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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Thursday was a weak 65-110-135 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell four points to 550. Simon Clarke's American Lithium Corp. (LI) lost two cents to $1.54 on 350,000 shares. The company has updated its preliminary economic assessment of the Falchani lithium project in southwestern Peru. The update follows an October resource update, which listed 447 million tonnes measured and indicated at 2,327 parts per million lithium and another 506 million tonnes inferred at 1,481 ppm -- a total of 9.5 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent.

The plan adopts a staged approach, starting with a 4,200-tonne-per-day operation to start but doubling in the sixth year and doubling again five years later, achieving at least 17,000 tonnes per day for the next two decades. (With a further decade of processing stockpiles, Falchani has a projected life of 43 years.) All this constructing and expanding carries a hefty cost to be sure -- $681-million (U.S.) to reach production, another $573-million (U.S.) for the first expansion and a whopping $1.27-billion (U.S.) for the second.

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