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Prospecting For Lithium


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11 hours ago, jasong said:

Would you say there is any mineral sector you see as underexploited right now as gold was back then?

Lithium. There are guys I know who have sold claim blocks for Lithium exploration within the last year. Half the dry lake beds in Nevada have been staked in the last year. Even the dry lake bed where they hold the Burning Man event. These things are related to spikes in commodity prices - lithium prices have been rising as demand for car and other batteries increase.  Look for an article on Lithium prospecting in this next issue of the ICMJ. If you don't subscribe, well, you should.

On REEs, you are 5 years too late - they spiked 5 years ago and exploration companies were mad for potential REE properties. On the other hand, as I said you have to go against the flow, staking property when prices are bottoming and no one has any interest. REEs will spike again someday.

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Its Oz Week on the Detector Prosector Remember!!! Here you Go Jasong and anyone interested....I watched this last year its 1 part of over 4 hours of Lectures!   Cheers for My Geology Mates Down Under! :smile: Ig

 

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15 hours ago, jasong said:

Would you say there is any mineral sector you see as underexploited right now as gold was back then?

I keep eyeballing REE's because it sure seems like global energy/auto/electronics industry is headed that direction now and for the future too, plus there are no active mines left in the US (unless that one in CA reopened?) and they are mostly in China (or were until recently anyways). Not easy to prospect for though like gold. But some of the associated minerals/elements are easier to prospect for such as thorium. What do you think about that sector?

Jason,

  Chris is right about the Lithium boom, all dry lakes have been claimed over... good thing meteorites dont fall under a mining claim, a nice excuse if someone says what are you doing on my mining claim right :rolleyes:, hehe...   A good example is Molycorp near the Nevada/ California border, just 10 years ago, when the company was not running, you could have bought up a lot of claims around it, and it would have made you a millionaire today leasing it out. I dont know if Red Dry Lake near Kingman Arizona is claimed up, but years ago, I was reading on drilling reports on the dry lake, and they ran into a lot of salt way down, and had to stop. I have read a lot of reports that show a lot of dry lakes that have salt/ brine tend to also have Lithium.... remember your buddy Dave if you do claim it, and lease it in the future...:tongue: . Also since Tesla built a Lithium Battery plant in Northern Nevada, it was cheaper to process Lithium for the battery plant than import it from China, that why most of the Dry Lakes in Nevada are claimed up, I believe Silver Peak Dry Lake is a Lithium plant that has also been around for a while. Keep your eye out for metals of the future, and claim up  !!!!!  Look at Tantalum, and Indium... Remember to put in the lease agreement you want shares of stock also...

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44 minutes ago, DolanDave said:

Remember to put in the lease agreement you want shares of stock also...

Maybe, maybe not. I took one year of my lease payment on my claim and bought stock. It seemed like a pretty good bet. My claims are alongside a known ore body just to the west of it, and the original mining company did not drill beyond but just a little ways onto my claims. The new mining company had done surface samples and found good indications of mineralization. They were going to drill my claims, and I figured the increased ore found would up the value of the stock.  Not very much ore was found and today, with the way the price of gold and silver have gone down since I bought the stock in 2012, the stock is worth about 15 cents on the dollar.

Another friend I know had several mining claim leases and took a lot of stock. His stock was worth over a million, and he retired, figuring that plus cash he had would last him a long time. The million + of stock is worth less than $50,000 now.

So yes, while some have made much on penny mining exploration stocks, still others have lost much. My preference is to take cash over stock.

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  • 3 weeks later...

What technique do people employ to prospect for or test for lithium in the field? A handheld XRF probably won't work on the low atomic number elements. Flame test probably won't work since I'm guessing there is a lot of sodium evaporites on the lake beds in much higher quantities than lithium.

I guess you could just sample every lake bed and send each sample in for lab analysis, but that seems pretty slow and unaffordable, especially hard to do in a "rush". Or are people just paper staking with no discoveries?

I'm not able to find a good test sample of lithium carbonate to experiment with, because it is of course a controlled drug.

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6 hours ago, jasong said:

What technique do people employ to prospect for or test for lithium in the field? A handheld XRF probably won't work on the low atomic number elements. Flame test probably won't work since I'm guessing there is a lot of sodium evaporites on the lake beds in much higher quantities than lithium.

I guess you could just sample every lake bed and send each sample in for lab analysis, but that seems pretty slow and unaffordable, especially hard to do in a "rush". Or are people just paper staking with no discoveries?

I'm not able to find a good test sample of lithium carbonate to experiment with, because it is of course a controlled drug.

Here's a chunk' of spodumene/lithium ore 1 single "giant crystal " of it found somewhere "near" you! :biggrin:Cheers.Ig

spodumene.jpg

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21 hours ago, jasong said:

What technique do people employ to prospect for or test for lithium in the field? A handheld XRF probably won't work on the low atomic number elements. Flame test probably won't work since I'm guessing there is a lot of sodium evaporites on the lake beds in much higher quantities than lithium.

Jason,

Agree that XRF spectroscopy won't work, but why is sodium such a problem for a flame test?  I'd think you could buy a notch interference filter made specifically for eliminating the yellow lines of sodium.  (For those not familiar, an optical notch filter works similarly to notch feature on metal detectors -- target a specific frequency to selectively either include or, in this case, eliminate from the signal.)  Maybe I'm oversimplifying the problem....

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Here's a 1/2 inch (12.7 mm) diameter sodium line notch filter for $77 (but says "overrun, out-of-stock").  I don't know if that's a large enough aperture for your application.  I'm sure you can get bigger ones but the price could go up non-linearly.

http://www.omegafilters.com/a5-sodium-line-notch-filter.html

 

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The notch filters I was looking at were like $250 (I happened to be looking at them already but for a different purpose coincidentally), at which point I could just buy a cheap spectrophotometer instead. Which is what I did. Should be able to see all the elemental lines in it. Looking ahead to potentially experimenting with building a Raman spectrometer (hence the notch filter) or maybe even LIBS if I can find a cheap portable laser powerful enough to ablate any kind of rock or metal. It's something I've always wanted but never had enough reason to buy, so I figured why not. This is for general use. Concentrating on all sorts of minerals, not just lithium.

For lithium prospecting in particular, I see that lithium carbonate is inversely soluable (if that's a term), it drops out in high temperatures. My idea to "pan" for lithium is to mix a soil sample in water just below freezing to saturation, filter, then heat to just below boiling and filter again since it should be mostly the carbonate dropping out of solution at that point. Then test that filtrate. If nothing precipitates out, then move on to the next sample.

Not sure how big the sample size would have to be though, it might be infeasable, or require a microscope. The flame test with the notch filter sounds reasonable too, I hadn't thought about using the filter like that.

But it sounds like the boom is on for lithium already, I was wondering about stuff that is underappreciated right now. There is enough competition from paper stakers in gold prospecting already. I still think REE's are where I'm going to concentrate. They contribute to the same green economy that is driving lithium, and there are zero claims on them in the areas I'm interested in right now.

 

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Jason, I'm impressed with your ambition to think outside-the-box, even to the level of building instruments to solve problems.  Please keep us (well, me at least :wink:) informed as you move forward.

(As usual) I don't understand something.  You talk about lithium carbonate as a native ore/compound.  In my (simple) searches I've only seen four primary, cost effective sources of lithium, all minerals:  spodumene, lepidolite, pentalite, and amblygonite.  The first three are silicon based and the last phosphorous based -- no carbonates.  Is the lithium found in these dry lake beds a different form/chemical compound?

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