AGM, page-131

You misunderstand how these plants are built.
Also its Anthony, not Albert - Mr Research.
To a large extent he is talking here about the time penalty for new entrants.
There are a lot of preparatory steps to establishing a brine operation
Galaxy has already been in Sal de Vida for many years, and put millions behind doing the work that has set up 2 x DFS studies and already has some existing infrastructure, wells etc. Last announcement had them picking up a base camp for cheap, saving on current capex expenditure.

Brine plants are essentially modular.
They are scaleable plants and the amount of pond infrastructure and the dehydration timeline dictates the output. The first stage was something like 42hectares in an area of what was described as optimum topography (ie very flat).

The first stage is, and was always going to be, a scaled down version of the full plant.
I believe that is 1.5kt of initial carbonate goal, with this production coming online in 2019 (see recent investor presentation page 6).

So - no. Its not a $500m admission price to get started.
Its not needed straight away. Never was.

They are going to prove the plant's viability with the first stage of construction.
They have a good brine team and the resource will take care of itself.
Its just a matter of now making all the best decisions for placement of assets and making sure the plant is built well. These steps were missed by Orocobre.

We don't know what stage AT is at in terms of negotiations about SDV.
He has already mentioned in January that prepaid offtake was another potential source of capital (same method as used for Mt Cattlin). The more advanced and proved-up the operation becomes the stronger Galaxy's hand is in negotiations (ie no need to be as desperate as LAC in terms of selling off such a large amount of their project's equity).

We already have the test plant costs in the kitty (CR), and with mounting cash flow through the rest of the year, Galaxy can either keep incrementally building it themselves (putting more ponds in and scaling up the plant capacity), or partner (finance/offtake/project equity) to fast track.