Jul 5 2017
Southern Lithium Corp. is pleased to announce it has been granted the necessary permits to execute the first phase of drilling at its Cruz Property previously announced (December 16th 2016). This permit was granted after an extensive review of the Environmental Impact Report (“EIR”) by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Production for Government of the Province of Salta.
The first phase of the drilling program will consist of one core hole drilled at two separate locations in the center of a body of brine over 6-km long in length , indicated by the Transient Electromagnetic (“TEM”) ground geophysical survey carried out in early February and announced (February 21, 2017). The objective of the drilling campaign is to establish brine chemistry at discrete vertical intervals as well as obtain other key geologic and hydrologic information, including eventually outlining a resource.
At each location, an HQ size core hole will test the Salar to a minimum depth of 350m, or deeper if warranted to ensure that the brine body identified by the TEM geophysical survey is thoroughly sampled. In the deeper parts of some Salar basins, coarse sediments that were deposited early during the filling of the basins have the potential to be excellent brine aquifers.
The program will be managed in Argentina through its joint venture partner Millennial Lithium Corp. Millennial has engaged HIDROTEC S.R.L., a Salta-based drilling company with extensive experience in drilling and testing salar-hosted lithium brines. Millennial has engaged Mike Rosko of Montgomery and Associates, Inc. a US-based hydrogeological consultancy to provide program guidance and act as the Company’s qualified person for reporting results.
About the Cruz Property
The Company has executed a formal option agreement with Proyecto Pastos Grandes S.A. (“PPG SA”), a wholly owned subsidiary of Millennial Lithium Corp., through the option Southern Lithium can earn up to an eighty percent (80%) interest in the PPG SA’s Cruz Property in the Pocitos Salar Basin in Salta Province, Argentina.
The Cruz Property is located in South America’s Lithium Triangle (northern Chile, northwestern Argentina and southwest Bolivia). The property encompasses 9,027 hectares (22,306 acres) in the Pocitos Salar Basin in Salta Province, Argentina.
The Cruz Property is contiguous to the southern limit of the Salar del Rincón Basin, where ADY Resources Limited is extracting lithium brine, and the northern limit of the Pocitos Salar Basin, where the Cruz property is located. Both properties lie along the structural belt that hosts the important lithium resources of the region, and at the junction of a large north-south fault system and the northwest-southeast megastructure along which lies the Rincon volcano, the possible source of the lithium brine in both salar basins. The 60-kilometre long Pocitos salar basin has previously only been drill tested with a shallow 12-hole program in the 1970s by an Argentinean government agency “Direccion General de Fabricaciones Militares”. To date, this is the only confirmed exploration drilling conducted in the Pocitos basin. The hole that produced the best results is near the southeast edge of the Cruz property boundary, and averaged 417 parts per million lithium. Although these results are considered historical and have not been verified by the Company’s QP, the Company considers these results relevant to the future exploration of the Cruz property.