Categories: Energy
Topics: Lithium Stocks

Li-FT Power (CSE: LIFT)(OTC: LIFFF) CEO Francis MacDonald on Adding Tonnes Aggressively at Yellowknife Lithium Pegmatite Project

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Li-FT Power, Mr. Francis McDonald. Francis, it's great to have you back on. We chatted about a month or so ago. We talked about the excitement surrounding the drilling, and that was validated pretty nicely today with the news that you had. You hit 79 meters at 1.13% lithium and 39 meters of 1.43% at your pegmatite project in Canada. Congratulations. First off, you got to be excited about the results.

Francis MacDonald: Yeah, absolutely excited. And so these are great results for a first batch of drilling, like you said. And the big thing here is that we're hitting similar grades and widths to what we saw at surface, and it's really confirming a lot of historic work that was done in the seventies. So that's great for us because if that holds true for the rest of the pegmatites, then this is just going to be a monster.

Gerardo Del Real: I was very intentional in describing the Yellowknife lithium project as a pegmatite project. And the reason I did that is because you have eight different pegmatites that you're going to be drilling this summer in one of the more aggressive drill programs in the entire resource space. You're drilling 45,000 meters with six rigs. Tell me about next steps and the potential here. I was on the phone earlier. Somebody commented that this one pegmatite could be anywhere between eight to 10 million tonnes and you're drilling eight of these things. And again, I know you're excited about how well the grades and the widths are holding up here initially. But you got to start thinking in terms of possibly triple digit tonnage here. I know it's early, but is that too wild of a speculation?

Francis MacDonald: I think based on what we see at surface, if you project these things down to depth, then it's totally possible that there could be a hundred million tonnes in the district. And that's obviously a lot of arm waving at this point, but that's all we can do because we don't have any subsurface information. And that's the goal for this summer is really to go out and drill these eight pegmatites off and we will have a very good idea by the time we release all these drill results with 45,000 meters.

So the timeline for that is we've got six rigs on the go, like you said. We'll be finished the 45,000 meters sometime in October it's looking like right now. And then starting September, October until the end of the year, it's just going to be a complete barrage of news releases coming out of Li-FT.

Gerardo Del Real: You just completed construction of a 49 person camp. Can you tell me about the reasoning for that and the advantages now having that camp fully constructed?

Francis MacDonald: Sure. So because we have six rigs going, this is a pretty large program. And we are supporting right now three diamond drill rigs out of the 49 person camp. We'll be adding a fourth rig supported out of there shortly. And then there's two rigs that are being supported out of the city of Yellowknife. And that's just because there's three of the pegmatites that are closer to the city. One of the constraints in the Yellowknife area is that there's not much housing within the city. So when you don't have a place to put people, it kind of constrains you on how much work you can do. So this was really the barrier of just having enough bed space to put people. And now that we've got the camp constructed, we're full on with six rigs at this point.

Gerardo Del Real: No look, exciting news, exciting times. Tell me about the turnaround with the labs. I know that a lot of the more exciting lithium plays out there, haven't been able to get to their drill programs this year and their exploration programs specifically in James Bay because of all the issues with the fires. But how are things with the labs and turnaround? Clearly, you're full steam ahead right now. How's that turnaround looking?

Francis MacDonald: The turnaround's looking pretty good. So on this batch, it was 36 days from when it got to the lab to when we got the results, so that's pretty good. But I would say you can kind of expect similar, so it's probably six to seven weeks from when the hole is started up until when the results are released. And we started the drill program on June 3rd and we are at July 25th today, so we're tracking around seven weeks. And the reason for that is we obviously need to look at the core, cut the core, ship the core, all this kind of stuff. But now the results have started coming, they're just going to come steadily.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, Francis, it sounds like you and I will be chatting on a more frequent basis. Congrats on coming out of the gate strong, and I appreciate the update as always. We'll chat soon.

Francis MacDonald: Sounds good. Thanks a lot, Geraldo.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

Francis MacDonald: Cheers, bye.