Nov 1 2022Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.
Recently, Cullinan Metals made an option agreement to purchase a 100% interest in the Smiley Lithium Property situated 55 km north of Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Regional location of the Smiley Lithium Property. Image Credit: Cullinan Metals Corp.
The Property comprises five mineral claims in a single contiguous block encompassing around 1,902 hectares. The provincial highway 527 cuts across the property, providing very good secondary road access, and Thunder Bay has outstanding port and rail facilities.
Commentary
We are excited to be entering the lithium space in northwestern Ontario where the exploration and advancement of several lithium deposits are occurring at a rapid pace. Northwestern Ontario is receiving a lot of attention for its lithium potential from companies around the world providing a low-risk mining-friendly jurisdiction with accessible infrastructure and government support.
Marc Enright-Morin, CEO, Cullinan Metals
“As the world gets closer to zero-carbon emission mandates, lithium remains a key mineral in the electric vehicle (EV) and battery mineral needs. We look forward to the results of our upcoming exploration efforts,” Marc Enright-Morin added.
Northwestern Ontario Lithium
The Smiley Lithium Property is situated in northwestern Ontario, where numerous lithium deposits and occurrences are at various stages of exploration and development.
Avalon Advanced Materials is all set to deploy a dense media separation (DMS) plant at its Separation Rapids Lithium Deposit north of Kenora, Ontario and continues to advance toward the purchase of an industrial location in Thunder Bay for a lithium battery minerals refinery.
Green Metals Technology has launched a 24,000 m drilling program at their Root Lithium Deposit, which aims at resource characterization and extensional and step-out drilling and baseline analyses at their Seymour Lithium Deposit.
GT1 also reports a strategic partnership with Lithium Americas on GT1’s Canadian assets to develop a combined lithium chemicals operation in North America.
Frontier Lithium is developing its PAC and Spark Lithium Project in ‘Electric Avenue,' where the latest drilling results yielded 326.6 m of 1.92% Li2O. Lithium deposits and occurrences are fundamentally associated with subprovince boundaries in northwestern Ontario (Breaks et al., 20031).
The Property
The Smiley Lithium Property has many indications of prospective lithium-bearing pegmatites [(LCT-pegmatites) Li, cesium (Cs), and tantalum (Ta)] that boost this Property’s merit. These include:
1) The Property comprises a muscovite-bearing S-type peraluminous granite bordering metasediments. Peraluminous granites are bountiful and related to several lithium deposits in northwestern Ontario, and metasediments are habitual hosts to lithium-bearing pegmatites in the aureole of a bountiful granite (Breaks et al., 20031).
2) The Property straddles the subprovince boundary between the Marmion and Quetico Subprovinces.
3) OGS charted muscovite-tourmaline granite pegmatites. Tourmaline and muscovite are good mineralogical signs of bountiful parental granite fractionation of lithium-bearing pegmatites ((Breaks et al., 20031).
4) Fault and fracture systems are favorable for trails of granitic fractionating melts.
5) In 2011, drilling southwest of the Property by HTX Minerals (HTX) intersected many quartz-feldspar mica pegmatites up to 3.4 m downhole hosted within metasediments. HTX was then looking for rift-associated ultra-mafic mineralization.
Drill logs define greenish feldspar (this could probably be spodumene as spodumene can be greenish and possess a feldspar-like crystal form), blue-transparent angular crystals (perhaps beryl), coarse tourmaline and muscovite or columbite-tantalite minerals. These are all valid mineralogical hints of LCT-pegmatites (Breaks et al., 20031).
6) Examination of one of two holes that intersected pegmatites yielded high cesium (Cs) values of up to 40.5 ppm, tantalum (Ta) values of up to 16.8 ppm, and rubidium (Rb) values of up to 206 ppm. Beryllium or lithium was not examined. All the above elements are well elevated and anomalous outside average crustal levels (Breaks et al., 20031).
7) Elevated lithium lake sediment outcomes carried out by the OGS on and adjacent to the Property.
The Transaction
The Company holds the right to earn a 100% interest in the Smiley Lithium Property by paying $2,388,000 to the vendors across a 3-year timeframe and issuing $175,000 worth of stock of Cullinan Metals. The vendors will keep a 2.5% net smelter returns royalty (NSR), of which the Company can acquire back 0.5% of the NSR for $500,000.
Source: https://www.cullinanmetals.com/