, it really starts to show the depth, literally, and also how big this project can get.
Stephen Rentschler: We've been trying to make it clear, for the last couple of months, about what I call the optionality of Bonnie Claire, and a lot of it is because of its sheer size and the different kinds of potential geology that we have.
We like to compare Bonnie Claire’s size to the island of Manhattan. Using the analogy, we are exploring and doing our peak PFS resource drilling just at the ‘Midtown’ area, so there’s a lot of area left to explore.
And even though Bonnie Claire's very flat on top, underneath we have things going on at different depths. What we've been talking about recently, with this core drill hole is essentially medium depths and the grand scheme of things 2000 to 2500 feet deep, which is certainly not deep at all. And this is where we're looking at what we could potentially access with borehole mining.
As we progress further to the west, we are seeing our high grade mineralization continue to come closer to the surface, which begs the idea of looking at perhaps an open pit. And then finally we're doing a seismic program. And we're looking to see about structures that run underneath Bonnie Claire, and the deeper areas to see about the potential for finding a bright spot and accessing hopefully, a very acidic pool of water that's dissolved the lithium sediments into an economic brine.
And now to top it all off, we have confirmation of what our technical teams have always thought, which is that we think this mineralization continues below what we've drilled previously because previously what we drilled ended in mineralization. So it's really excellent news. The grades I think are just remarkable and I look forward to discussing it further going forward.