American Salars Lithium’s acquisition will take its Pocitos project up to a district-scale opportunity. Pic: Getty Images
American Salars Lithium is expanding Pocitos into a potential district-scale project
Mining
share
- American Salars Lithium is expanding footprint of its flagship Pocitos project in Argentina
- Acquisition of Salar de Pocitos will increase its landholding by 1635% to 13,880 hectares
- New ground has existing historical exploration including drilling, surface sampling and geophysics
Special Report: American Salars Lithium is continuing its acquisition spree with the signing of a letter of intent to acquire the Salar de Pocitos project that’s contiguous with its flagship Pocitos project in Argentina.
The acquisition will drastically increase the scale of Pocitos, increasing its landholding by 1635% to 13,880 hectares (138.8km2), giving the company the second-largest property asset on the Salar de Pocitos in the Salta Province.
Other notable operators in the region include Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO), Eramet and Ganfeng Lithium.
American Salars Lithium (CSE:USLI) already has a gross non-JORC NI 43-10 resource of 760,000t lithium carbonate equivalent at the combined Pocitos 1 and third-party Pocitos 2 blocks, or net resources of ~456,000t LCE.
Completing borehole magnetic resonance surveys will provide continuous and higher accuracy allowing an upgrade of the resource.
“This acquisition represents the culmination of tremendous work by the whole American Salars team and is a game changer for the company and our stakeholders,” chief executive officer Nick Horsley said.
“Having consulted with some of the largest lithium mining companies in the world, we clearly understand the prerequisites for a takeover or production scenario.
“Today’s acquisition provides our engineering and exploration team a district scale footprint to execute on.”
The company recently acquired the Leduc East project in Quebec and the Jaguaribe project in Brazil.
District-scale landholding
The new 13,080-hectare Salar De Pocitos project is ~100km west of San Antonio de Los Cobres – the largest city at the top of the puna plateau – and ~250km west from the provincial capital of Salta.
It has been the subject of numerous historical exploration campaigns including drilling, surface sampling and geophysics.
USLI is acquiring an initial 75% interest in the project and can increase this to 100% by paying the vendor US$2m in cash and 20 million shares over four years.
Initial work planned will be data compilation to tie together the existing drill holes on Pocitos 1 with all the historical drill holes and update the company’s NI 43-101 resource.
Scoping and feasibility studies will follow the data compilation and move the Salar De Pocitos project through to commercial production.
Pocitos project
The flagship Pocitos project benefits from some of the best infrastructure on the puna including Provincial Highway Route 17 and the Pocitos industrial Park settlement that has a natural gas pipeline and near the railway that runs through the salar to the Port of Antofagasta on the Chilean Pacific Coast.
Drilling carried out in 2022 returned results of up to 169 parts per million lithium in hole PCT22-03 while a packer sampling system used in diamond holes that were drilled to a depth of up to 409m flowed brine for more than five hours at exceptional rates.
Adding further interest, direct lithium extraction company Ekosolve Ltd was able to produce 99.8% purity lithium carbonate at a recovery rate of >94% of the contained lithium within the brine.
The higher magnesium values in the brine did not appear to impact the extraction efficiency.
This article was developed in collaboration with American Salars Lithium, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
