Mining Intelligence

In Argentina there are mineral rights and surface rights. The provinces control the former and local communities generally own the latter. A miner needs the mineral rights to extract from them and the surface rights to build on them. Typically, you try to buy the surface rights to coincide with your mineral rights. These transactions are with the local communities for the use of the land at the surface and infrastructure built upon it. For salar deposits, there's simply not much else they are useful for, so usually this is just a matter of course. That is all to say simply that surface rights generally coincide with mineral rights. Operation Landlock Lithium Americas' (LAC) acquisition of Millennial Lithium included a good chunk of land with Cauchari East, but it didn't look very promising from a resource expansion perspective. When I looked closer, it turned out there was probably something else of value here. The claim map in Cauchari-Olaroz (C-O) is a mess, holes...