Centennial, Colorado-based Uranium Resources Inc. (URI) has added to its Sal Rica lithium brine project in Box Elder County by staking an additional 168 placer claims adjacent to the company’s current development area in the Pilot Valley region of the county.
Centennial, Colorado-based Uranium Resources Inc. (URI) has added to its Sal Rica lithium brine project in Box Elder County by staking an additional 168 placer claims adjacent to the company’s current development area in the Pilot Valley region of the county.
The new claims total approximately 3,360 acres and bring the total mineral rights holding of URI to 13,260 acres on the lithium-rich brine lands approximately 25 miles north of Wendover and approximately 100 miles northwest of Salt Lake City.
The newly acquired claims adjoin property recently acquired URI from Mesa Exploration Corp. and bring under the company’s control projected extensions of known near-surface lithium brine occurrences in the Sal Rica Project area. The newly acquired claims are not burdened with any production royalty obligations, URI said in a release.
Christopher M. Jones, president and chief executive officer of URI, said, “Developing a dominant land position in two prospective basins in Nevada and Utah is key to developing our lithium brine exploration business. Expanding our lithium development project pipeline while maintaining our uranium business portfolio in readiness for the predicted price rise allows investors increased investment opportunities in the clean energy industry. We remain optimistic about this new chapter in our development of URI.”
A shallow drilling program carried out by Quintana Petroleum in 1966 at the Sal Rica Project encountered significant levels of lithium-enriched brines associated with near-surface aquifers over a wide area of the region. Confirmation brine samples recently collected by Mesa Exploration personnel returned lithium grades averaging 66 parts per million (ppm) with values as high as 80 ppm. Initial sampling of sediments in the project area by URI yielded lithium values ranging from 82 ppm to 213 ppm.
The property additions at the Sal Rica Project, along with a recently completed expansion of the company’s Columbus Basin Project in Nevada, continue expansion and diversification efforts within the energy metals sector for URI as it advances its internal program of lithium brine target identification, exploration and evaluation to build a robust lithium project portfolio, the company said.
Lithium is a critical component for the manufacture of batteries for electrical storage and is used in a wide range of devices ranging from cell phones to automobiles. The battery market is expected to grow 500 percent over the next 10 years, with lithium batteries accounting for 35 percent of this growth. At the same time, the transportation sub-market is expected to experience a 23 percent compounded annual growth rate during this same period, according to URI.
URI said that lithium enriched brines have proven to be less expensive to explore for, develop and operate than other sources of lithium, such as lithium rich pegmatites and hectorite clays. This, coupled with a small environmental footprint and minimal carbon emissions, makes brines an attractive method for producing lithium. With large battery plants such as Tesla’s “Gigafactory” near Reno, Nevada and Faraday Motor Works’ proposed large facility near Las Vegas, Nevada, URI’s Sal Rica and Columbus Basin Projects are at the epicenter of lithium brine development, production and consumption in the United States, said Jones.
In addition to the Utah and Nevada lithium brine projects, URI controls uranium lands in Turkey as well as uranium mining projects in Texas and New Mexico. The uranium projects along with two uranium processing plants are currently idle due to low uranium prices.