By FRANCISCA OLUYOLE

The Nigerian Geological Survey Agency (NGSA) said high grade of lithium mineral had been discovered in Nigeria.

Dr Abdulrazaq Garba, the Director-General of NGSA, made this known, while briefing newsmen on mineral exploration activities on Monday in Abuja.

Garba said that Nigeria had discovered a critical high grade lithium that investors were currently eager to pay humongous amount for.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that lithium is an element valuable for the production of glass, aluminum products, batteries that recharge mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras and electric vehicles.

“Nigeria lithium is hot cake now, the mineral was discovered in Kwara by National Integrated Mineral Exploration Project (NIMEP) during exploration and we did investigation and came up with analysis and discovered that Nigeria lithium is of high grade.

“High grade in the sense that the standard worldwide for even exploration and mining starts from 0.4 per cent lithium oxide but when we started exploration and mining, we saw one per cent up to 13 per cent lithium oxide content.

” Another advantage of Nigeria lithium is hard rock lithium found and that is what investors are looking out for worldwide

” We even heard discussion with some private companies with mining licences in Nigeria and they conducted test on the lithium and we also collaborated with Canada on that too,” he said.

He said that all data received from NIMEP were quite exciting and would boost the economy.

NIMEP is a hallmark project that provides reliable geo-sciences information needed by investors to make the right mining investment decisions in Nigeria.

He said that a track of mineralisation almost two to 10 km was discovered close to Abuja, adding that resource evaluation was conducted on the area and anomolous gold, lead and silver were discovered with Tungsten.

“Gold mineralisation found there has high content of tungsten which is used as an additive exploration of steel, therefore, any company mining there will be mining gold associated with lead, silver and tungsten.

Garba said that many companies both local and international investors were willing to pay any amount for the data.

He said that pronouncement would be made soon on companies that had shown interest on those data.

“What we do is that we don’t sell data, we concession the area through the Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO), so interested investors can get licence and data and take it to the next level.

“These are the things we are looking at and working on to ensure that the data we generate are useful to investors. (NAN)

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