The federal government says “high grade” lithium has been discovered in Kwara state.

Abdulrazaq Garba, director-general, Nigerian Geological Survey Agency (NGSA), made this known while briefing journalists on mineral exploration activities on Monday in Abuja.

Lithium is a highly reactive metal that is used to make energy-dense rechargeable batteries for electronics, such as laptops, cell phones, electric vehicles, and grid storage.

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

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

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

“Another advantage of Nigerian lithium is that it is hard rock lithium and that is what investors are looking out for worldwide.

“We even had discussions with some private companies with mining licences in Nigeria and they conducted tests on the lithium and we also collaborated with Canada on that too.”

Garba said that all data received from NIMEP were quite exciting, adding that the development would boost the economy.

He also said that a track of mineralisation almost 2km-10km was discovered close to Abuja.

He further explained that resource evaluation was conducted on the area and anomalous gold, lead, and silver were discovered with tungsten.

“Gold mineralisation found there has a 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,” he said.

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

He said that pronouncements would be made soon on companies that had shown interest in 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,” Garba said.

“These are the things we are looking at and working on to ensure that the data we generate is useful to investors.”