MAN’s US lithium project to benefit from US Department Of Energy funding

The US Department Of Energy (DOE) just gave US$1M to the Paradox Basin Lithium Group to “characterise and estimate reserves of Lithium and other critical minerals”.

Good news for our Investment Mandrake Resources (ASX: MAN) which is part of the Paradox Basin Lithium Group.

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MAN owns 100% of the Utah Lithium Project which has a 3.3Mt lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) JORC resource in the Paradox Basin in south eastern Utah, USA. (source)

MAN is one of our companies that has been sitting on a lithium project during the “lithium winter” while exploring other opportunities (MAN has been on the hunt for a new project).

Now with lithium prices recovering and on the up, MAN is planning to “shortly re-enter” the old oil and gas wells on its project to test for lithium.

(MAN had initially planned to do this a while ago, but rightly delayed it due to the low lithium price environment)

MAN managed to put together its existing resource estimate with very little capital spend utilising mostly the existing well data in the area.

Now MAN will benefit from the US$1M the DOE is spending in the area (which we hope is a precursor to more funding coming into the region).

What’s next for MAN?

Lithium Project progress

Man said in the recent December quarterly that it had continued to be active on the lithium front in the background, now with discussions underway and reviews regarding suspended and depleted oil and gas wells.

MAN has already deployed this strategy to get a resource estimate in an extremely cost effective manner, so we await to see updates on any progress here.

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New project acquisitions

MAN said in its September quarterly that it was reviewing new project opportunities as well as pursuing “organic project generation initiatives”.

With lithium back then being very much unloved (not so much as of today), it will be interesting to see what comes from this.

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This was again mentioned in the recent December quarterly that was released last week:

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