Falchani Pilot Plant Beats Its PEA Recovery at 88.7%

American Lithium Corp. (TSXV: LI; OTCQX: AMLIF) said its Falchani pilot plant in Lima, Peru is fully installed and operating, with semi-continuous bench runs on pilot equipment averaging 88.7% lithium extraction against the 80.0% recovery assumed in the February 2024 preliminary economic assessment.

American Lithium Corp. (TSXV: LI; OTCQX: AMLIF; Frankfurt: 5LA1) has reached the point at its Falchani lithium project where the chemistry stops being a laboratory argument and starts being an engineering one. The company said every system in its pilot plant — being advanced by TECMMINE in Lima, Peru — is now installed and operating as expected, and that the most recent bench test work run on that pilot equipment, in a semi-continuous process, averaged 88.7% lithium extraction, within a range of 88.0% to 89.9%.

That number matters because of the one it is being compared against. The February 2024 preliminary economic assessment for Falchani was built on an 80.0% recovery assumption. The bench results sit 8.7 percentage points above it — roughly a 10.9% relative improvement in the share of contained lithium the flowsheet pulls out of the rock, on an illustrative basis using the two stated figures.

Why a recovery rate moves the economics more than it looks like it should

Recovery is the fraction of lithium in the feed that ends up in a saleable product rather than in the tailings. In a hard-rock or, as at Falchani, a lithium-bearing tuff operation, the mine, the crushing circuit, the reagent handling and the labor bill are largely fixed by how many tonnes you put through the plant. If a higher share of the lithium in those same tonnes survives the flowsheet, the extra output arrives against a cost base that has barely moved.

That is the leverage investors are pricing when a developer reports a recovery beat. It flows into revenue per tonne processed, and it flows into unit operating cost per tonne of lithium product — the two lines that do most of the work in any net present value calculation. The company has been explicit that pilot plant results will feed into future project studies, which is the formal route by which an operating result replaces a modelled assumption.

The caveat is equally important, and American Lithium has framed it plainly: 88.7% came from bench-scale work, even though it used pilot plant equipment in a semi-continuous mode. Bench results are not the same as a plant running continuously at design rates for weeks on end, where residence times, recycle streams, impurity build-up and reagent consumption all behave differently. That is exactly the gap the next phase is meant to close.

What the three-month continuous campaign has to prove

With all flowsheet equipment installed and tested, the company said it is advancing toward full end-to-end validation at scale in continuous mode. The campaign is expected to run continuously at target rates for three or more months, processing 6 to 10 tonnes of Falchani mineralization.

Three things will be watched in that window:

Whether recovery holds. Continuous operation is where flowsheets typically give back a portion of bench-scale performance. Holding near the 88.0%–89.9% band would be a stronger result than the headline number itself.
Reagent and utility consumption at rate. Recovery gains bought with far more reagent are not automatically economic gains.
Product quality and consistency. Lithium carbonate or hydroxide destined for battery supply chains is judged on impurity specification as much as on volume. A pilot campaign is the first place a developer can demonstrate consistency across a run rather than a single sample.

A 6-to-10 tonne campaign is modest in absolute terms, but that is the point of piloting: enough material, run long enough, to de-risk the design basis for a definitive study and to generate representative product for offtake conversations, without committing commercial-scale capital. The milestone was reported by INN Battery Metals.

How the shares handled the news

American Lithium's OTCQX line, AMLIF, last traded at 0.33 as of the close on Friday, 18 September 2026, up 1.56% on the session from a prior close of 0.32, having spent the day inside a 0.32–0.33 band. That is a narrow range, and it describes the character of the move well: a constructive tick rather than a re-rating.

The broader tape offered no particular tailwind. The S&P 500 proxy SPY closed at $761.69, down 0.12%; the Dow 30 proxy DIA fell 0.48% to $515.88; the Nasdaq 100 proxy QQQ was the exception, up 0.63% to $721.45. Against a flat-to-soft large-cap backdrop, a junior developer holding a small gain on a technical milestone is close to what the market usually does with pilot plant news — acknowledge the de-risking, wait for the continuous data.

The muted reaction is also a function of how single-asset lithium developers are currently valued. The market has spent the past stretch discounting project timelines and financing paths rather than resource quality, and a recovery beat addresses the flowsheet risk in that chain without addressing capital, permitting or price.

Where this sits in the wider lithium development cycle

The muted reaction is also a function of how single-asset lithium developers are currently valued.

Peru is not yet a producing lithium jurisdiction, which makes Falchani a project where technical validation and jurisdictional groundwork have to advance together. Running the pilot in Lima, through TECMMINE, keeps the work in-country — useful for demonstrating an in-Peru processing route and for building the local technical record that permitting and community engagement ultimately draw on.

Across the sector, the developers making progress are the ones converting assumptions into measured results: metallurgy proven at scale, product qualified with a buyer, a study updated on real numbers rather than benchmarked ones. American Lithium has now delivered the first half of that sequence at Falchani. The second half — a continuous run that reproduces bench recovery, and a study that carries it through to updated economics — is the part that determines whether 88.7% becomes a line in a financial model or stays a line in a press release.

For now the checkpoints are clear enough: commissioning complete, bench recovery above the PEA basis, and a three-month-plus continuous campaign on 6 to 10 tonnes of mineralization to come. Any updated study for Falchani will be read first for which recovery number it adopts.

Key facts

Bench lithium extraction: 88.7% average (range 88.0%–89.9%)
February 2024 PEA basis: 80.0% recovery assumed
Pilot campaign: 3+ months continuous, 6–10 tonnes of Falchani mineralization
AMLIF last close: 0.33, +1.56%, as of 18 Sep 2026 20:00 GMT

Frequently asked questions

What did American Lithium actually announce about Falchani?

The company said the Falchani lithium project pilot plant, being advanced by TECMMINE in Lima, Peru, has all systems installed and operating as expected. It also reported that recent bench test work using pilot plant equipment in a semi-continuous process achieved average lithium extraction of 88.7%, with individual results ranging from 88.0% to 89.9%.

Why is the 88.7% figure being compared to 80.0%?

The February 2024 preliminary economic assessment for Falchani was modelled on an 80.0% lithium recovery. The 88.7% bench average is therefore above the assumption used in that study. American Lithium has said pilot plant results will feed into future project studies, which is the formal mechanism for replacing a modelled recovery with a measured one.

Does a higher recovery rate automatically improve project economics?

Not automatically, but it usually helps. Mining, crushing and much of the labor cost is set by tonnes processed, so extracting a larger share of the contained lithium from the same feed raises output against a broadly fixed cost base. The offset to watch is whether the gain requires materially more reagent, energy or processing time.

What happens next at the Falchani pilot plant?

With all flowsheet equipment installed and tested, American Lithium is moving toward full end-to-end flowsheet validation at scale in continuous mode. That campaign is expected to run continuously at target rates for three or more months and to process 6 to 10 tonnes of Falchani mineralization, testing whether bench-scale recoveries hold under sustained operation.

How did American Lithium shares trade around the announcement?

The OTCQX-quoted AMLIF line last traded at 0.33 as of the close on Friday, 18 September 2026, a gain of 1.56% from the prior close of 0.32, within a day range of 0.32 to 0.33. The move was small, consistent with a market waiting for continuous pilot results rather than repricing on bench data.

Where does American Lithium trade?

American Lithium Corp. is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol LI, quoted in the United States on the OTCQX market as AMLIF, and listed in Germany on the Frankfurt exchange under 5LA1. The Falchani lithium project itself is located in Peru, where the pilot plant work is being carried out in Lima.

Sources

American Lithium's Falchani Pilot Plant Fully Commissioned and Operating — INN Battery Metals