Avarone to Acquire Moab Lithium Brine Project in Nevada

This week, Avarone Metals (CSE:AVM) announced that it has entered an agreement with an armss length vendor to acquire the Moab lithium project in the Big Smoky Valley, Nevada.
As quoted in the press release:

The Big Smoky Valley is located 25 km immediately north of the Clayton Valley, home to Albemarle’s Silver Peak Lithium Mine, the only producing lithium brine facility in the United States and which has been in continuous operation since 1967. Recently, Esmeralda County Nevada has seen resurgence in exploration activity, culminating with Pure Energy’s identification of a NI 43-101 inferred resource of 816,000 metric tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE)* at a cut-off of 20mg/L in brine. (*Technical Report (2015) Spanjers, MS. PG.)
The Moab Lithium Project is located some 225 km SE of the Gigafactory site. Access to the Moab Lithium Project is excellent and lies adjacent to highway 95.
The primary target at the Moab Lithium Project is a horseshoe shaped gravity low anomaly that has been interpreted as an in filled basin. Exploration of the Big Smoky Valley by the USGS in the 1970’s culminated in the drilling of two Reverse Circulation holes, both of which encountered anomalous concentrations of lithium that were highly similar to those encountered in the Clayton Valley, just to the south, and where the Silver Peak Mine is located. Hole BS-13, which is located just 2.4 kilometers east of the Moab project border was designed to test the same basin covered by the Moab Project and Ultra Lithium’s Big Smoky Valley Project. Hole BS-13 was terminated at 200 m, and geochemical analysis revealed lithium in sediments ranging from 48ppm to 365ppm and averaging 160ppm. This is considered significant, as the cut-off grade used by Pure Energy for their resource calculation is only 20ppm.

Avarone CEO, Marc Levy, said:

This acquisition is a key milestone as Avarone enters one of the hottest sectors in the resource and energy space: Lithium. The board believes that due to growing world demand for lithium, the Moab brine project located in Nevada near Tesla’s Gigafactory, has the potential to deliver strong returns for our shareholders over the short and long term. We look forward to aggressively advancing work on this exciting project.

Click here for the full press release.