Aclara Resources Inc. announced that the 25-tonne shipment of ionic clays extracted from its Carina Module deposit located in Goias, Brazil, (the Project) has successfully arrived at its fully owned pilot plant facility in Concepcion, Chile. The Company will start the piloting operation at the end of December and aims to complete it at the end of February 2024. The objective is to ensure these modifications facilitate the production of an end product that is more conducive to the subsequent Rare Earth Element (REE) separation stage.

Continued demonstration of environmental attributes: Revalidate the Circular Mineral Harvesting methodology, wherein 95% of the water and 99% of the primary reagent (ammonium sulfate) employed in the extraction process are recycled, thereby preventing the generation of liquid residues and eliminating the necessity for a tailings storage facility. This update follows the successful completion of initial piloting operation for the Penco Module ionic clays in September of this year where a total of 120 tonnes of ionic clays were processed, leading to the production of approximately 107 kilograms of wet, high-purity Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) carbonate. The pilot operation also underscored the sustainability attributes inherent in Aclara's Circular Mineral Harvesting process.

The Carina Module. On October 11, 2023, the Company announced the discovery of the Carina Module, its new heavy rare earth deposit hosted in ion-adsorption clays in Goias, Brazil. The discovery was made through the successful completion of an initial auger drilling campaign, which on December 12, 2023, confirmed (i) a large mineral resource estimate (MRE) of 168 million tonnes of inferred category with a NSR value of USD 32.3/t1, (ii) prospective heavy and light rare earth grades resulting in significant quantities of dysprosium (Dy), terbium (Tb), neodymium (Nd) and praseodymium (Pr), which are the rare earth elements critical to the production of permanent magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines, (iii) metallurgical compatibility with the technology patented and successfully demonstrated on a pilot scale by Aclara in Chile, designed to minimize both cost and environmental footprint, and (iv) the growth potential of the deposit at depth as the average drill depth of the MRE was only 8.1 metres and did not consistently reach the bottom limits of the mineralization.

The short-term catalysts for the Carina Module project development will be (i) the production of samples by processing the Project's ionic clays at Aclara's pilot plant in Chile from December 2023 until the end of February 2024, (ii) the completion of a Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") in January 2024, and (iii) pursuit of additional resources at depth through the completion of a 9,090-meter reverse circulation ("RC") drilling campaign, which is already underway and scheduled to be completed in second quarter 2024.