Lithium Americas Corp (LAAC)

[overlordpeter]

Kings Valley will be the first clay-hosted lithium mine in the world. Western Lithium plans to recover lithium from clays via a proprietary process it tested at a pilot plant in Germany last year. The end product, however, will be quite similar to what is produced from a traditional lithium brine deposit.

The pilot testing was scheduled to end in late January, which will set the stage for an upcoming feasibility study. Western Lithium will then proceed through permitting under the Bureau of Land Management and hopes to get the project into production by early 2019.

“We’ve always focused our attention on the development side because we believe the lithium business is not an exploration business,” Chmelauskas continued. “A lot of these major lithium deposits were discovered in the past, and it really becomes an engineering exercise that’s about getting known deposits into production. By combining our two projects we’ve focused the industry on one company that has the position to be the next producer.”