Exploration and development company American Battery Metals has renewed its 1 300 claims with the Bureau of Land Management, covering 10 500 ha in Railroad Valley, Nevada.

CEO Doug Cole said on Monday that the move highlighted American Battery’s positive momentum.

“We know the United States must break free from our reliance on foreign sources of critical minerals and we are committed to working with our partners and competitors alike to make that a near term reality,” he commented in a media statement.

For its exploration and mining programmes, American Battery is pursuing additional claims in Railroad Valley, including the potential acquisition of distressed assets statewide, Cole noted.

But American Battery’s focus is not only land positions, but also on vertical integration with development plans for extraction and battery recycling technologies.

The junior recently opened another office in Tonopah, and a full scale laboratory in Virginia City.

“We are developing distinct, yet logically interconnected verticals, each of which is self-sustaining and capable of feeding an insatiably hungry supply chain,” commented head of business development Doug Nickle.

American Battery is advancing two battery metals projects: the Temple Mountain vanadium project in Utah and the Fish Lake Valley lithium project in Nevada.

The historic Temple Mountain vanadium project has seen intermittent production dating back to 1914 and 3.8-million pounds of vanadium oxide and 1.3-million pounds of uranium were shipped as part of the Manhattan project in the 1940s.

A 2019 work programme of drilling, geophysics, mapping and sampling will follow-up on historical assays, which ranged as high as 4.97% vanadium oxide, as well as exploring around the numerous historical mine workings.

The Fish Lake project is an early-stage exploration project targeting the same geologic structures that are host to ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge project. Rhyolite Ridge is host to a 4.1-million-tonne lithium carbonate resource with a prefeasibility study demonstrating a long-life, high-margin production profile.