Piedmont Lithium (ASX:PLL) has initiated a 25,000 meter Phase 4 drill program at its Piedmont lithium project, which is located approximately 40 kilometers west of Charlotte, NC. The majority of the drilling (approximately 76%) will be focusing on the Core property where Piedmont currently has a total resource of 16.2 million tonnes at an average grade of 1.12% Li2O. Piedmont previously defined an exploration target of 4.5-5.5 Million tonnes, so it would be nice if the company would be able to boost the total Core resource to 20 million tonnes.
One drill rig is also working on the Central Property which is just a few kilometers away from the Core property, but doesn’t have a resource estimate yet. This year’s drill program will be focusing on defining a resource as part of a drill program following up on last year’s drill intervals of 7 meters at 1.53% Li2O and 34 meters containing 1.04% Li2O.
The 25,000 meter drill program will very likely be a useful investment as the Net Present Value of the project should be boosted by a larger resource and longer mine life. Additionally, Piedmont has just initiated the next phase of its metallurgical test program to further finetune and get more details on the original bench-scale test work which confirmed the Piedmont rock could easily be upgraded to spodumene (lithium concentrate with an average grade of 6-6.5% Li2O). The PFS-level met work will now provide a better indication of how feasible the upgrade process would be at today’s spodumene prices.
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