New CIM NI 43-101 lithium reserve estimation guideline falls short

TRU Group Inc, Tucson USA, Toronto ON, November 26, 2012 - Lithium consultants TRU Group Inc says that the “Best Practice Guidelines” for Lithium Brine reserve estimation are deficient and could lead to substantial overestimation of lithium resources, if applied. The guidelines recommend a manner for estimating brine resources and reserves that would include both potential brine producing aquifers with extractable lithium along with associated low permeability sediments, which may contain brine that is not extractable by economic means. Such sediments should be excluded from any resource estimate. 

The “CIM Best Practice Guidelines for Resource and Reserve Estimation for Lithium Brines” was published November 1, 2012. Dr Kunasz will present his review of brine guidelines and make recommendations for lithium resource definition at the IM Lithium Supply & Markets conference January 29, 2013. 

Ihor Kunasz Ph.D (Geol), P.Geol, is well known as the geologist who developed the original reserve model for the very first lithium brine deposit at Silver Peak, Nevada and defined the lithium resources for the Salar de Atacama deposit from whence sixty per cent of the world’s lithium is currently produced. He developed the original resource and production feasibility study for the Chemetall-SCL - CORFO (Chilean Development Corporation) Joint venture. His full presentation "Lithium reserve estimation Best Practise Pitfalls - common errors found in NI 43-101 reports" will be available on the TRU website late January 2013. 

TRU Group Inc is technical engineering consultants with a strong capability in lithium. The firm is a world leader in lithium resource evaluation & exploitation, lithium extraction processing technologies and lithium chemical engineering. TRU has evaluated and modelled most of the known existing lithium properties and advised a number of players on a wide variety of lithium resource, engineering, process, business and investment issues. 

The TRU website is trugroup.com and the presentations can be viewed at the link trugroup.com/Lithium-Market-Conference.shtml