JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Australian junior Walkabout Resources, which is developing the Lindi Jumbo graphite project in Tanzania, is to explore for lithium in southern Namibia.
Walkabout was granted a second exclusive prospecting licence (EPL 6308), giving the company a footprint of more than 1 500 km2 in the Orange River Pegmatite Belt in the Karas region.
The exploration and development firm said on Tuesday that more than 60 previously mapped and unsampled pegmatites had been documented on its licences and that these had not previously been exposed to modern exploration techniques for lithium.
Demand for lithium is forecast to rise sharply, fuelled by advances in rechargeable battery technology. Last week, TSX-V-listed exploration firm Montero announced that it had confirmed the presence of lithium at its project in the Soris area, northwest of Uis in Namibia’s Erongo region.
Walkabout reported that a recently published mapping programme, completed by South Africa’s Council for Geoscience and the Geological Survey of Namibia, had delineated pegmatite swarms with a combined strike length of 27 line kilometres and individual pegmatite bodies of up to 2 km in length in the region where its licences were located.
Walkabout has named its two licences the Eureka lithium project. The project is about 7 km from Aim-listed Kennedy Ventures’ Namibia Tantalite Investment (NTI) mine, which is currently in its commissioning phase. Recent work on the pegmatites on the NTI ground had confirmed the presence of lithium-caesium-tantalum-type pegmatites with grades larger than 1.6% lithium oxide reported from rock samples.