AIS Resources is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange and has been around since 1967. They have a lithium brine project in Argentina. Chairman Martyn Element and COO Phil Thomas spoke to Proactive at Mines and Money 2016 in London.

Element says: ”AIS Resources is actually an investment issuer … which is a micro merchant bank. It just means that we have the breadth and width to be able to do any deal in any sector and there’s not many of them – it’s quite an unusual vehicle. We have another asset in the company but our main one is the lithium project  that we are currently involved with”.

”It was done very purposefully. We got into the lithium project about 5 or 6 months ago and it became evident very quickly that to mean something in this space you have to be in Argentina … but if you’re going to be in Argentina you need to have people around you that are very, very technically minded. On the TSXV there might be 95  lithium or lithium-related companies and in my professional opinion only about 5 or 6 are going to make their mark. The fall down we believe is on the technical side and we believe as a company  we have the best technical team, even though we’re still a very low cap, in the country.”

Thomas adds: ”This is my third project, so it’s not like I haven’t done it before. The production process follows an extensive exploration process so at the moment, this week actually, we’re trenching, we’ll be taking samples of brine, we’ll create lithium isobars so we know on the surface where the lithium is occurring. Then we’ll go down and start drilling  and doing some seismic”.

”We’re looking at the end of 2018, early 2019 to ship our first load of lithium carbonate and hopefully lithium hydroxide.”