Business
Westwater Resources Granted Water Rights for its Sal Rica Project in Utah
CENTENNIAL, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Westwater Resources, Inc. (Nasdaq: WWR), an energy metals exploration and development company, is pleased to announce that i
About this update from Westwater Resources, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"CENTENNIAL, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Westwater Resources, Inc. (Nasdaq: WWR), an energy metals exploration and development company, is pleased to announce that its application for the use of 1500 acre-feet of groundwater per year has been approved by the Department of Natural Resources of the State of Utah. This water is intended for the development of lithium mining operations at the Company’s Sal Rica Project. Christopher M. Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer, said, “Water rights are critical to the development of lithium brine properties. Utah’s grant of water rights enables us to extract the lithium bearing brines from underground. We believe that owning the right to use the groundwater materially differentiates our exploration projects from others in the area going forward.” The right to use water is very important in the arid American West, and this right is essential to the development of lithium brine resources at the Sal Rica project. Utah has a robust legal regime for allocating the right to use water, and Westwater carefully followed the regulatory process to secure the groundwater required to develop lithium resources discovered in the basin. About Sal Rica Westwater’s Sal Rica lithium brine exploration project is located in the Pilot Valley area, approximately 100 miles west of Salt Lake City, and 25 miles north of the town of Wendover. Historical exploration by Quintana Petroleum and more recent exploration by Mesa Exploration partially outlined a broad area of the Pilot Valley (up to 20 square miles) in which very shallow brines (less than 20 feet from the surface) are mineralized with lithium up to 81 parts per million. Sample spacing for the Quintana and Mesa sampling was on the order of 1 to 2 miles. Subsequent in-fill and confirmation sampling by Westwater returned lithium values ranging from 40 to 100 ppm Li in thirteen of the fourteen samples, as analyzed by ALS Minerals, a well-regarded independent commercial analytical laboratory. About Westwater Resources WWR is focused on developing energy-related materials. The Company’s battery-materials projects include the Coosa Graphite Project — the most advanced natural flake graphite project in the contiguous United States — and the associated Coosa Graphite Mine located across 41,900 acres (~17,000 hectares) in east-central Alabama. In addition, the Com...