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American Battery Technology announces positive drill results from initial exploratory subsurface drill program at its Tonopah Flats Lithium Project

Published: 09:50 21 Jun 2022 EDT

Lithium sign
American Battery Technology said this initial exploratory drilling program consisted of 16 targeted drill holes on its 10,340 acres of lithium-bearing claims

 American Battery Technology Company (OTCQB:ABML) (ABTC) has announced positive drill results from its initial exploratory subsurface drill program, Phase 1, at its Tonopah Flats Lithium Project in Big Smoky Valley, Nevada.

The company said this initial exploratory drilling program consisted of 16 targeted drill holes on ABTC's 10,340 acres of lithium-bearing claims, and was guided by surface sampling results collected in early 2022. ABTC drilled approximately 7,895-feet in this Phase 1 program and based on these results the company intends to further expand these exploration efforts to continue to advance this project.

"These initial results are beyond our expectations as they suggest a widespread lithium mineralization that is consistent in both area and depth throughout the sampled materials," ABTC CEO Ryan Melsert said in a statement.

READ: American Battery Technology names Kimberly Eckert as CFO 

"We are excited to have generated these high-potential results from our initial Phase 1 exploratory drilling program, and we look forward to expanding these drilling, sampling, mapping, geochemical, and analysis efforts to be able to fully define and quantify this resource moving forward. These sampling and characterization efforts provide the foundation for the validation and commercialization of our internally-developed selective lithium leaching and lithium hydroxide manufacturing technologies that are critical to solving our domestic and global critical battery metals challenges," Melsert added.

ABTC has developed its own proprietary processing train for extracting lithium from this type of unique Nevada-based lithium-bearing sedimentary claystone resource and for the subsequent manufacturing of this extracted lithium to battery-grade lithium hydroxide for sale to the domestic battery supply chain.

Whereas many proposed extraction processes are only able to produce economically competitive lithium products from high lithium grade material, the low-cost and low-environmental impact manufacturing process that ABTC has developed is able to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide from a wide variety of lithium concentrations hosted within these sedimentary resources. ABTC, in collaboration with DuPont (NYSE:DD), was recently awarded a $4.5 million grant from the US Department of Energy to build and operate a multi-ton per day demonstration-scale system to accelerate the commercialization and scale-up of this critical lithium manufacturing technology.

Highlights from the Phase 1 drilling program include:

  • Shallow Overburden: Anomalous lithium concentrations were measured at very shallow depths, less than 50 feet below the surface in many cases, indicating that low-cost and low-strip ratio techniques can likely be applied to access these near-surface lithium-bearing sedimentary materials
  • Consistent Lithium Concentrations: Lithium concentrations above the reference cutoff concentration of 300 ppmw were observed in every drill hole, in consistent concentrations throughout a large percentage of the total sampled depths, and with significantly higher peak concentrations observed in many sample holes, which makes this deposit especially attractive to the internally-developed ABTC processing train
  • Depth of Mineralization: The drilling infrastructure employed in these explorations was able to drill to a depth of approximately 500-foot, and in several of these drill holes the significant mineralization of lithium is still present at these depths, indicating that the anomalous lithium presence could extend even beyond the sampled depths
  • Breadth of Exploration: With these initial 16 drill holes a wide breadth of ABTC claims have been explored, and when considering a 0.5-mile radius area of influence (AoI) around each drill hole, approximately 4,990 acres out of 10.320 acres of total claim area has been explored within this Phase 1 program
  • Magnitude of Deposit: With the anomalous lithium concentrations observed throughout the detailed exploratory drill holes, and throughout the listed sampling depths, the ABTC team is excited to accelerate the further exploration and characterization of these claims to advance this deposit to an inferred, indicated, and measured resource through the established S-K 1300 guidelines
  • Next Steps: ABTC will utilize the results from this Phase 1 program to develop a step-out drill program, Phase 2, to further characterize the deposit. Additional drill results on Phase 2 will aid in the determination of area-wide grade and thickness assessment of the in-situ amount of lithium in order to progress this deposit to a quantified resource

ABTC chief resource officer, Scott Jolcover commented: "The results from the first 16 drill holes indicate limited overburden with a significant near surface, 500-ft or better, thick lithium enriched area of mineralization," stated We aim to maximize our step-out and build upon the initial drill hole program to shape our drill targeting and understanding of the area. While our holes are intentionally wide spaced at this time, the consistency of grade throughout the current results should lead to a very low strip ratio in a surface mining scenario."

The ABTC Tonopah Flats Lithium Exploration Project encompasses 517 unpatented lode claims covering approximately 10,340 acres. As part of the company's battery metals resource development exploration efforts, ABTC is performing bench-scale characterization and extraction trials to confirm the technical and economic competitiveness of extracting elemental lithium from these domestic sedimentary resources in order to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide for sale to the battery metals market.

The company stressed that there has been insufficient exploration of the relevant property or properties to allow for an estimate of a mineral resource, adding that it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the estimation of a mineral resource. The exploration target, therefore, does not represent, and should not be construed to be, an estimate of a mineral resource or mineral reserve, it said.

American Battery Technology Company, which recently changed its name from American Battery Metals Corporation, is uniquely positioned to supply low-cost, low-environmental impact, and domestically sourced battery metals through its three divisions: lithium-ion battery recycling, primary battery metal extraction technologies, and primary resources development.

The company has built a clean technology platform that is used to provide a key source of domestically manufactured critical and strategic battery metals to help meet the near insatiable demand from the electric vehicle, electrical grid storage, and consumer electronics industries. This ESG-principled platform works to create a closed-loop circular economy for battery metals that champions ethical and environmentally sustainable sourcing of critical and strategic materials.

Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com

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