This week we caught up with the management team at Li-FT Power [CSE:LIFT/FRA: WS0], which has a trio of interesting lithium projects in Canada, two of them in the Northwest Territories. The company is in the process of exploring at all three.
Just taking the miner’s project at Yellowknife, we understand that this and its sister project at Cali have been sought after by a number of players in the mining space. The big challenge was that the previous ownership was very opaque, and even when the owner was tracked down, he was selective about who he was going to sell to. Li-FT have been lucky to secure exploration rights to a potentially very rich lithium resource.
Yellowknife and Cali both have obvious, lithium-rich formations above surface as evidence of the strength of the deposits Li-FT Power is looking at.
Yellowknife has 13 spodumene pegmatites with an average grade of 1.07 – 2.2% Li20. The pegmatites have near 100% exposure. The company started drilling in June and told us they had completed 45,000 metres. Exploration activity has been hampered by wildfires in the area. Drill results from 35 holes indicate extensive widths and some excellent grades.
As just one example, hole YLP0007 found 60m at 1.26% purity. The size potential and lithium grades are readily apparent based on the outcrop exposure.
There has been exploration activity in the area since the 1970s. Canadian Superior Exploration led activities here in that period and much of the initial grade estimates are based of channel sampling from then. L-FT has six drill rips operational on site at time of writing and management anticipates a steady slew of news flow over the course of the winter.
Yellowknife also benefits from its proximity to Hay River, which is the primary railhead southwest of the city of Yellowknife. All the pegmatites are located east and north-east of Yellowknife. There is also the prospect of shipping lithium from the project across the Great Slave Lake during the summer months.
The primary bottleneck for the project is permitting. Li-FT currently has an exploration agreement but nothing covering production at this stage.
The Cali project has a pegmatite dyke swarm with 5-10 individual dykes over a width of 120m. This includes a high grade spodumene boulder field at surface. Drill permitting is ongoing here with the first drill program anticipated for summer 2024. Most of the effort at the moment is being directed at the Yellowknife project.
The Quebec Greenfields lithium project is another beast entirely – this is a 3200 square km land position in the James Bay region of Quebec. Systematic geochemistry sampling has been looking for pegmatites buried beneath the glacial sediment. Diamond drilling is starting here now, with additional targets for 2024. This project is very different from the other two, in that the pegmatites are undercover.
The management team informed us that there has been considerable institutional buying of the stock in recent weeks. Previously, just over 15.7% of the shareholder base was institutional, versus 52.3% for founders, and 26.9% retail. A group of people who coinvested in the lithium projects and one of the current institutional investors have all upped their holdings in the company.
