Macallan East Project
Nevada, USA | 5,340 Acres
Project Summary
Macallan East is an early-stage lithium project, spanning across 267 placer claims, totalling 5,340 acres, and is located on the southeast side of southern Clayton Valley. Clayton Valley hosts the only producing lithium operation in North America, Albemarle’s Silver Peak. Throughout the years, Clayton Valley has been the location for considerable exploration success.
Clayton Valley has an enormous measured and inferred endowment of lithium and is rapidly emerging as one of the world’s largest concentrations of lithium.
Project Highlights
4,260 Acres
100% Ownership
Significant Existing Infrastructure
4 hour drive to the Teslas Gigafactory
Located in Mining friendly Nevada, USA
MaCallan East is located 180 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The regional gold mining town of Tonopah is about 35 miles northeast of the project.The property can be accessed by paved roads from Tonopah and Goldfield as well by the paved state route 265 through Silverpeak.
The Macallan claim block is located just 10 kilometers from the only active lithium production facility in the US, operated by Albemarle. In addition, MaCallan East also borders Pure Energy’s Clayton Valley property and lies beneath both Cypress Development Corp and Noram Ventures Inc’s lithium projects. Pure Energy recently announced its first lithium extraction pilot plant with Schlumberger New Energy, while. Noram Ventures currently is working on its fifth round of drilling and has announced a resource of 300 million tonnes of >900 ppm Lithium.
Cypress Development Corp has already completed a Preliminary Feasibility Study and their open pit design and mining plan project a 40-year mine life, at a minimum and have also just closed a $23 million dollar bought deal financing.
Clayton Valley is a lithium brine and claystone district hosted within the Esmeralda Formation, a sequence of lake basin-fill rocks that contain zones of volcanic ash-rich stratigraphy and salty evaporite units.
Esmeralda Formation sedimentary rocks exposed at the surface in the basin are dominantly volcanic ash-rich mudstones, claystone with rare salt breccia evaporite units. The presence of sandy, volcanic ash units within these rocks provides the host for lithium brine accumulation due to very high porosity.
Clayton valley contains a thick section of lake-bed sedimentary rock units that were deposited within paleo lake Esmeralda, a closed basin of late Miocene to recent age. Active faulting continues to down drop the basin against the basement rocks of the surrounding mountain ranges.
The term “closed basin” refers to the nature of the basin in that water enters the basin from precipitation on the surrounding mountains. The waters are trapped in the basin as no rivers exit the basin, thus it is “closed”. Evaporation from the basin over millions of years has concentrated lithium and other salts within groundwater and basin filling, volcanic ash-rich sediments creating a world-class lithium concentration in the Clayton Valley.
The Macallan Lithium Project is located in the Great Basin physiographic region and more precisely within the Walker Lane province of the western Great Basin. The mapped, surficial rock units covering the Macallan placer claims are also widespread to the north-northeast of the property where they occur as thin cover units lying directly on lithium mineralized lake bed sedimentary rocks. The oldest of these cover units is denoted as gravel unit Q2a, described as being of middle to late Pleistocene age. The age of this unit indicates that it lies stratigraphically directly above the brine target lake bed sedimentary and evaporite rocks targeted in the subsurface at Macallan. Clayton Valley is a flat-bottomed salt basin that is surrounded by a complex pattern of mountain ranges. Broad, low passes lead into the basin from the north and east (paved access). On the Macallan project itself, the terrain is dominated by flats and shallow gullies cut into indurated gravels of the Pleistocene age.
Scotch Creek Ventures Macallan claim block sits directly on trend with outcropping, lithium mineralized, volcanic ash-rich, basin lake bed sedimentary rocks which project towards the project area from the NNE. The projected presence of these mineralized units in the subsurface at Macallan strongly suggests that porous ash units, associated with these rocks elsewhere in the basin, should exist below the surface on the claims.
The Clayton Valley’s basin has collected, retained, and concentrated lithium for several million years, both into mineral brines and also stored within the upper section of lake bed mudstones, claystone, and evaporite rocks that in outcrop and in the subsurface along the eastern edge of the Clayton playa. This pile of mudstones is evidence of a significant brine lake that existed in the basin prior to final evaporation in the last 10,000 years. Both the lithium brines and lithium mudstones result from the evaporative concentration of lithium within a lake that is now gone.
The position of known brine and mudstone lithium resources shows that the margins of the basin are the preferential areas for lithium concentration in the Clayton Valley. The Macallan Lithium Project is located along a key portion of the eastern margin of the basin.
Scotch Creek has contracted Hasbrouck Geophysics, Inc. who has now completed a Hybrid-Source Audio-Magnetotellurics (HSAMT) Survey, Gravity Survey and Seismic Survey on the company’s 5,340 acre Macallan Clayton Valley lithium Project. Scotch Creek has also completed a exploratory drill hole, approximately 500 meters in depth which was executed by Harris Exploration Drilling and Associates Inc.
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