The mining boom is back, baby!

The Lizard King reminds us not to be too glum because if you haven’t already noticed, lithium is going bonkers.

Another week has passed, and even a King Lizard cannot escape the three certainties of life on earth: Death, Taxes and the monotonous regularity of a subeditor’s deadline.

However, this was not a week of tedium, not a week to wonder which pet cause was to receive a lashing from the forked lizard tongue.

Not a ‘slow news week’ as they say. The news channels flicked to overdrive with the death of our beloved Queen.

It’s a sad event and not altogether unanticipated, but has the death of a 96-year-old great-grandmother ever attracted so many columns of print or hours of news coverage?

Whilst the King Lizard is a staunch royalist, we have pretty much covered every possible angle of life, the death, the passage of the coffin, the children, the siblings, the legacy … over and over again.

The Lizard family spent most of the week bombarded with ‘Queen’s Passing’ coverage, so we feel like we have done our reflection, our moments of silence, and mourned more than a bit [basically had enough, can we move on].

But we haven’t even had the funeral or the national day of mourning yet. That’s all ahead of us. What a lurk that is having a public holiday the Thursday before a long weekend in WA — the day before the grand final holiday in Melbourne- coinciding with the start of school holidays in WA.

Who’s bright idea was that? It’s a 5-day break in every workplace in the country. You might declare Friday a ‘national sick day’ because nobody will be at work!

Woo-hoo, that’s like another Easter, but with the Tuesday off as well. So much for the new labour government with its focus on productivity …

Another confirmed accession to royalty during the week is that Lithium is the King of commodities [like we didn’t know already], and its reign will be for a long while yet.

Various reports from those intelligent people at investment banks (yes, they are economists too, so be wary!) filtered out with bold predictions, each more optimistic than the last about the future demand for lithium and the future high prices for the product.

You see, it’s a perfect storm.

The world is alarmed by climate change, and the only way to fix it is to reduce carbon emissions.  

And The only way to do that is to force everyone to drive an electric vehicle — and the only proven solution is a lithium-powered battery.

Sure, there are other components, such as nickel, copper, graphite, and manganese — but lithium supply is the most acute problem for our transitioning economies.

There is oodles of lithium in the world, but just not enough being processed into the necessary pre-cursor materials with the correct chemical make-up to supply the batteries for the EVs of Tesla, Ford, Mercedes and all the other car manufacturers.

Hence, the frantic search for supply is seeing these end users come way down the curve to the miners offering all sorts of incentives, investments, partnerships and the like to lock up some potential future supplies.

The markets echo the song with 6% lithium carbonate sextupling from around US$1000 a tonne just 12 months ago to /t to over US$6,000/t today.

This is seriously unprecedented.

And it seems this will continue for a while yet. So It’s great for the lithium miners [anyone who watched Pilbara Minerals share price double over the last two months like the Lizard King has indeed gotten it], the explorers, the brokers and the investors.

The punters are back, and so are the lithium millionaires (and a couple of billionaires).

So much for the doom and gloom merchants … the mining boom is back-on in Perth, baby! So we expect to see a few new big boats at Rottnest this summer.

The Lizard King’s guide to finding yourself a lithium deposit

You’ll most like find the stuff in the oodles of spodumene in pegmatites you’ll find scattered around this great state of ours. 

Would you believe they were once a curse for gold miners, as they would sometimes cut across orebodies with barren material for tens and hundreds of metres?

But unfortunately, not all pegmatites contain lithium, and sometimes the lithium, being mobile, has moved on or leached out.

Sometimes the chemistry is wrong, and the lithium is in other forms, such as lepidolite, petalite, amblygonite and other weird forms – mostly no good from a processing perspective.

And pegmatites don’t show up on magnetics or other geophysical signatures. Often they are undercover and deep.

Most of the discovered pegmatites in WA were initially found earlier in previous exploration activities, where they were noted but not considered worth pursuing.

This has been a boon for prospectors and explorers who have been able to scour the old mines department records for pegmatite occurrences and then peg the ground.

Anyone with an exploration licence with a pegmatite recorded can literally write their ticket, raise funds and potentially have the next billion-dollar company.

Just look at the Liontown story — It used to be a 1c penny dreadful with little to show for its exploration portfolio. Then they bought a tenement for $100K and found the Kathleen Valley lithium deposit, and now it’s a $3.7bn major even before its started mining.

Another win for Tim Goyder!

It’s a gold rush or an iron ore boom all over again, and it’s not confined to one area – anywhere from Greenbushes to the goldfields to the Pilbara, and the Gascoyne people are scouring the landscape for lithium-rich pegmatites.

Explorers are rushing to check for pegmatites, and the news flow is all blowing in the same direction … lithium.

So as we herald a new monarch and a new era, many in WA are raising a glass … long live the new King (Lithium).     

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