Albemarle is 100 percent (%) owner of the Salar de Atacama and La Negra operations.
Albemarle's mining properties within the Salar de Atacama include two groups of exploitation concessions: Carlos Sáez - Eduardo Morales Echeverría (CASEME) and mining concessions in Salar de Atacama owned by the Chilean economic development agency (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción or Production Development Corporation of Chile (CORFO)) (OMA). For the purpose of the reserve estimate, the OMA concessions are those that are relevant.
Albemarle owns the land on which the extraction/processing facilities at Salar de Atacama (Salar Plant) and the processing facility at La Negra operate. However, the ownership of the land at the Salar de Atacama will revert to the Chilean government once all amounts of lithium.
Albemarle's mineral rights at the Salar de Atacama in Chile consist of the right to extract lithium brine, pursuant to a long-term contract with the Chilean government.
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Summary:
Salar de Atacama is located in the Central Andes of Chile, a region which is host to some of the most prolific lithium brine deposits in the world. The Central Andean Plateau and the Atacama Desert are two important physiographic features that contribute to the generation of lithium brines in the Central Andes. In these environments, the combination of hyper-arid climate, closed basins, volcanism, and hydrothermal activity has led to extensive deposition of evaporite deposits since approximately 15 million years ago (Ma) (Alonso et al., 1991). The size and longevity of these closed basins is favorable for lithium-rich brine generation, particularly where thick evaporite deposits (halite, gypsum, and, less commonly, borates) have removed ions from solution and further concentrated lithium.
The Salar occurs in the plateau margin basin of a volcanic arc setting, and active subsidence in the basin is driven by transtension and orogenic loading. Based on the raw data used for this resource estimation, the lithium-rich brine at Salar has an average of 2,388 mg/L Li, with a minimum of 1,010 mg/L and a maximum 5,220 mg/L. Lithium appears to be sourced from weathering of the basin geology, the Andean arc, and the Altiplano-Puna plateau, which is transported into the closed basin where it is concentrated by ET (Munk et al., 2018).
Lithium-rich brines are produced from a halite aquifer within the Salar nucleus. In addition to the evaporative concentration processes, the distillation of lithium from geothermal heating of fluids may further concentrate lithium in these brines and provide prolonged replenishment of brines that are in production. Since many lithium-rich brines exist over (or in close proximity to) relatively shallow magma chambers, the late-stage magmatic fluids and vapors may have pathways through faults and fractures to migrate into the closed basin.
Waters in the Salar de Atacama basin and the adjacent Andean arc vary in lithium concentration from approximately 0.05 to 5 milligrams per liter (mg/L) Li in the Andean inflow waters, 5 to 100 mg/L Li in shallow groundwaters in the south and east flanks of the basin, and may exceed 5,000 mg/L Li in some brines in the nucleus (Munk et al., 2018). These values indicate that the lithium-rich brine in the basin is concentrated by up to five orders of magnitude compared to water entering the basin; this is a hydrogeochemical circumstance unique to the Salar compared to other lithium brine systems.