Azure has picked up the pace of lithium drilling at its Andover project in Western Australia’s West Pilbara region after two rigs started drilling reverse circulation holes.
Azure has picked up the pace of lithium drilling at its Andover project in Western Australia’s West Pilbara region after two rigs started drilling reverse circulation holes.
The rigs, which join two diamond rigs that have already completed 20 holes totalling 7332.6m to date, will carry out an initial 40,000m drill program.
First holes will be drilled along the 1500m strike length of the AP0011 and AP0012 pegmatites, which have already seen diamond drilling that intersected significant widths of spodumene-bearing pegmatites.
And if this wasn’t enough, Azure Minerals (ASX:AZS) plans to mobilise another one or two RC rigs – depending on availability – to speed up the step-out drilling and test the full extent of the AP0011, AP0012 and other pegmatites.
Meanwhile, both diamond rigs have also moved to test the AP0011 and AP0012 pegmatites to follow-up on the previous pegmatite intersections which confirm along-strike and down-dip extensions of the outcropping pegmatites that returned high lithium grades during surface sampling.
“Following receipt of the environmental and heritage clearances which allows us to access several high priority lithium targets, we have moved rapidly to increase our drilling capability at the Andover Project,” managing director Tony Rovira said.
“Along with the two diamond core rigs that have been operating on site since early March, we’ve now added two RC rigs to our lithium-focused drilling campaign and it’s likely that additional drill rigs will be mobilised within the next month to further accelerate the program towards resource definition.
“To date, we’re very encouraged by the visual indications in the drill core from the AP0011 and AP0012 pegmatites, so for the time being the rigs will continue at these locations.
“However, I expect to start drilling other high-priority pegmatite targets at Andover in the near future when additional drill rigs arrive on site.”
Forward plan
Following the receipt of heritage clearances, Azure now has numerous high priority lithium targets available for drilling across the pegmatite swarm that extends over an area of 9km (east-west) and up to 5km (north-south) within the central and eastern parts of the Andover project area.
First priority for the five to six rigs the company expects to have on site will be the AP0009-AP0014 sub-region, which contains multiple pegmatites extending over a strike length in excess of 1,500m.
Exploration to date has already visually identified abundant spodumene in the AP0011 and AP0012 pegmatites, returning assays of between 2 per cent Li2O and 4 per cent Li2O from surface samples.
This article was developed in collaboration with Azure Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing. This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.