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Atacama acquires major new potash project in Brazil

[2008-7-18]

Potash is basically potassium chloride, an essential plantnutrient, currently in high demand as an agricultural fertilizer.Recent world-wide demand has been accelerated by the need forfertilizers in countries such as China, India and Brazil. Priceshave increased from $200/tonne CFR Brazil in 2006 to current levelsof $1,000/tonne CRF Brazil.
The Reconcavo Basin is a large rift basin extending 600 kilometersin length by 100 kilometers in width. It is one of the importantoil and gas producing areas of Brazil with several existing fieldscurrently producing a total of approximately 50,000 barrels of oilper day. The evaporite section of interest within the ReconcavoBasin containing the potash and halite salt beds overliescrystalline PreCambrian basement which lends itself tointerpretation of depth and configuration using seismic and gravitymethods.
Ghignone and Assis state: "The halite salt beds of the MatarandibaMember were discovered in 1964-65 with the drilling of anexploration well (IDM-1, Matarandiba Island) by the Brazilianstate-owned petroleum company, Petrobras. This well encountered thehalite salt beds at a depth of 1,110 meters. In 1969, Mineracao eQuimica do Nordeste S/A (Mining and Chemical Company of theNortheast) was organized with the specific objective ofinvestigating the salt section encountered earlier. Two exploratorywells were drilled on the small island of Matarandiba, MQ-2 andMQ-3, ncountering 32.5 meters and 44 meters thickness,respectively, of vertically continuous, high-grade halite salt".These holes formed the basis for subsequent commercial halite saltdevelopment using solution mining methods. Nine meters of potashconsisting of sylvite and sylvinite interbedded with halite saltwere subsequently described by Coutinho and Fernandes in drill holeMQ-3.

The halite salt bed is currently exploited by solution mining onthe island of Matarandiba with the recovered saturated brine sentby a 51 kilometer pipeline across the Bay of Todos os Santos to aprocessing plant near the port city of Salvador. Chlorine andsodium hydroxide have been produced by a division of Dow Chemicalfor more than thirty years.

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