The Hawkstone Mining Ltd [ASX:HWK] share price has been on a tear this year, having gained an impressive 360% since the new year.
Today the share price is up again after emerging from a trading halt pending metallurgical test work results.
At time of writing, the HWK share price is up 15% to trade at 4.6 cents per share.
Source: Trading View
Last week the HWK share price just doubled on solid lithium recovery rates from metallurgical testing of the Big Sandy sedimentary lithium mineralisation.
Battery grade lithium
Today the gold and lithium explorer announced that initial test work conducted by Hazen Research produced battery grade lithium carbonate at 99.7% purity from the Big Sandy Project.
The benchmark for battery grade lithium is 99.5% purity.
With HWK able to achieve an overall lithium recovery of 90% with minimal losses in downstream processing (announced last week), the economics of Big Sandy could be quite lucrative.
Particularly with the current resurgence we are seeing in the price of lithium.
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What happens next HWK Share Price?
If you’re not familiar with HWK, in 2019 their drill program at Big Sandy estimated a total Indicated and Inferred JORC resource of 32.5 million tonnes of lithium for 320,800 tonnes carbonate.
Lithium carbonate is the stuff eventually turned into batteries.
However, that resource estimate represents 4% of the Big Sandy Project area that contains an estimated exploration target of between 271.1 and 483.15 million tonnes.
The next phase of resource drilling at Big Sandy will commence pending approval from the Bureau of Land Management.
With Big Sandy’s lithium product meeting the requirements of the most rigorous of off takers, HWK finds itself in a rather fortunate position.
With the election of Joe Biden to the White House, his administration is chasing down a target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Meaning we could see demand continue to surge for commodities like lithium used in green energy storage.
Now that HWK has successfully produced battery grade lithium carbonate, design of the bench-scale testing is slated to commence this month.
Bench-scale testing is estimated to take 3–4 months and will be followed by the design, construction, and operation of pilot-scale facilities.
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Regards,
Lachlann Tierney,
For Money Morning
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