https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-work-hard-rock-lithium-costs-michael-langford?published=t
I've just noticed that even SuperNinja is repeating the same errors and getting mica confused. Mt Cattlin and Mt Marion ARE spodumene deposits, that should be plainly obvious. They don't derive their lithium from quartz.. quartz is a waste mineral that would be present in all the hard rock pegmatite deposits. (and before I get grilled by geologists, my background is in finance so apologies if i mess up the terms, this is all just information i've picked up from research/questioning. Maybe
@blastfurnace can correct me !). Whats tripped him up again is the difference between lepidolite and muscovite. Both are mica type minerals. From what i've been told muscovite occurs in ALL deposits, but at mt cattlin they are excessively high hence they have more processing costs to remove the mica.
I quote a part from the Galaxy Resource release in 2012 about exporting mica
"Mica is a non-toxic co-product of spodumene production and occurs naturally in spodumene in the form of muscovite. At its Mt Cattlin site, Galaxy separates the mica from spodumene and is developing the technology to further process it to create another potentially high-value marketable product."
So once again, cattlin and marion ARE spodumene deposits, not lepidolite. And i have not found any research to say that mt marion have high processing costs or any issues with mica (mainly due to MinRes not releasing anything). I thought the common consensus was that they have big iron problems.
Also, even though I'm a PLS holder, his justification for mt marion being high cost compared to PLS doesnt make sense to me. It looks like he has taken the PLS DFS cash operating cost of $207 US/t but doesnt take the one that includes the native title/royalty payments which takes the cash operating cost up to US$258 (Although this may have changed since the resolution of the smelter royalty to minres). And he is comparing it to the numbers from NMT's LiOH plant feasibility study (
http://www.neometals.com.au/reports/667-MM11072016.pdf) where it is clearly stated that they are assuming a market price cost for the spodumene cost (hence the massive difference!) .Can you double check this
@binwood as financial modelling seems to be your forte?
(20min delay)