There are no known pegmatites mapped inside the company's projects, within the region that gives the company its name, but while exploration efforts are still to begin, managing director Andrew Dornan explained why be believes the company has attracted so much early interest.
The board has been involved in 10 successful lithium projects in Australia and Canada, its project vendors - Mark Fekete and Marty Huber - are Quebec locals and will lead exploration, and its projects "tick all the boxes" Dornan said.
The right stuff
Its projects have the three ingredients needed for success: they sit within the right Archean-aged rocks, are proximate to greenstones, and large deformation zones run through the properties.
"The larger the faults, the larger the pegmatites," he said.
It has about 10% off the regional faults within the La Grande greenstone belt, including 24km of deformation that is up to 1km wide within its flagship Joule project.
Dornan said the JBY team had landed in James Bay after two years of examining the world for opportunities.
Sedimentary/clay plays are still to be commercially proven, brine projects were too water intensive, so JBY focused on hard rock opportunities where it has its expertise.
It cast away areas with sovereign risk, and ended up with Western Australia and Canada.
Canadian opportunity
WA is saturated with explorers, so it landed in James Bay, a jurisdiction that has had a rapid rate of discovery in recent years, with world-class deposits taking shape, but where there were still opportunities.
With its vendors as both investors and its lead geologists, JBY is about to start exploration and expects to have year-round access and fewer logistical issues than the Pilbara.
Over the next 4-6 weeks the team will start generating targets that could lead to drilling plans being formulated, or further field work.
Dornan said while the recent wildfires across Canada had been terrible for the environment, they were actually a boon for exploration.
"The silver lining is they have cleared the scrub and will probably allow access to areas we may not have been able to get to, and after the snows clear we may be able to see outcrop easily," he explained.
Its final project, Troilus, is earlier stage and far to the south. It sits next to Sayona Mining's rapidly growing Moblan resource.
Dornan said initially JBY would wait to see the results from Sayona's expansive 60,000m drilling before doing too much work of its own.
JBY raised A$6 million at 20c and was last traded at 47.5c, capitalising it at $29 million.
The stock hit a record 61c earlier today.
