Thai lithium pegmatite swarm grows for Pan Asia

Fieldwork at Pan Asia Metals’ KT East lithium prospect in Southern Thailand has revealed a pegmatite swarm measuring 2.4km by 2.4km, defined by hand-held X-ray fluorescence (XRF) results running as high as 2.13 per cent lithium oxide.

The company says the swarm contains pegmatite dykes up to 20m in width, which it will target in an upcoming sampling program ahead of a targeted drilling campaign.

Pan Asia Metals technical director and chief geologist David Hobby in Thailand.

Today’s news comes on the back of an announcement made earlier this month when Pan Asia confirmed it had found an 850m-by-350m pegmatite swarm at KT with 1m to 7m-wide dykes. Now, with more sampling complete, the numbers have swelled.

Management says its most recent batch of XRF results included not only lithium oxide hits, but also highly-elevated lithium pathfinder elements such as rubidium and ceasium. The company says rubidium regression modelling suggests the presence of lepidolite and white mica, linking the geology at KT East with the company’s southern area of interest about 35km to the south.

‘Successful definition of a Mineral Resource will give PAM the scope for increased annual LCE production’.’

Pan Asia Metals managing director Paul Lock

It raises the question on whether it could be one big system?

Pan Asia says the area of lithium enrichment at KT East is already bigger than its southern leads and the ground linking them remains largely untested. Encouragingly, the XRF results suggest mineralisation remains open in several directions.

Pan Asia Metals managing director Paul Lock said: “Strategically, KT East is a natural extension of RK and BT, located about 35km to the south, and successful definition of a Mineral Resource will give PAM the scope for increased annual LCE production and/or a longer project life.”

The company has two lithium projects – Reung Kiet (RK) and Kata Thong (KT) – in the south of Thailand within the Phang Nga Province. KT is in the north of the province and RK is about 35km to the south of KT. Within the RK project there is the RK and BT prospects.

RK has a mineral resource estimate of 14.8 million tonnes at 0.45 per cent lithium oxide for 164,500 tonnes of contained lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE). BT has an exploration target of between 16 and 25 million tonnes at 0.4 to 0.7 per cent lithium oxide.

Within the KT project sits the KT West and KT East prospects. Neither have a mineral resource estimate or exploration target pinned to them just yet, but today’s news of more pegmatites in KT East gives rise to thoughts of it being proposed sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Pan Asia says it is taking aim at a prefeasibility study (PFS) at the RK project, in addition to developing a mineral resource at the nearby Bang I Tum prospect, just a few kilometres north of its major Thailand site.

The area is strategically positioned to provide battery metals to the growing Southeast Asia market, which has been valued at $4.32 billion this year, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.77 per cent for the next five years. By 2029, the market is estimated to be worth about $6 billion.

And it is not a bad time to be finding lithium in Thailand, where the cost of extraction is expected to be cheap and the execution times fast when compared with western jurisdictions.

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