lithium sleeper

Beneficiation Program
PepinNini’s drilling and trenching programs to date have returned lithium sample grades of 0.02% at the Rincon Project and
0.015% at the Incahuasi Project, .
In order to deliver a higher-grade, more marketable concentrate, the Company commenced a beneficiation program, which
involved blending the brines from the different projects and removing the deleterious contaminates.
The first stage of the beneficiation program delivered outstanding results with an enriched lithium brine concentrate containing
3.05% (30,500 ppm – parts per million) lithium and a very low magnesium contaminate ratio of 1.6:1 Magnesium:Lithium
(Table 3). The result represents a massive increase in lithium content in raw brine.
The test work involved the blending of brines from these Rincon and Incahuasi deposits (Figure 7). The computer simulations found
that the chemistry of Rincon and Incahuasi salt lakes were highly complementary; Rincon brine is high in sulphate and Incahuasi
brine is high in calcium. With blending the deleterious gypsum precipitated out of the final blended brine and resulted in a very
high-grade lithium concentrate.
REVIEW OF OPERATIONS

Table 3: Results of stage one beneficiation studies
Next Steps
To confirm and validate the stage one results, PepinNini is now planning, in the context of its overall portfolio of projects, funding
priorities and market pressure, to undertake the next stage of beneficiation studies involving laboratory bench test-scale studies to
validate the high-grade stage one results.
This will involve blending brine samples from the Rincon and Incahuasi projects in a laboratory environment, which will involve a
laboratory-scale wind tunnel to create accelerated evaporation conditions to enrich the brine samples.
This program will be designed to test and estimate the approximate actual evaporation and concentration of lithium brines that
is required to produce lithium carbonate. The objective of the stage two program will be to provide actual data on the blended
brine product to validate the results of the computer simulations from stage one. An important consideration in these tests is also
to determine the optimum pre-concentration point for blend composition that is likely to achieve highest lithium concentration for
blended brines while minimising transport and operational cost of brines to the combined evaporation ponds.
The Company has identified a consultant with requisite wind tunnel equipment from the University of Salta to conduct these tests.
The laboratory bench test program is expected to take a period of three months to complete.
Figure 8 (below) presents an indicative process flow diagram for the production of lithium carbonate from brines, where the brines
are concentrated by evaporation in solar ponds, blended and then fed as a concentrate to a lithium carbonate plant.