Arcadia Lithium Project | mine

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This is the main portion of the area covered by the Arcadia Lithium project and there are 4 other smallclaim blocks that are not contiguous with the main area, and are not shown. The project is owned by Prospect Resources and based on the reserves in early 2018 it is the largest JORC Code reported lithium deposit in Africa. In early 2018 announced a 70% increase in the reserves from the original pre-feasibility report to 26,9 Mt at 1.31 % Li2O and 123 ppm Ta2O5 (Tantalum), which will allow for a 20 year life of mine based on a processing rate of 1.2 Mt/a. The project is comprised of mining claims that cover an area of more than 14km2 over the Arcadia Pegmatite swarm deposit.

The Arcadia area is dominated by greenstone lithologies of the Arcturus formation of the Harare Greenstone Belt (HGB). The HGB is a complex refolded synformal structure that crops out in two major limbs. An E-W trending Arcturus Limb occupies a broad band across the centre of the area, and to the west of the city of Harare this passes via a fold closure into the N-S trending Passaford Limb which is contiguous northwards with the greenstones of the Bindura area. The main HGB lithological units comprise mainly meta-basalts, banded iron formations, meta-andesites, serpentinites, dolerites and the lithium bearing pegmatites that also host beryl, tin and tantalite amongst others. Drilling has identified up to 14 significant stacked, sub-parallel pegmatites >1m thick. From youngest to oldest these are the Upper Pegmatite (U3), U2, U1, Main Pegmatite (MP), Lower Pegmatite (L1), L2, L3, L4/ LMP (Lower Main Pegmatite), L5, L6, L7 and L8.

The most significant bodies both in terms of thickness, lithium grade and lateral consistency are the Main Pegmatite at 7- 10m and Lower Main Pegmatite at 25 – 50m. The other pegmatites are mineralised but are much thinner, bifurcate, and coalesce along strike and down-dip. The drilling programmes undertaken by Prospect Resources have proved that the package of stacked pegmatites extends for over 3 km of strike length, while surface mapping and trenching has shown the total strike length to be almost 4.5 km.

The deposit will be mined from 3 open pits using conventional open pit methods and due to the shallow dipping nature of the orebody the stripping ratio will be 2.98:1 (waste:ore). Mining will start from the top of the hill then progress down and northeast towards the valley below. The proposed main pit dimensions are 1.1 km by 750 m with a final depth of 130m.

The concentrator plant is designed to process 1.2 Mtpa of ore feed using conventional DMS and froth flotation technology. The processing plant comprises key areas including, three-stage crushing, grinding, dense media separation, mica-flotation, spodumene flotation, petalite flotation, magnetic separation, concentrate dewatering and drying, and tailings filtering.

Three lithium product streams will be produced at Arcadia, all aiming at supplying lithium hydroxide and carbonate plants that supply feed-stock to the lithium battery manufacturers and the glass/ceramics markets. The following products are:

ArcadiaLithium 6.5: Spodumene concentrate – 6.5% Li2O and 0.33% Fe2O3
ArcadiaLithium 6.1: Spodumene concentrate – 6.1% Li2O and 0.52% Fe2O3
ArcadiaLithium 4.2: Petalite concentrate – 4.2% Li2O and 0.08% Fe2O3

Tantalite concentrate (>25 % Ta2O5) will also be produced to serve the downstream electronics markets. Silica sand and mica products will also be produced as by products and sold to domestic markets in Zimbabwe.

Prospect announced in November 2017 that it had executed a conditional placement and offtake agreement with Sinomine Resources Exploration Co and Sinomine Exploration (Hong Kong) Co. In terms of the agreement, Sinomine will invest A$10 million via a share placement in Prospect. As part of the agreement Prospect will sell 390 000 tonnes of spodumene concentrate and 1,097, 000 tonnes of petalite concentrate to Sinomine over a seven-year period.