Argentina-focused lithium brine explorer Galan Lithium has muscled up its advisory team, to accelerate prefeasibility study work on its Candelas project, located at the Hombre-Mueto salar which is one of the world’s richest sources of lithium brine.
The Candelas PFS, which is anticipated in Q4 this year, will be overseen by respected mining engineer Boris Caro.
Mr Caro has more than 20 years’ experience in the mining industry and served as study/project manager for Orocobre, developing the working on the expansion of the producing Olaroz lithium project, also located in Argentina.
The PFS work will occur while the company also develops a maiden JORC resource, with Galan estimating it will complete the Candelas resource estimate in Q3 this year.
Commenting on the appointment, Galan Lithium managing director Juan Pablo Vargas de la Vega said: “I would like to welcome Boris into our team.
“With his wealth of experience in Argentinian brines projects, Boris is a key addition to Galan as we move towards PFS commencement next quarter.”
It is expected that Caro will advise the Company and its team on strategy and study development activities, with Galan already completing some preliminary processing test work with Candelas brine samples.
Ion exchange has been chosen as the first technology to be assessed due to the lead time required to test the technology. Ion exchange is a low cost and high flow-rate processing step that is widely used in water treatment and may yield a more efficient lithium extraction operation.
In addition, Galan will also investigate more conventional processing routes using evaporation, selective precipitation, purification and precipitation as lithium carbonate.
The technologies will have limited processing work to complete, with the brines extracted from Candelas demonstrating extremely high-grade and low impurity results.
The explorer has completed eight drill holes – confirming a minimum 3.5km strike of heavy brines –intersecting results as high as 192m at 802mg of lithium per litre, with exceptional low levels of impurities with Mg/Li ratios of <2.80.
Galan’s results at Candelas put the company in line with results observed at the nearby Livent project (NYSE: Fenix) and Galaxy Resources’ (ASX: GXY) Sal de Vida project.
