American Battery Technology Company, an integrated battery materials technology company, has achieved targeted core drilling depth of 1,430 feet, one of the deepest lithium sampling areas in Smoky Valley, as part of its third drill program aimed to advance its Tonopah Flats Lithium Project. This drill program has currently completed 4 of the 8 holes of this infill and step out drilling sampling effort, and supports the development of this domestic resource towards upgraded ‘measured and indicated’ resource classification.
“We are extremely proud of our team in Tonopah with this accomplishment as we now have identified the Upper, Middle, and Lower Siebert formation geologically in the basin, all within a single hole,” stated Scott Jolcover, Chief Mineral Resources Officer. “Our previous deepest hole was 825 feet, and we have now sampled at over 1,400 feet deep with four drill holes completed in this eight-hole program. All four holes so far have appeared to bottom in claystone with very shallow alluvium gravels at the top of the holes and we look forward to receiving assay results.”
ABTC has already sent collected samples to Paragon Geochemical, an industry-leading, fully accredited geochemical laboratory located in Sparks, Nevada, providing mineral assays and geochemical analyses. Paragon Geochemical’s third-party characterization assessment results are anticipated within 60-120 days.
This drill program aims to expand the lithium mineralization zone with step out drilling and confirm the presence mineralization between step out holes with infill drilling.
The ABTC Tonopah Flats Lithium Project encompasses 517 unpatented lode claims covering over 10,340 acres, and ABTC controls 100% of the mining lode claims comprising the Tonopah Flats claims and the rights to all locatable minerals without any royalties. ABTC began surface sampling of these claims in the Summer of 2021, and subsequently performed multiple subsurface drilling programs at depths of up to 1,430 feet totaling over 12,000 feet of exploration covering approximately 65% of its claims.
The results of these initial successful exploration programs led to the development and publication of its third-party Qualified Person (QP) audited SK-1300 compliant Inferred Resource Report in February 2023, which concluded that this is one of the largest known lithium resources in the United States containing approximately 15.8 million tons of economically accessible lithium on a carbonate equivalent basis (LCE).
In addition to developing this resource, the company has developed its own in-house processes that utilize selective leach extraction to provide a lower-cost, lower-impact solution in contrast to conventional lithium extraction methods. ABTC will continue to conduct geological mapping, sampling, drilling, geochemical analysis, and proprietary extraction trials to characterize this resource and further quantify the performance of its internally developed lithium extraction and manufacturing operations.
In 2021, ABTC, in collaboration with DuPont and the University of Nevada, Reno, was awarded a $4.5-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to build and operate a multi-ton-per-day demonstration-scale system to accelerate the commercialization and scale-up of this critical battery-grade lithium manufacturing technology. As a result of the early successes of this project, in October 2022 ABTC was selected for an additional competitively awarded U.S. DOE grant for a $115M project funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to support the construction of this commercial-scale primary lithium hydroxide manufacturing facility.