Great Southern Copper plc announced that it has consolidated its concession area in the Salar de Atacama district of Chile, which hosts the world's largest reserves of lithium. Next steps: Over the coming months, GSC will conduct due diligence on the project and prepare plans for its exploration programmes; Work will include reconnaissance field trips to undertake surface sampling and mapping programmes. Monti Lithium Project: On 20 September 2023, GSC announced that it had executed an Option Agreement allowing the Company to earn 100% of the Monti Lithium Project in Chile1 comprising 81 exploration concessions covering a total area of 23,500 ha (235 km2) located in the Salar de Atacama district, Chile's largest lithium-brine production region.

The Company has since filed a further 33 exploration concessions bringing the total project area to 33,100 ha (331 km2) representing a 40% increase in the project area. Further to these new filings preliminary reconnaissance exploration of the Monti Lithium Project may commence. The Salar de Atacama basin comprises an extensional depression controlled by first-order normal faulting within a more extensive N-S trending Preandean rift system.

The geometry of the basin is interpreted to have resulted from to the interaction of crustal-scale, N-S trending, normal faults and conjugate northeast and southeast-trending structures. The same structural trends also appear significant for the control on emplacement of porphyry copper deposits - e.g., Chuquicumata, Spence, Gabi, Escondida - located within the Preandean Cordillera de Domeyko volcanic domain west of the depressional divide. GSC has aimed to strategically locate its exploration concessions coincident with interpreted major structures and basinal in-flow zones.

The Salar de Atacama is a Tier 1 lithium production region with estimated pre-mine resources greater than 6.0 Mt Li3. Lithium is hosted in subterranean brine solutions which are pumped to the surface, where the lithium is extracted via evaporation processes producing a lithium carbonate (LiCO3) concentrate product. By products of the lithium concentration process include potassium chloride and potassium sulphate, which are used to manufacture fertilizer materials4, and bromine products.

Lithium production in Chile: Chile is currently the world's second largest producer of lithium after Australia6. Unlike Australia where lithium is recovered from spodumene-rich pegmatites, lithium in Chile is recovered from salt brine solutions located within and beneath high-altitude geographic depressions known as "salars" or salt lakes. In the Andean region of South America, lithium-rich salars occur in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile within a region known as "the Lithium Triangle".

Total reserves and resources of lithium calculated in Chile are estimated at 14.3 Mt Li7 with the Salar de Atacama being the largest lithium producing salar. The Chilean government recognises the strategic importance of lithium to the country's economy and has recently moved to implement a new production model whereby companies wishing to extract and produce lithium are required to enter into contracts (CEOLs) with the State, negotiating with government companies Codelco or ENAMI8. Codelco is Chile's state-owned copper mining company and is one of the largest copper producers globally.

ENAMI is also a state-owned copper and gold-silver processing company mandated to purchase and process ores from medium and small-scale copper and gold miners across Chile. Improvements in extraction technologies are also incorporated in the new model to address environmental concerns relating to the impact of evaporation processing on existing water tables beneath the salars.