Monger Gold to commence soil sampling program at Scotty lithium project
Monger Gold is aiming to define exploration targets at the Nevada project for maiden drilling later this year.
Monger Gold (ASX: MMG) is preparing to commence an auger soil geochemistry program this week at the newly-acquired Scotty lithium project in southern Nevada, United States.
The program will assist in defining exploration targets for maiden drilling campaign later this year.
Previous soil sampling over 1.5 square kilometres (or less than 3%) of the project area delineated “extremely strong and coherent” anomalism open to the north and south and grading more than 250 parts per million lithium.
The anomalism is higher tenor and more coherent than that which is reported to exist at the adjacent Bonnie Claire lithium deposit owned by Canada’s Iconic Minerals.
Bonnie Claire contains an inferred resource of 3.4 billion tonnes grading 1,013ppm lithium for 18.3 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent and is one of the largest deposits of its kind in the US.
Fast, low-cost program
Monger chairman Peretz Schapiro said a fast, low-cost soil sampling program was commissioned at Scotty in light of the previous strong anomalism combined with anomalies from Iconic’s work also remaining “open” and extending into the project area.
“Soil sampling was integral to the discovery and delineation of Bonnie Claire which abuts and surrounds our project, yet only 2.6% of our project area has been covered by soil sampling to date,” he said.
“The soil sampling which has been done at Scotty has returned even better results than those at Bonnie Claire we plan to combine all the results to help target holes in our maiden drilling campaign in the second half of this year.”
Sample collection
Mr Schapiro said approximately 550 samples will be collected during the program on 400m-spaced centres across various types of surface sediments.
All samples will be assayed at an ALS laboratory in Nevada for lithium and a multi-element suite.
It is expected that sample collection will be completed by the end of July, with assays due within six weeks of submission.
Project acquisition
Monger took ownership of the Scotty project this month following the $2 million acquisition of American Consolidated Lithium.
It is considered to be a very large-scale, sediment-hosted asset comprising 700 placer mining claims covering approximately 56.6 sq km.
Scotty is situated 70km from Albermarle Corporation’s Clayton Valley (Silver Peak) lithium mine (which is the only producing lithium mine in the US) and 330km from Tesla’s giant lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle manufacturing facility (or gigafactory).