Former SQM Superintendent to drive Galan lithium chase

Galan Lithium has appointed former SQM Hydrogeology Superintendent Alvaro Henríquez as its new Exploration Manager. Henríquez will be responsible for ramping up the company’s exploration and development efforts at its battery metal projects in Australia and Argentina. He has more than two decades’ experience in the mining sector.

Galan’s new exploration boss has held leadership positions at a number of global miners and held the operational reigns at SQM’s Salar de Atacama lithium and potash brine operation in Chile, where he was in charge of the company’s mining plans and spent more than a decade at the firm.

Henríquez also played an integral role in the execution of hydrogeological exploration campaigns and firmed up SQM’s conceptual and numerical hydrogeological modelling programs.

SQM is one of the world’s largest lithium producers and pumped out close to 110 thousand metric tonnes of lithium carbonate at Salar de Atacama between 2011 to 2021.

Curiously, it is not Henríquez’s first time at Galan, he played a crucial role in the company’s exploration and resource development efforts at its flagship Hombre Muerto West, or “HMW” lithium project in Argentina during his time as a consultant with WSP Golder Chile.

Galan Lithium’s Managing Director, Juan Pablo Vargas de la Vega, said: “The value of Alvaro’s vast exploration and operational hydrogeology experience cannot be overestimated. He is an invaluable addition to the Galan team as we continue to advance our lithium project portfolio towards development and operation. Alvaro’s decision to join Galan on this journey to becoming a significant South American lithium producer also represents a further endorsement of the technical and commercial integrity of our world-class projects.”

According to Galan, HMW currently has a lithium-equivalent resource that runs more than 2 million tonnes.

The company is working towards a definitive feasibility study at the operation and recently tabled an “outstanding” set of well results from an initial pumping test that underlined HMW’s potential with a solid set of grades, porosity ratios and flow rates.

Galan says HMW is among the best brine projects in the world and is a stone's throw away from NYSE-listed Livent Corporation’s tenement boundary.

Livent boasts over a 25 years of lithium production and is one of many battery metal players to have pegged ground within a 20km radius of HMW.

Closer to its Perth home base, Galan appears to have its foot on a raft of hard rock lithium targets at its Greenbushes South project in WA after launching airborne geophysical work.

Early last year, the company agreed to form a joint venture with the original owners of the ground, Lithium Australia NL, keeping hold of 80 per of the operation.

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