foreign to geohug uh so before we kick off today's session I'd just like to take this time to acknowledge the traditional learns which we're all coming from today I'm here on the beautiful lands of the gadagal of the people of the Aurora nation and I'd like to pay my respects to the elders past present and future so I'm so happy to have Edward bunker joining us today so Ed is a mineral exploration geologist at cgg and here his current focus is on the development of global to Regional scale exploration tools for a range of mineral systems with a particular focus on energy transition metals such as lithium so with these expertise it is going to be awesome to learn from him today about from months Brian's an overview of lithium deposits and how to explore for them so it's going to be an epic session I hope you all enjoy it please use the chat we'll be opening up the floor for discussions at the end and yes thanks so much and for joining it's awesome having you well thanks so much Jess um so as Jess just said my name's Ed bunker and I'm a minerals exploration geologist at cgt and so today I'm hoping to provide you with an overview of lifting mineral systems and this is based on work that we've been doing at cgg for the last few years both through client-funded projects and also through internal research and development so a kind of rundown of the presentation today I want to start with a few fundamentals of the physical and chemical properties of lithium and it's important to start there because it helps us understand how lithium moves and why it accumulates in kind of economic deposits in the certain places that it does I also want to touch briefly on the motivations for why we want to explore for lithium in the present day climate then I'm going to kind of just give you a high level touch on each of the different type of mineral deposit types I'm going to talk about today and then tie them all together in our integrated lithium mineral system and that kind of integrated perspective that we've that we've developed and then we're going to do a slight Deep dive into all those different deposit types using a few academic case studies and also a few industry case studies along the way to just show different ways that we can explore for these different types of deposits so to start with those fundamentals um you can consider lithium to behave kind of like a large iron lithophile it's actually got a very low a very small ionic radius in itself but it behaves similar to most of those large iron lithophiles so it's pretty much incompatible within most silicate mineral structures and doesn't really like to be incorporated into those mineral lattice structures of silicates but when it does it tends to occur as a trace element and it often substitutes for magnesium because magnesium seems to have similar chemical and physical properties to lithium so they tend to behave in the same way lithium is also the lightest metal that we know of in the periodic table I've already mentioned that it has a small ionic radius and it's also highly electropositive and those are some properties we'll talk about a bit further in the next slide lithium is also highly water soluble there's a low melting points and boiling point and interestingly it seems to be stripped from sea water and that's an important point to mention because you'd expect if if lithium is pretty incompatible within silicate phases and is highly water-soluble you'd expect lithium to be kind of concentrated at the Earth surface and then it would be easily soluble and mobilized into water so all of those factors you'd suggest would suggest that lithium would be naturally concentrated into seawater but on this table on the right you can see that seawater actually has a very depleted lithium content of 0.2 lithium 0.2 parts per million of lithium and the reason that people think that is is because lithium seems to be stripped out of seawater by the formation of deep sea Clays you can see deep sea Clays here are actually quite enriched with respect to lithium so higher than the average crustal abundance even higher than most granites typical Granite compositions and and we also have shales here as well so it's an interesting kind of thing to bear in mind that whilst at first glance you might think seawater would be a really good source for lithium actually it's it's pretty lithium depleted at the bottom of this table here I've also summarized a few kind of um figures of some potential potentially economic lithium systems or resources for lithium so Cornish lithium are interested in brine associated with the granite down in the southwest of Cornwall and the values for lithium in that brine are said to be about 200 220 parts per million so that's relatively not particularly high if you look at the other kind of sources of lithium that we have here so we have um salad Atacama brines and we'll talk about those later on and they're almost an order of magnitude higher in concentration lithium and these are interesting things to think about so we've got two different brines here with very different compositions of lithium both considered in some way to be economic and hopefully we'll dig into that a bit later on and you'll see and hope to I hope you'll understand why that might be and then we also have those kind of all grave rock types so we've got thakka pass which is a lithium clay type system and also we have that hard rock spodium type system such as Mount Holland and those are um once again highly enriched with respect to lithium but significantly higher than The Brines so I've already said we want to talk about the motivation so why is lithium so good and why do we need it in the modern day so those properties of lithium I already mentioned it's a light metal it's highly Electro positive and it's a small ionic radius and those things mean that you can fit a huge amount of charge into a very small amount of volume and that's really good if you want to create a high energy density battery and those high energy density batteries are the best kind of batteries to make mobile technologies so what I'm talking about are those electric cars mobile phones and laptops so you can have a nice portable phone with a huge amount of charge in it and that's ideal for what we need so in this kind of modern world in the energy transition we really do want Lithium-ion batteries for Trans for use in in all those kind of different Technologies and as a result of all that popularity of lithium for use in these batteries it's projected that demand for lithium is going to increase by Eightfold over the next decade but it's not only a demand problem it's also a supply problem so lithium is strategically vulnerable so the majority of lithium is actually produced from only a few countries so you can see on this graph on the bottom here Australia dominates the production Market we also have Chile Argentina to a lesser degree China as well so it's just a few countries here producing most of the lithium that we have that we need for the world's demand but also that's supplies strategically vulnerable because the majority of lithium processing so that's like refining of the ore and also creation of the batteries is going on in China so most of our lithium whilst it's produced in a range of different countries all go through China so there's a an interesting bottleneck there that we really do need to address if we want safe and domestic supplies of lithium into the future so I'm now going to give you a very high level rundown of each of the different deposit types and the pros and cons of each so hard rock mining as I as I call it is kind of the most classic way that we've mind lifting in the past and it's associated with granite related pegmatites and other types of hard rock systems like that and we're mining minerals like spodium and petalite and lipidolite which are lithium enrich silicate minerals the benefit of this type of system is that it uses conventional expiration and Mining techniques so you know drilling defining a resource through drilling out and and then processing the ore in conventional ways so we can use knowledge that we already have to explore and process that um the the minds and and exploit them also coincidentally many of these Hard Rock Minds occur in permissive jurisdictions to mining so areas where uh mining is is welcome so places like Australia and Canada where um It's relatively straightforward to um set up the legislation and all the pathways to develop a mine also as we already discussed the aura is high grade and that's really beneficial when you come to the processing but that high grade is really needed because one of the cons of this type of um lithium extraction is that it's intensely energy it's very energy intensive so um I've heard um quoted several times by John Thompson um that uh the crushing of ore in order to process and obtain minerals takes about 10 of our energy production globally and that's a huge proportion of energy consumption is used in in that crushing of all and that's really important consideration so energy intensive and it also produces a huge amount of waste so only about three to 0.3 percent of the rocks that we're mining is actually lithium and useful the rest of it is generating waste and that waste needs to be stored somewhere so we generate tailings and waste piles and those are an ongoing consideration for ESG concerns we need to monitor those and look after those as best we can for the rest of the um for ongoing into the future sure so another type of of rock mining is lithium in Clays so this occurs in places like thakka pass in Nevada in the USA once again we're using conventional exploration and Mining techniques to look for explore for and then mine these types of deposits they're also relatively straightforward to extract the grades are moderate to high once again but similar downsides as well so this is an energy intensive process and generates a lot of waste again that we have to pile up in tailings piles and look after but an additional consideration here is that the majority of the deposits that we actually know about which are lithium Clays tend to occur in environments where um there's resistance to mining so this could be due to indigenous communities living in the area that don't really want mining to occur and it can also be due to ecological concerns so some of these mines occur in in kind of areas of outstanding natural beauty or scientific interest areas that want to be preserved for other reasons so those factors are really important considerations and reasons that we may consider not not exploiting that resource so the most conventional type of brine extraction is extraction from evaporative Continental basins and I tend to refer to these as Salas and that's what they're referred to in South America so the reason I refer to them as Salas is because the majority of those Continental evaporative basins that we know of do occur in South America so the majority of them are called Salas um the benefits here is once again they're straightforward to explore four and to extract because these basins tend to occur at or near the Earth's surface so that they have quite an obvious expression that we can then go and look at an and exploit the grades here are pretty pretty low that should really say moderate to low grade and obviously it's dissolved within a in within water interestingly the the kind of refinement process is very low energy requirement has a very low energy requirement so these brines are being pumped to the surface as you can see in this figure from the salad Atacama uh The Brines are pumped to the surface and stored in pools at the Earth's surface and then through the process of kind of just solar evaporation so passive evaporation using the heat of the Sun the water is evaporated away and the lithium gets left behind there's a lithium carbonate so we're basically using renewable energy sources to refine the lithium here and that's a really interesting consideration one of the reasons that we can extract lithium at lower grades than for instance a hard rock mine is because we're using that passive energy source but one of the downsides here is that so for one thing it's very time con time intensive so we pump these Brands to the surface and then they have to sit there for 18 months to two years while that gradual evaporation occurs so it takes a very long time to refine these lithium brines out it also pumps water out of a groundwater out of an environment that's highly arid so in South America where we are here in this in this image it's a very arid environment and pumping groundwater out to the surface and then evaporating it away isn't necessarily the best use of that water and so that takes us on to the next point which is resistance from local communities so we're pumping groundwater out and that could influence the groundwater table in in the nearby regions so local communities may have issues around their own water sources if they're living near to one of these salar extraction facilities and likewise this can cause ecological issues as well for similar reasons and then we have this kind of new kind of emerging opportunity or technology uh this kind of new kind of geological search space that I've broadly refer to as unconventional lithium brines so these occur in a diverse range of geological settings that's both a challenge and a benefit it's a challenge because it's hard to kind of prescribe a mineral deposit model that you can go and look for but it's also a benefit because it means that these kind of lithium brines are broadly distributed across the globe in a range of different environments there's also interesting opportunities in these kind of settings for the production of other types of minerals out of brines and also the production of heat from these brines because some of these brines come from Deep aquifers or kind of adjacent to magmatic systems and so they can be quite hot and so there's opportunities for geothermal extraction and we're going to expand on that a bit later on this is also a fairly low energy intensity process so we're using Technologies I'm going to expand on later called direct lithium extraction Technologies and these are essentially ways of getting the lithium out of the water a lot of these don't require a huge amount of energy consumption to do so we can pump our water out of the ground put them through a direct lithium extraction technology to suck the lithium out and then pump that water back into the ground and that puts us onto the final Pro which is minimal waste so the byproduct of this process is water and so it's in theory as long as you haven't added anything to that water it should be able to be pumped back into the aqua film from which it came from in a kind of circular process now the downside here is that we're looking at Brian's with pretty low grades I mean you saw the cornice lithium example earlier on it's much lower grade than a salar for instance um and so that means that it could be challenging to make an economic business plan around this kind of low-grade lithium the extraction Technologies are also kind of still haven't been proven yet in a commercial sense many of them are kind of in Pilot phase they've been demonstrated to work in the lab but can we trans translate that success in the lab to success in the field it still is yet to be seen and also whilst we have got a range of kind of pilot studies in in the in the field right now where people are looking to extract lithium from specific geothermal brines or specific brines in in the field none of those projects are really at a commercial stage yet so it's kind of yet to be proven whether these unconventional lithium brines can be commercially viable in that respect so just to kind of bring all of that together I've got a few facts and figures here so um the table on the top right here right hand corner here shows the proportion of reserves relative to all of these different types of systems that I've discussed so you can see quite interestingly that those those Continental bass and brines those tellers dominate the proportion of lithium reserves and I've thought a bit about this and and kind of my feeling on this is probably because these these um Salah brines they occur at or near the Earth surface as I've already said so it's quite easy to establish where where across the globe those lithium brines are and they're also quite shallow basins so maybe maximum depth of 100 meters so actually kind of you know defining that resource or Reserve is is relatively straightforward whereas when you think about a hard rock system like a pegmatite system um it's it's a bit more challenging to Define that Reserve so whilst we have 30 reserves for those lithium pigmentites it's probably um the actual percentage of lithium reserves is probably higher relative to the Salah basins and then you can see that those kind of those clay systems actually compose quite a small amount or small proportion of the global lithium reserves and then even smaller still are those unconventional brands that we were talking about so in in terms of unconventional Brian's geothermal brines and or philbrines sit there and then this is the only time I'm really going to mention it but there is an interesting deposit in Serbia called yada where we've discovered this mineral that's completely new to geology called yaderite and this is a lithium zeolite um so the not a huge amount of literature out there for us to understand the geological controls and and the kind of background for this deposit um kind of from the preliminary work that I've looked at it seems that it could relate to those lithium-play type systems but this could be a metamorphosed lithium clay type system that's really mainly speculative so I wouldn't really say that with a high degree of confidence but yeah it's interesting because it's a massive deposit and composes three percent of global lithium reserves in itself um so I've kind of touched on a few of these points on the left here um and I also wanted to mention that it's it's likely that that non-conventional lithium brine Reserve proportion which is relatively small in this table here but this table was an estimate from 2017 by Bradley atel and so it's likely that that proportion of unconventional brands has increased because of Technical Innovations within that space and also kind of excitement and interest in these kind of new unconventional Brands so it's likely that when we come to a new estimate a modern estimate that proportion will will increase significantly down in the bottom here you can see those comparative grades I've already kind of vaguely touched on this so the black crosses uh correspond to sell our brines and you can see that comparative to those Hard Rock and soft rock systems they have quite low grades and the grade is shown here on the y-axis and the total tonnage of each deposit is shown on the x-axis so whilst they have relatively low grades deposits like the salad Atacama and the salad at UD actually have some of the highest total tonnages of any of the deposits that we've seen then we have those lithium clay systems which are relatively low grade compared to the to the Hard Rock systems up here so in blue we have the Hard Rock systems and they have significantly higher grades and pretty high tonnages as well so it's just interesting to kind of synthesize and compare all those different grades versus tonnages so now I want to tie all those different deposit types together in our kind of holistic mineral system that we have here um so this figure is a conceptual figure that we've brought together internally and it helps us to kind of conceptualize how lithium moves at and near the Earth's surface so we're going to pick the story up here in these magmatic systems so as you can imagine or you may already know a lot of the lithium enriched grommets that we know of are S-Type granites they likely have interacted with sediments on the way through the crust and lithium as I've already mentioned behaves like a large iron lithophile so it's relatively incompatible and doesn't really like to be trapped into silicate phases so one of the primary mechanisms of concentration of lithium in these magmas is through fractional crystallization so we're fractionating out silicates and lithium likes to stay in the residual magma for as long as it possibly can do so an example of environments like a lithium pegmatite that we've already talked about that's an example where lithium's basically been backed up into a corner so fractional crystallization has been progressing along and a magma has becoming more fractionated and more hydrous but eventually there's no way for the lithium to stay within that fluid any longer and it's forced into the kind of the mineral lattice of of a of a of a lithium and Rich silicate like a spodium or a petalite so that's how we end up with a lithium pegmatite but in in other cases we can have a an evolved magma kind of fractionating away but some of that magma is extruded to the surface and so we have um rhyolithic explosive eruptions so a great example of an area like this would be the Western Andean margin where we have these highly evolved very explosive eruptions of rhyolithic magmas so during these eruptions we get a lot of developalization and it's likely that some lithium will be lost as volatile species species but we also get rapid crystallization of magma and that's it that tends to trap the lithium within glassy matrixes so we get the formation of of uh volcanic deposits like ignum brights during these eruptions and those igne brights have a high volume of glass and within that glass we get a lot of lithium the benefit here is that that lithium isn't trapped within the mineral lattice structure it's trapped within an amorphous silicate glass and these glasses are actually pretty unstable at the Earth's surface so when they interact with water weathering can occur quite rapidly and that lithium because it's very soluble and incompatible will readily partition into the water so through weathering of those ignorant brights water can easily be liberated into into a hydrous phase now when that weathering occurs it's not likely that that lithium that's then trapped in solution will be of a significantly enriched grade it's probably still going to be at less than 10 parts per million within the fluid but the important factor here is that the relative ratio of lithium to other cations within that fluid has increased because lithium is more soluble than all the other cations so the lithium to calcium ratio will increase the lithium to potassium ratio will increase and so on and that's really crucial when we come to enrich it later down the line another important um contributor of lithium into the Earth's surface especially in areas like the Western Andean margin that we're talking about here is the contribution of geothermal Waters so when we have a shallowly in place magmatic system that will then begin to develateralize and condense outer hydra's phase often and so that hot water which is lithium enrich and also enriched with other elements can sometimes reach the Earth's surface by following shallow across all fractures and when that extrudes that's basically what we consider a geothermal spring and in one of the products I'm going to talk about later on we've looked at Waters from geothermal Springs in similar type environments and the lithium content can be 50 parts per million sometimes a bit higher than that so in comparison to the lithium being contributed from these kind of waters that are interacting with the Rye light glasses that lithium that's coming from those geothermal Waters is a significantly stepped up with respect to lithium enrichment so all of this lithium is being transported in the water cycle it's being transported along the earth's surface in in River channels and it can often accumulate in in basins and in many areas like the Western Andean margin we we have kind of topographic basins that are closed off or isolated uh we call them Endo rate basins and basically what that means is that water can flow into the Basin but it doesn't really have potential to flow out of the Basin due to the topography so that water accumulates and the only way that it can escape from that area is through evaporation and in hyper-arid regions like the Atacama Desert the evaporation rate is much higher than the precipitation rate so that water accumulates in the Basin and then the volume of that water begins to diminish but lithium can't follow that water through evaporation it has to stay within the within the fluid because it's highly soluble it wants to stay within the fluid for as long as it possibly can so as that water begins to evaporate and the residual water becomes increasingly enriched with total dissolved solids so lithium and other other elements are becoming enriched a lot of those elements also begin to precipitate out as evaporite phases so the sodium will be trapped with inhalite the calcium becomes trapped within gypsum and other minerals but the lithium gets left behind because it's the most soluble and it's most incompatible with respect to other elements and that's essentially how you get the formation of a salar so it's basically through gradually evaporative enrichment of that residual Brine and the lithium gets left behind now before I go any further there's an important expiration implication that I want to talk about from a really interesting paper so this is ellicital in economic geology this year um they showed that Within These ignum bright systems the lithium mobilization probably happens at or near the time of igne bright um deposition so when the ignan bright was still hot that's the best time to mobilize that lithium so what that tells you is that lithium was released at the time of eruption and so that lithium most likely accumulated within that Basin at all near the time of that eruption as well and the age of some of these ignorant brights is significantly older than you'd expect so some of them are millions of years to 10 million years old and that's what that tells you is that that lithium brine has a very long resonance time within that Basin so it can sit there for geologically long periods of time and what that means is that we have the potential for subsequent geological events to occur and to potentially cover that Basin over so we could get the precipitation sorry the deposition of a gravel we could get more ignum bright flows coming over and covering this Basin up and essentially what that means is that we can isolate that base in a way and bury it and that's what we refer to as a Paleo Cellar so that's a buried aquifer where we have lithium in Rich Brian sitting within the pore space of the rock here is they're no longer an active Cellar system but the brine is still sat there happily just just you know living its life and so that's what we refer to as a Paleo solar it's an interesting concept we're going to come back to later in the presentation so we have another few types of lithium to talk about here we have lithium associated with oil fields so essentially some oil fields in the world have been seen to be or observed to be associated with lithium and Rich brines whereas other oil fields have no lithium enrichment within the brines so some interesting controls there that we will try and dig into a bit later on but trying to understand the relationship of these lithium brines to the modern day analogs that we see here is a really interesting kind of thing to kind of play around with and then sometimes we refer to basinal brines and that's essentially where we have lithium sat within a a kind of porous Basin uh the lithium in this kind in this case has kind of become separate from the from the geological context that would allow us to infer how that lithium got there in the first place so a basin O'Brien is more of like a bucket term for just generally lithium brines that we find in basins and we don't really know how they got there and then the last kind of thing to talk about is we do have some interesting environments like Granite hosted lithium brine so the Cornish lithium example I talked about earlier as an example where we have we had lithium enriched within the granite and then water was able to interact with that Granite through exploiting fractures within that granite and dissolve the lithium out again and so we do sometimes get interesting environments like that so that kind of completes that holistic Journey that we've been on following lithium through its journey through atom near the Earth's surface so now we're going to do a few deep dives into those different deposit types first one we're going to talk about is the Hard Rock lithium deposits so we do have a classic model for these kind of deposits as I've already said we've been exploiting and exploring for these types of deposits for the probably the longest time uh in our human history so typically we find these kind of pegmatite type systems which are associated with S-Type grommets so it's important that the rest type as I mentioned earlier because interaction with those sediments is likely a key factor in enriching lithium within the magma because it's so incompatible any kind of partial melting lithium just likes to jump into that partial melt as soon as it possibly can do so interacting with those sediments those kind of Clays and shales will allow lithium to jump from those Clays and shells and into the pair of magma which will then become subsequently enriched with respect to lithium but these granites are also enriched with another broad Suite of elements like the ones here rubidium cesium Etc these are all kind of incompatible elements that behave in a similar way to lithium they typically form in late to post collisional tectonic settings and these granites typically are in place within the shallow to mid-crust in the green shift amphibolite fascies and that's useful as an exploration uh kind of implication um so the lithium gets uh essentially as I've already mentioned it's very incompatible it likes to stay in the magma for as long as long as it possibly can do and so we tend to get zoning around around these pigmentites and lithium tends to be sitting within the outer the outermost zones of these pigmentites and that's useful but it's also a challenge so it's useful because we can then begin to map distance to Granite as a useful expiration Vector but it's also a challenge because that lithium is sitting in the outermost area or zone of that Halo so it means that using um the those kind of alteration Halos as an exploration Vector can be quite challenging now it has been shown that these Halos do extend much further away from the granite than whether lithium is economically concentrated but we're really looking at Trace element compositions here and and it requires High sensitivity analysis to actually kind of look for these alteration Halos so a very challenging environment in which to explore for so that's kind of the most classic Model for lithium enrichment in pegmatites but recent work by Muller ital from the green pig project has actually argued for the potential for lithium to be unassociated to any kind of granite so in certain environments like sheer zones we can get pasture melting of the mid to lower crust or the mid-crust in particular where we get dehydration reactions from sediments like the muscovites and shells and things like that and that partial melting in itself can lead to the liberation of lithium into kind of an enigmatic partial melt so if that can accumulate within a Shear Zone we could actually get kind of economic concentrations of partial melt within that Shear Zone and it could be unrelated to a granite so the interesting example that they use is is Leinster paradoxically that is associated with a granite but some of the recent work has shown that the partial melts are most likely derived from sediments and then derived from the associated Granite now this is something that I don't have full Authority on so if there are people that disagree I'm happy for you to disagree with me on that um but I'll leave it at that but it's just intro interesting and important to bear in mind that we can actually get lithium concentrations unassociated with granite and it's really that process of partial melting is is the concentration Vector there so I'm going to briefly touch on lithium in Clays now these systems are really interesting they kind of span the gap between Hard Rock systems and brine systems we've already talked about some of the mechanisms behind lithium enrichment in brine systems being those ignum brights and once again igne brights are an interesting and important potential lithium Source in these in these environments so what we have here is a is a highly evolved rhyolytic melt similar to the ones we were talking about in the Andes but in this case we're looking for extremely large eruptions those kind of Caldera forming explosive eruptions such as the Yellowstone eruption for instance or maybe a little bit smaller of the Yellowstone but really big eruptions so we've got an evolved magma we blast a huge amount of material to the surface deposition of a huge amount of igne brights with glassy matrixes with lithium within the glass that lithium can then be remobilized and that Caldera setting is basically forming that Ender rate Basin that we were talking about earlier where water can drain into the Basin but it can't really drain out again so they get accumulation of lithium enriched Waters within that Basin setting and and it can accumulate and interact with the lake sediments we also have a really major component of contribution of magmatic fluids here as well so once that magma has erupted we get a kind of decompression within that magma chamber and that may lead to a lot of devolatalization of that magma and some of those fluids will travel along fractures and get into the shallow environment as well and so we're really thinking here about sediments that are interacting with the lithium and Rich Waters that water has lithium probably has a lot of silica and it's also quite hot and through those digenetic reactions that occur when we have a hot water within the sediment we begin to get reactions that are altering those Clays that are forming in the lake sediments into the kind of smack type formula of a hectorite so that's essentially the kind of reactions that are going on there and and that's really interesting to understand so in terms of how we explore for these things it's good to understand where the volcanic calderas are understanding their size and catchment can give you an understanding of what's the potential for lithium enrichment within that cold era understanding the composition of that magma was it an S-Type Granite because those are quite important with lithium enrichment and then the age of that Granite so is it is it of that kind of late to post um orogenic phase the Clays themselves they don't have a characteristic multi-spectral or hyperspectral signature but they're also quite obvious to spot from satellites because they're very bright white they tend to occur in kind of stratiform or at least lenticular bodies so once you find some of this kind of heterite clay you can look along a long strike and an attempt to find kind of larger proportions down uh down dip or for instance and as I've already mentioned this is a diagenetic reaction so it's it's kind of proximity to those paleo hydrothermal systems is really important uh and then I've kind of got this open question at the bottom how important is paleoclimate in these type of systems so as I've already just mentioned we have this Ender rate Basin type system we have lithium being mobilized from brines so is it important that we have um kind of that Arrow climate which is quite important in Cellar type systems or is it really just more about magmatic fluids being kind of driven off of these magma systems so I mean that's an open question really I don't think that there's any definitive answer there but I think it's an interesting question that's open so now I'm going to switch gears and start talking about brine type systems so firstly I'm going to talk about Sellers and paleo salars and here's in this example I'm going to start talking also about one of the projects that we've been doing at cgg so just to kind of re-summarize the the mineral system of of these Cellar type systems so we have lithium enriched rocks at only the Earth's surface these are typically glassy ignor brights and by weathering and reacting with those ignium brights Waters can dissolve lithium out of those out of those rocks and transport it along the Earth's surface they then accumulate within those end array basins and through evaporation we get enrichment of the of lithium in the residual fluids and we also have important contributions from those Hot Springs so cgg determined that this would be a really interesting kind of case study to use satellite derived techniques for Target generation and in this study we're particularly focused on Paleo salars so we've got that interesting point of view that we know where all of the modern day sellers are they're obvious and they're at the Earth's surface but what about those satellites that were forming in geological periods of time in the past um those ones that could potentially be shallowly buried and potentially still accessible but we just can't see them at the Earth's surface so we derived some satellite techniques in order to help us explore for lithium in this area that we know that we know of as the lithium triangle or the greater lithium Crescent so on this figure on the right the lithium triangle is shown in pink and it's defined by three major Salas we've got the salad a uni that's number three on the top of the figure we have number 12 here which is the Salada Atacama that's probably the biggest lithium resource that we know of and we have salad onboy muerto here in Northwestern Argentina number 43. and that defines the lithium triangle but if you look at this figure you'll see that the majority of the sellers actually sit outside of the lithium triangle and we have a few smaller ones inside the of the lithium triangle there's a huge amount of potential for Cellar formation in this region and then it's just about understanding the mineral system in order to explore for it the benefits other benefits in this region for using satellites are it's a very arid region so we don't have much cloud cover and we also don't have much vegetation and that's really ideal when you're looking um when you're using satellite derived techniques [Music] um so in order to start our exploration efforts here and this is um work done by the satellite mapping team at cgg and all of this data is available on subscription basis if you're interested just give me an email so the first challenge what we realized is that this area spans three different countries we've got Southwestern Bolivia Northern Chile and Northwestern Argentina and all of these different countries have geological maps that have different symbology they're presented at different scales and the boundaries rarely line up if ever and so that's a real challenge if you're exploring across borders so what cgg have done is create a unified geological map over this area of Interest where the geological symbology and the geological units are all unified and that's really beneficial when you're looking at areas that could be across the border for instance also brought together a range of other layers that have been derived from satellites so we have a bare Earth model in the visible light spectrum derived from Sentinel 2. we also have a multi-spectral bare Earth model which is derived from The Astor satellite and that's useful for looking at Mineral signatures outside of the visible light spectrum and then using digital elevation models and in-house processing we've created derivatives that help us understand the river flow pass and drainage catchments within this area so that's shown in the central figure here we've also brought together some important geological layers so in this figure here in red we've got the distribution of modern of salars at the modern day and this is important because this is considered to be our lithium Source in this case study and then we also have the distribution of the modern cell are shown in blue and then the final piece of the puzzle is another derivative from the digital elevation models and this is a flat area analysis so what we're doing here is analyzing the slope in any one area and where it's flat you're in that is indicated by blue red and yellow stippling so the error that I'm circling with my mouse I hope you can see that is the salad Atacama that we've talked about a few times already and you can see that it's very well defined by a flat area so this indicates that these flat areas are generally good areas for water to accumulate um I'm now going to show you how we put this all into practice by using a case study in Northwestern Argentina so this is an area Northwestern Argentina this is a Google Earth image and of its exaggerated the uh topography by three times just to help you to help emphasize the points so we can map our drainage catchments here shown in red we can also map the distribution of the igne bright shown in Orange and that's our potential lithium source and then we can map our flow paths and we can see that many of these flow paths intercept the igneum bright so that's quite beneficial in understanding how we liberate that lithium and then we can map the flat area which is shown in light blue in the center of the catchment so that's where our Waters could be accumulating obviously you can see that at the modern day most of this area is covered by gravels so that there's not much indication of there actually being a Cellar there but we can predict that there could well be a salar there and we can validate this approach because we have two Junior companies sat working in this area already we have NRG Metals working in the north and we have Lake resources working in the South and to give you an idea for the uh the size of the prize here this green polygon is a jaw compliant resource of four million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent that they've defined within this area and Lake are also looking to expand that by 10 million tons to further expiration so a really significant resource has been discovered in this area and and that was all done um by this company but we can also validate and do that again using our own in-house data so now I'm going to switch gears once more and talk about unconventional lithium brine extraction so my colleague the other day asked me does this have anything to do with unconventional hydrocarbons no it doesn't have anything to do with unconventional hydrocarbons this is a completely different topic and it's just a very a broad range of different types of lithium brines that aren't very well geologically characterized we just have we just tend to be finding more and more different areas where lithium occurs in solution so as I've just mentioned it they occur in a diverse range of geological settings and that's a challenge because it's hard to actually prescribe a kind of deposit model to these types of lithium brines but if you take a kind of holistic or a mineral systems point of view an approach to this kind of expiration and there is potential for a lot of success and Discovery so understanding the sources the traps the pathways and the concentration factors is really important so as I've already mentioned there's a lot of potential lithium sources that we could think about often igne brights are really crucial or granites because they have high lithium content to begin with evaporation can be a keep a key factor in in concentrating these fluids and also a key thing that is often not considered in other types of mineral system is the dilution of the fluid so um you can have a lithium enriched water but if it has potential to interact with a meteoric water uh within within an aquifer system then that lithium could be easily diluted to sub-economic grades also within that kind of economic play we have to think about the opportunities for co-production of other resources so it's been proven that we can easily get silica out of these fluids it's also been shown that we can get zinc out of some of these fluids and there are other potential elements that we could get out like Rare Earth elements for instance sometimes gold is considered and silver um so if we can get other fluid other elements out of these fluids there's potential for kind of a double payoff and also in that kind of double payoff regime is the potential to get geothermal energy out of these fluids and that's often considered a major resource in these fluids is that it's the geothermal resource and then lithium might be a beneficial byproduct or vice versa lithium might be the primary byproduct and geothermal energy might be just a beneficial side side product but alongside um the chemistry of all these beneficial elements that we might want to get out of these fluids we can also find that some of these fluids have deleterious or penalty elements in them so fluorine bromine hydrogen sulfide can be in these fluids and these are all really important technical considerations for a range of reasons and even silica can be a major technical consideration because if you have too much total dissolved solids and too much silica within the fluid that can begin to precipitate out when you start pumping that water to the surface and that can block up your system and then some of these elements are major public health concerns for instance so understanding what's in the fluid before you pump it to the surface is really crucial uh and it's crucial for a number of reasons so this this figure uh this slide summarizes the different types of direct lithium extraction technologies that I was talking about earlier so when we talk about direct lithium extraction we're actually referring to a range of different potential technologies that are on the market so we have iron exchange resins sorbents solvent separation methods semi-permeable membranes and electrocom electrochemical methods of extracting lithium from these fluids all of these different technologies have different sensitivities to the physical and chemical properties of the fluids so some of these technologies will only work on a low temperature fluid or they might work on a high temperature fluid and not a low temperature fluid some of these Technologies get clogged up if the water is too mineral Rich so you can only have um if it'll be ideal to have as as the ratio of lithium to other dissolved solids within the fluid to be as high as it possibly can be and then other Technologies still are really sensitive to pH so you really do need to have a comprehensive understanding of the physical and chemical properties of these fluids if you're ever going to be able to economically and feasibly extract the lithium from from some of these fluids so um ctg took on board all of this information and decided to create a screening tool that helps in that in that challenge so um this screening tool is a global screening tool derived from publicly available and in-house cgg data sets which summarizes the global water chemistry that's available today along with some accessory data sets such as the Hard Rock geochemistry which is really useful in understanding Source drop potential for lithium Within These environments and we've also brought together flow rates and production vectors for geothermal energy and also accurately located um position of the active and inactive geothermal plants that are available today or are kind of have been manufactured and that's interesting in understanding potential opportunities for joint ventures and re-harnessing of old infrastructure so this screening tool helps us in interrogating the full chemistry of a brine so the pH temperature flow rate and all of the kind of chemical composition of that bride and what I what I find is exciting about this product is that one company will come to a different conclusion to another company about what the perfect brine is depending on what their objectives are so if their objectives are to find a hot water that they can get lithium out of as a byproduct they'll conclude that one area of the world is the perfect place to go whereas if another company just wants to find as much lithium as they possibly can do and they don't care if the water's hot or not then they'll probably go to a different part of the world so each company will come to different conclusion based on the same data set which makes it very valuable so I'm just going to close off now with a few kind of remarks on oil field brines this is an environment that's pretty interesting it's probably one of the least well-known or least well understood systems in terms of lithium brines so as I've mentioned we find lithium brines associated with some oil fields but not all oil fields so some oil fields are considered to be Barren with respect to lithium brines whereas whereas others are not so understanding what are the potential sources of that lithium is really important I've already told you that lithium in brine has a long resonance time and it can sit within an aquifer for as long as that aquifer is a good is a good trap for that brine um so we've had a lot of our um there's a lot of discussion in the literature about what could be the potential lithium sources so it's often observed that when we have lithium enrichment within the brine it's often underlained by a large evaporite and I think that's a big kind of Smoking Gun here so we have that evaporite and evaporates form in those arid environments that we were describing earlier with respect to Salah type systems but in terms of how that lithium is actually kind of captured and stored that's not so well understood does it just sit within a brine for a long period of time for like the whole time of that geological history or is it trapped within minerals is it trapped within you know Trace elements in in Gypsum for instance and then it kind of gets dissolved out again and then gets remobilized up into the overline geological layers that's a potential opportunity there's also possibly um it's also possible that that lithium comes from an external source so maybe it's related to a pegmatite or an evening bright host Rock and then that water gets kind of mobilized and and ends up in the basin and then others still have argued that it could be lithium derived from that metamorphic breakdown of minerals um in in that high in in high temperature kind of metamorphic environments and that lithium could just be one of the first things to jump out of that fluid because it's so incompatible uh and really we wouldn't be having this discussion today without the uh emergence of all these direct lithium extraction Technologies because this is really what's making this a potentially Economic Opportunity so I'm just going to show you one case study of where we have an example of one kind of potentially ideal lithium enrich brine sat within a geological basin so we're talking about the Gulf of Mexico here and and what has been observed is that we have lithium enrichment in The Brines associated with a specific formation of of the Basin so interestingly it's just kind of the the smack or the smack over formation which is quite a low uh low-lying geological formation within the Basin that has those lithium enrichment values and we do observe Brian sitting in the overlying region as well but those brines are typically very low with respect to lithium enrichment so typically less than 60 milligrams per liter so there's an interesting Paradigm there that we need to investigate is why is it that lithium is only enriched within the Smackover formation and nothing rich with the within the overlying waters and so we've put some thought into this and and kind of used our oil and gas background to put some principles down to understand why that lithium might be enriched only within the Smackover so the Smackover itself is a very good aquifer it's actually often an aquifer where we extract oil and gas hydrocarbons um it's 300 meters thick and composed of limestone with a good permeability and porosity and we find those brines in kind of pockets in in this Smackover formation the overlying rocks are the Hainesville and the Haynesville and Bossier shells which are very low permeability and actually act as a very effective cap Rock in this environment so we have that cap Rock sitting immediately overlying the smack over formation and then closely underlying the Smackover formation is the Luanne salt that we were discussing earlier this massively thick 1.5 kilometer thick evaporite sequence underlying the Smackover and as I was arguing earlier that kind of evaporative environment is probably really good for um kind of progressive enrichment of lithium within any primordial brine sat within that salt area salt environment and really that just needs to be able to get up into the Smackover formation and accumulate there so we have our source we have our pathway and sync and then we have our trap as well so a really interesting kind of self-contained system there that quite nicely explains why lithium could be getting into the Smackover formation and then not mixing with all of that low low-grade lithium brine associated with those overlying geological units so that's kind of summarized here we've got a nice Source in in the potential in the in the Luanne salt um but what is the actual ultimate source of that of that lithium and how is it stored those are kind of open questions that we need to dig more into the aquifer quality seems to be really crucial in this example so we've got a nice permeable aquifer and that's also overlaying by a very good quality Trap Rock so these are quite kind of Base principal hydrocarbon principles that we can apply to this lithium system which is really interesting and exciting so that basically wraps up my presentation I'm just going to leave with a few conclusions really so I mean this is an exciting place to be exploration is ramping up rapidly in this in the lithium sector and we're really going to need to discover new Hard Rock soft rock and brine resources if we're going to meet the demands required for the energy transition I find that the Brian hosted systems are the most interesting and exciting right now and they have a interesting potential for kind of energy uh for carbon neutrality or even carbon negativity in times for be able to produce lithium and energy at the same time which is really interesting and also production of other uh minerals as well can also help in the economic uh argument there um yeah and really just the final point is just sums it up nicely we're going to have to innovate and explore in new ways if we're going to meet the demand for lithium so yeah I'll leave it at that those are the references feel free to screenshot that uh on YouTube or whatever later on but thank you very much for your attention and I'm happy to take any questions now foreign