The Bonnie Claire lithium deposit appears to be a lacustrine salt deposit hosted in sediments. The Project area as a sedimentary basin, from an environment and geology point of view, is reasonably well represented by the USGS preliminary deposit model, which describes the most readily ascertainable attributes of such deposits as light-colored, ash-rich, lacustrine rocks containing swelling clays, occurring within hydrologically closed basins with some abundance of proximal silicic volcanic rocks. The geometry of the Bonnie Claire Deposit is roughly tabular, with the lithium concentrated in gently dipping, locally undulating Quaternary sedimentary strata. The sedimentary units consist of interbedded calcareous, ashrich mudstones and claystones, and tuffaceous mudstone/siltstone and occasional poorly cemented sandstone and siltstone.

From a lithium deposit point of view, Bonnie Claire is interpreted to be a new type of sediment- hosted lithium deposit whereby lithium compounds such as lithium carbonate and lithium salts have been deposited within the fine grain clay, silt, and sand pore space. Although most of the sediment-hosted lithium in the literature occurs in clays, it does not at Bonnie Claire.

Bonnie Claire is the lowest in elevation of a series of intermediate-size playa-covered floodplains, with an area of about 85 km2 that receives surface drainage from an area of more than 1,200 km2. The plain and alluvial fans around it are fault-bounded on a ........

The QP evaluated both open pit mining and borehole mining (BHM) and a combination of both for the Bonnie Claire Lithium Project. Both are potentially viable options; however, the prevalence of relatively lower grade material near surface results in high stripping ratios early in the mine life for open pit mining. The use of BHM eliminates this by targeting high-grade mineralization at depth as well as offering other Project benefits, including reduced surface disturbance (i.e., no open-pit) and reduced tailings at surface due to tailings backfilling underground. The soft nature of clay should make it ideally suited to water jet cutting. For these reasons, the QP selected BHM as the more viable method at this stage of the Project. Test work and test borehole mining are required to support this mining method. If future drilling and assaying programs identify higher grade, shallow mineralization, the mining method could change.

As outlined above, The QP has used a base case of borehole mining (BHM) using jetting and pumping for this study. The borehole recovery using jetted drilling and pumping would pump high-pressure water through drill holes into the formation while simultaneously pumping the resulting loosened material out, creating a void that could be backfilled with suitable material to prevent caving from the surface. One benefit of this method would be that it could be targeted to deeper higher-grade locations without the need for removal of the shallow lower ........

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