2016-01-21_PERMIT FILE - M1999051

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Drilling, Abandonment, and/or Completion Most of the proposed rotary/core holes will be drilled and immediately plugged and abandoned. The typical coring target interval will be from 10 to 20 feet above the Dissolution Surface (DS) to 10 to 20 feet below the bottom of the Boies Bed. If the hole is cored, the intermediate hole interval will be rotary drilled and temporarily cased using a 4.5 inch scab liner. The coring medium will be a saturated brine of sodium chloride and/or sodium bicarbonate to minimize saline mineral losses from the target interval due to drilling induced dissolution. The brine drilling fluid will be collected in Tined pits or containers and transported to an appropriate facility or the NS pond if in excess of 5,000 ppm TDS. The target interval may be cored, and then the scabliner will be removed and the well will be plugged and abandoned by cementing the hole to surface. The core sample size will be HQ 2.5 inch, with a hole size of approximately 3.83 inch. An alternate method to gather resource data would be to rotary drill the holes to TD and simply run a geophysical logging suite to determine the resource extent. A select few core holes may be completed as groundwater and/or subsurface subsidence monitoring wells. Typical construction would compliment the core drilling operations. The scabliner would be removed, a cement plug set from core hole TD to the bottom of the interval to be monitored, and the well would be sanded back across the monitored interval, cased and cemented (Figure 3). NS will use the same drilling, coring, and completion procedures specified in the BLM approved 2014 NS RDP. NS wishes to complete these wells in a timely fashion during 2016. It is important to note that NS will most likely not drill all 10 holes. Holes will be omitted if the data collected is sufficient to model the nahcolite resource and facies intervals accurately. Daub & Associates, Inc. NS 2016 Exploration Program Page 3 of 8 Revised 1/14/2016