Birimian doubles up on its lithium endowment in southern Mali

Junior lithium explorer Birimian (ASX: BGS) has substantiated its early promise by delivering a substantial increase to its existing JORC resource at its flagship Goulamina lithium project in southern Mali, following an update to its ongoing resource definition exploration program.

Birimian reports that its exploration team drilled a further 119 holes to facilitate the update, in addition to the 142 drilled holes which generated the initial resource estimate.

The budding explorer has not only improved its overall resource quantity by over 32 million tonnes (Mt) but has also improved upon the average grade of its mineral resource.

Birimian reports that its mineral resource now stands at 65Mt at 1.43% lithium which works out to a contained amount of 931,000 tonnes of lithium concentrate (more than doubling its previously estimated 451,000 tonnes).

“The results have exceeded our expectations. At 32.9 million tonnes, Goulamina was impressive. At 65 million tonnes, it is even more so and clearly one of the world’s outstanding hard rock lithium deposits,” said Mr Greg Walker, executive director and CEO of Birimian.

Results aplenty

According to Birimian, its latest exploration and boosted resource at the Goulamina project confirms it to be among the highest grade, hard rock lithium deposits of significant size anywhere in the world.

Furthermore, Birimian says that four of its other prospects ­– Yando, Danaya and Sabali and Main II – have not been included in its estimates because of ongoing exploration work. Main II is the least developed and known having not undergone any explorative drilling to date.

Further “potential upside” comes in the form of weathered pegmatite.

Birimian’s previously declared resource estimate in June last year did not include the 1.4Mt of weathered pegmatite in its pre-feasibility estimates.

The explorer says this was “due to a lack of metallurgical information” at the time and its minor potential impact on the project, given that this portion of its ore reserve constituted only around 4% of the project.

However, almost one year on, Birimian is hoping this 1.4Mt of weathered pegmatite can soon be included in its overall resource estimate now that it has time to conduct metallurgical testing on the material.

Taking a deeper look at Birimian’s figures shows that its Indicated Resource (a more certain estimation of an explorer’s resource endowment) now stands at 43.7Mt @ 1.48% lithium, which works out to a contained amount of 645,000 tonnes of lithium concentrate.

The explorer says that it will “aggressively” advance its regional exploration at Goulamina by probing “several promising anomalies” and drill targets, given the encouraging results it has obtained in the past 6 months of exploration, including today’s bumper update.