Blue Sky, page-12

As a rough guide ORE built their plant in a year from breaking ground to opening. It was then delayed by bottle neck problems with the plant for a few months but some of these are believed to have been design flaws.
The ponds would be the first things to be built and are in the complexity scale of a council skateboard park - concrete lined pools. The build time for these would be in the order of months and the reason to build them first is to allow the dehydration process to get started as soon as possible while the rest of the plant is being built.

Dehydration can take between 12 and 18 months to dehydrate/concentrate the brine and it is then run through the processor.
My estimate would be that if we can start building in Q1 2017 that we may well have some carbonate or hydroxide from SDV by Q4 2018. Perhaps this is a bit tight.
Q3 2019 seems very doable and allows for things to go wrong and all the other stuff that happens when building big things.

There are even options to perhaps toll our brine through a local processor while we wait for the plant to be built. FMC has a hydroxide plant in nearby Salta. This is one way for income to flow a bit quicker.

Everything is dependent on the negotiations they'd be having now.
There must be a line of people willing to talk about Galaxy's future with Mr Tse.

However this goes... I don't believe a cap raise is on the cards for SDV.
It would be relatively easy to find a finance partner to fund the gap particularly given Galaxy's high income and debt-free status by early next year.
If they move on a test plant first then the build cost (approx $30m) could be found from the next prepayment (50% of 120kt will be a good number no matter what they get.)
Mt Cattlin could pay down debt very quickly as 180kt+ per year.

It may still be strategically useful to enter a jv partnership or find an offtake client who may be willing to stump up pre-payment cash for guaranteed supply or longterm contracts.
My feeling is that at nameplate 25kt - this is a large enough supply to allow an auto manufacturer to proceed with their EV line-up plans without fearing losing a severe supply chain problem.