LONDON (Alliance News) - Bacanora Minerals Ltd on Wednesday hinted the feasibility study for the flagship Sonora lithium project in Mexico may be slightly later than planned but confirmed the asset's mineral resource will still be updated before the end of the year.
Bacanora has been drilling and carrying out various different elements of work on the huge lithium development and last week Rare Earth Minerals PLC, a firm with interests in Sonora and a large corporate stake in Bacanora, launched an unsolicited and unwelcome takeover offer for the company.
Bacanora, at around twice the value of Rare Earth, quickly rejected the takeover offer and said it intends to continue progressing the project to its next two big milestones. The offer from Rare Earth is, at the moment, still on the table.
In previous statements, Bacanora said the feasibility study for Sonora would be completed in the first quarter of 2017 but on Wednesday that guidance changed slightly as the company said it remained on track to deliver the study "late" in the first quarter of next year.
The update to the resource model and the upgrade of indicated resources to the measured category, however, remains on track to be published and completed in the fourth quarter of 2016.
Over 4,000 metres of infill drilling has been completed so the resource can be upgraded. Currently, Sonora has 259.0 million tonnes of ore in the indicated category graded at 3,200 parts per million lithium, containing around 4.5 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent.
The processing plant at Hermosillo, part of the wider project, is continuing to be refined and optimised and Bacanora said this will continue for the next 18 months.
Battery-grade samples have been taken from the project and sent to Japan for testing by potential future buyers, with Bacanora targeting the market in Asia because it has a "larger lithium carbonate supply chain," it said.
Bacanora shares were up 1.3% to 89.69 pence per share on Thursday morning.
Rare Earth, which did not release a statement regarding Sonora on Thursday, saw its shares trading up 1.8% at 0.682 pence.
By Joshua Warner; joshuawarner@alliancenews.com; @JoshAlliance
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