TSX VENTURE: SLL
www.standardlithium.com
Mr. Robert Mintak reports:
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 30, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Standard Lithium Ltd. ("Standard Lithium" or the "Company") (TSX-V:SLL) (OTCQX:STLHF) (FRA:S5L) is pleased to announce that the Company has commenced detailed resource definition work at its recently optioned 33,000 acres of brine leases, located in a highly prospective area of the Smackover Formation in Southern Arkansas, USA. This work integrates collection of new data from current well infrastructure, with a large amount of already-available, high quality, geological, geophysical and geochemical data.
The lease area has been historically drilled for oil and gas exploration, and approximately 256 exploration and production wells have been completed in the Smackover Formation in or immediately adjacent to Standard's new lease area (almost 3,000 wells have been drilled in southern Arkansas and provide excellent data to support interpretation in Standard's lease zone). All of these 256 wells have geological logs, and all can be used to constrain the top of the Smackover Formation's brine-bearing zone. In addition, a sub-set of 30 wells has full core reports that provide detailed data, and downhole geophysical logs that include formation resistivity and porosity data. A further sub-set of 15 wells also has full core samples available from the Smackover Formation, these cores (available from the Arkansas Geological Survey core library) can be sent for additional laboratory testing to further refine porosity estimates for the Smackover resource zone in Standard's lease area.
In addition, Standard Lithium has retained Shreveport, Louisiana based Hill Geophysical Consulting to provide key geological interpretation of the lease area. The Principal, Kevin Hill, has several decades of experience gathering and interpreting geophysical data from the Southern Arkansas area, and has been instrumental in identifying structures, lithological/porosity variations and new resource zones in the Smackover Formation throughout Standard's area of interest. Of key importance is that Hill Geophysical have licensed access to over 320 km (200 miles) of high resolution 2D-seismic line data that have been collected in Standard Lithium's new lease area, and these lines fully image the total thickness of the Smackover Formation and fine-scale structures and lithology variations that are present therein. Hill Geophysical Consulting is in the process of integrating the 256 well logs from the lease area into the 2D-seismic data, and is working towards producing a 3D-block model of the Smackover Formation underlying Standard's leases.
Standard is also in advanced discussions with oil and gas producers with open, unused Smackover wells in and immediately adjacent to the new lease area to gather new, high quality lithium brine samples from the key brine production zones in the Smackover Formation. The new samples will supplement the extensive historical geochemical brine data available from the area of interest.
President and Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Andy Robinson commented, "One of the reasons that the Company aggressively pursued this lease package in the Smackover Formation was because we knew that not only was there was a wealth of high quality data already available to define the resource, but also several key professionals who could help us integrate and interpret those data. We're now at the point where we can very quickly work through the resource assessment process and identify where we need to collect any additional data to ensure a robust and comprehensive understanding of the lithium brine resource potential. Execution of this very fast resource assessment process is part of Standard's corporate strategy to move large potential resources as quickly towards production as we can."
Quality Assurance
Raymond Spanjers, Certified Professional Geologist (SME No. 3041730), is a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, and has supervised the preparation of the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for this news release. Mr. Spanjers is not independent of the Company as he is an officer in his role as Vice President, Exploration and Development.