© Business News 2017. You may share content using the tools provided but do not copy and redistribut, page-9

I'm not a processing engineer but from simple observation, it appears to be 4 or 5 steps in the process, based on the photos I've seen.
I believe our current process had 3 steps that have been reduced to 2 steps, but it will cost $214M to build the plant, plus the usual over runs making it higher.
Just from this I expect the process to be quite capital intensive and opex might also be high. As they are currently only using spodumene, it also indicates to me that any testing of lepidolite is well down the track, or they have not been able to get it to work in the lab yet.

I don't worry about such things ass you would never invest in anything if you were always worried about the latest u-beaut tech of anything.

Basically I think it will be many years and lots of testing before the first full scale plant is built. Plus the odds are it will be by us from cashflow anyway, and as we will have the cash and they wont, we will benefit the most from any such joint venture in the future.

Our management are not silly and if in 4-6 years time they decide to build aa commercial plant, I suspect they will lock the technology up so that only we can use it until the Chinese raid the patents office and copy it.