Arena Minerals Inc. announced it has completed drilling of its first diamond drill hole (DD-02) at the Sal de la Puna Project (“SDLP Project”) located in the Pastos Grandes basin within Salta province, Argentina. The diamond drill hole is located on the Almafuerte claim and intersected a continuous brine column from 140 metres to the total drilled depth of 646 metres. The entire sampled brine column averaged 496 milligrams per litre (“mg/l”) lithium (“Li”).

An uninterrupted gravel aquifer was intersected between 334 metres and 634 metres down hole, representing the thickest gravel sequence drilled in the basin. The gravel aquifer averaged 503 mg/l Li with grades as high as 557 mg/l Li at 550 metres below surface. Gravel and sand aquifers typically have favourable effective porosity values and high flow rates, which translate to highly productive wells.

DD-02 was completed as an observation well with 2-inch diameter blank and screened PVC casing to 450 m depth. Depth specific brine sampling was caried out in DD-2 over the entire brine column using double and simple packer sampling systems. The brine column averaged magnesium to lithium ratios of 4.5 to 1 and sulphate to lithium ratios of 15 to 1. The Company announced that two additional drill rigs have been mobilized to site. One diamond drill rig is currently set up at DD-01, located on the Graciela claim, and has a target depth of 550 metres.

The depth of the hole may be extended if favourable lithologies are encountered, as happened in DD-02 in the adjacent Almafuerte claim. A second rotary drill is scheduled to mobilize in three weeks to Almafuerte to drill a production well (P-1) 15 metres away from DD-02. The well has a target depth of 450 metres and looks to test the productive capabilities of the gravel aquifer intersected in DD-02 by completing pumping tests using the neighbouring DD-02 as a monitoring well.

Arena is operating the drill program on behalf of Sal de la Puna Holdings Ltd., which is jointly owned by Arena (65%) and Ganfeng New Energy Technology Development (Suzhou) Co. Ltd. (35%). The drill program is focused on the Almafuerte and Graciela blocks which border Lithium America's Pastos Grandes project to the south and south-east and consists of 3,000 metres with the objective of both increasing the category of the current resource and increasing the SDLP Project's resource base.

The drill program is jointly designed and supervised by the Company and Atacama Water consultants. All brine samples are sent to SGS Laboratories, Salta, Argentina, an independent and fully international accredited laboratory for analysis for lithium multi-element Induction Coupled Plasma Spectroscopy. Arena has a regimented Quality Assurance, Quality Control program where at least 10% duplicates, blanks and standards are inserted into each sample shipment.