Columbus Project
The Columbus Project is comprised of 1920 acres of Federal placer claims, located in the Big Smoky Valley, Esmeralda County, Nevada. The Project is 30 minutes by road from the Clayton Valley, where the Albemarle’s Silver Peak Lithium Mine is located and where Pure Energy has recently identified a NI43-101 inferred resource of 816,000 metric tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) at a cut-off of 20mg/L. (Technical Report (2015) Spanjers, MS. PG.)
The Project is located within the Columbus Salt Marsh, near Coaldale and west of ground controlled by Ultra Lithium. The principal target at the Columbus Lithium Project is a large circular gravity low anomaly which is interpreted as an in-filled basin which may contain lithium-rich brine. The Big Smoky Valley was preliminarily drilled in 1979 by the United States Geological Survey and anomalous lithium values were encountered in the basin sediments. It is the Company’s belief that the quality and concentrations of lithium brines discovered in the Clayton Valley are present in the Big Smoky Valley.
About Lithium in Nevada
Lithium is a scarce and technologically important element produced primarily from brines and pegmatites. It is used in conjunction with renewable energy technologies and hybrid automobiles, primarily in the form of Li-ion batteries, currently the most used form of batteries in many electronics. The consumption of lithium carbonate is on the rise and is considered essential to the continued growth of electric and hybrid-electric transportation systems.
Located in the Basin and Range geological province in Southern Nevada, the Big Smoky Valley, which is approximately 3km wide and 14km wide, is an internally drained, fault bounded and closed basin. Geological modeling suggests that lithium-rich brines were transported and deposited in the both the Clayton and Big Smoky valleys during the Pleistocene era. The primary exploration model is to identify and map basins with ground gravity surveys and evaluate the chemistry of salts and sediments therein with DWRC or rotary-mud drilling. In the later stages of exploration, downhole geophysics and seismic reflection surveys are also utilized to define lithium-bearing aquifers.