Drilling completed at WA rubidium/lithium project

Earlier in the week, ARN announced that its 65 hole RC drilling program had been completed at its Niobe rubidium/lithium project.

With the majority of the drill holes making pegmatite intercepts, all eyes will be on the assays which ARN will be looking to convert into a maiden JORC resource. In our last note on ARN’s drilling program we set the following expectations for the assays:

• Excellent: Average rubidium grades at or above the 0.15% upper range ARN set for its exploration target, with the project also proving out a lithium resource at the same time.
• Good: Average rubidium grades above 0.07% and some indication of lithium mineralisation.
• Poor: Average grades <0.07% rubidium and no lithium mineralisation in the assays.

We set this based on the exploration target that ARN had set based on analysis of historic drilling results: 33,000-150,000 tonnes of rubidium oxide grades ranging from 0.07% to 0.15%. ‘

The drilling program and the announcement of a maiden JORC resource are two of the three primary objectives we set for ARN to achieve in 2022. To see these and why we continue to hold ARN in 2022 view the memo here.