American Battery Technology Company, a critical battery materials company that is commercializing both its primary minerals manufacturing and secondary minerals lithium-ion battery recycling technologies, has announced positive drill results from its initial exploratory subsurface drill program, Phase 1, at its Tonopah Flats Lithium Project in Big Smoky Valley, NV. 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.
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, was recently awarded a $4.5M grant from the US Department of Energy [2] 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.