Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Venari Minerals NL (ASX:VMS), Executive Director and CEO, Matt Healy
Lel Smits: Venari Minerals has delivered a milestone with the release of its Maiden Inferred Mineral Resource Estimate at its 100% owned Red Mountain Lithium Project in Nevada in the USA. The Maiden Mineral Resource Estimate comes amid a sharp resurgence in lithium prices and growing forecasts of a global supply deficit. I’m joined today by Venari Executive Director and CEO Matt Healy to discuss the significance of the Maiden Resource, how Red Mountain compares globally, and also what’s next as the project moves into its next phase of advancement.
Matt, welcome back to the Stock Network.
Matt Healy: Thanks, Lel. Glad to be with you.
Lel Smits: Now, can you start by outlining the highlights of the Mineral Resource Estimate and also how important this result is in validating Red Mountain as a large-scale lithium system?
Matt Healy: Absolutely. It’s been about 20 months since the first drill hole went into this project. We’ve been working pretty hard to get to this point and an important milestone it is. We’ve come out with our Maiden Mineral Resource Estimate, it’s an inferred resource estimate, 500Mt at 1140pmL for 3Mt of contained lithium. And that’s a really significant result. And what’s more, there’s also a high-grade part in the north of the resource, which grades just over 2100 parts per million, and there’s 47.9Mt of that in the north.
And that’s a fantastic thing to have, a high-grade area to focus on. We’ll, in due course, hopefully add something to the economics of this project.
Lel Smits: Absolutely. A significant result. And what does this result really tell you about the project’s upside and opportunity to grow the resource further?
Matt Healy: Well, we put out an exploration target that was 5Mt to 10Mt about a year ago, and we came out and said to the market, we’re going to drill 25-30% of that. Now we’ve done that, and we’ve come up with about 30% of the upside figure of that target.
So now we’ve put the resource out, that means that we need to redo the exploration target, and we’re looking to do that later on this month. And that will give investors a really clear idea of what upside we see in the project. But also, the fact that we’ve delivered on the last one, give us some confidence that we can deliver on drilling out the next exploration target as well.
Lel Smits: Absolutely. And finally, Matt, with a low discovery cost and this revised exploration target pending, and 2026 drilling plans underway, what are the key priorities for you now, really, as you’re looking to upgrade and expand the resource?
Matt Healy: Yeah, so we actually got some work that’s underway, Lael. I mean, we’ve mentioned the exploration target. I’ve got some lithium carbonate test work underway. So in terms of metallurgy, we know the lithium leaches readily from the clays. We know we can beneficiate the clay and get rid of some of the acid-consuming materials.
But what we haven’t quite completed yet is generating that product. So we’ve got test work underway that’s going to produce a lithium carbonate product, and then we’re going to look at upgrading that to a battery-grade product. So that’s underway.
We’re hoping to get those results also out by the end of February. And then we’re going to be firming up our drill plans for 2026. And at a high level, I can say we’re going to look to infill the existing resource to upgrade its category from inferred to indicated and maybe some measured.
We’ll look to drill to expand the resource and make it bigger. And then we’re also going to drill some exploration targets so we can keep that pipeline going, intersecting new lots of lithium elsewhere on the project that we can focus on to then bring into inferred resources and then bring up the chain to indicated resources.
Lel Smits: Excellent. Well, Matt, congrats on the significant use that you have just announced in a strong pipeline ahead. I look forward to hearing more as those developments come through.
Matt Healy: Yeah, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
Ends