Despite volatile market pricing, it is without question that lithium will be in great demand in the coming decades as a critical metal in the green energy transition and energy storage. From 2023-2025, SRK Exploration (SRK EX) worked with Albemarle to identify sources of longer-term lithium supply through generative exploration.
SRK EX started with building deposit models and mineral systems for three types of hard rock lithium deposit; lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) pegmatites, lithium-rare metals granites (Li-RMGs) and volcanosedimentary sequence (VSS) or “clay” deposits. These conceptual models collated the most up-to-date research and knowledge of essential, deposit forming processes through extensive review of academic literature and collaboration with subject matter experts from various universities and institutions.
Global-scale geoscience datasets were acquired, processed and interpreted to map evidence in the geological record of each constituent process of the three mineral systems.
SRK EX employed a knowledge-led fuzzy logic targeting workflow to produce prospectivity maps coving all continents except Antarctica with 20x20km sized cells. Each cell indicated the relative potential for hosting lithium mineralisation. Analysis of the distribution of the most prospective cells delineated lithium provinces that were to be followed up with more detailed province-scale prospectivity analysis.
This mineral system approach did not use the location of known lithium occurrences, deposits or mines to inform and influence the prospectivity of each map cell, as a machine learning (ML) approach would do. This removes some of the confirmation bias of simply selecting regions where most discoveries have been made, and allows the identification of prospective regions based on favourable geological processes – i.e. where deposits ”should” be found. This opens up the possibility of exploring new, un- or underexplored geographies.
