2,500tpa is more than enough to make a profitable enterprise, I think. As you demonstrated, probably more than enough to pay for the construction of P1 at US$35m.
As for a full plant, we don't know the size yet. As the surprise came with P1 and it looking like double the capacity will happen, so too will a full-scale plant have it's own developments, but 26,000 is possible.
US$40m is the cost of building P1. Full scale will be more expensive. I think
@Welsho54 and/or
@R08 pointed out there was a cost of $200m for an earlier imagining of a full scale plant. Was that right?
With the cPlant, the modular design may allow them to simply stack more up, sure. Apologies if I've misread this, but I hope you're not confusing the cPlant with the P1 plant.
The cPlant is just a concentrator. It's a 1/10th scale operation of the DMS that GXY operates at Mt Cattlin, basically. It's entirely separate to the P1 plant itself. The cPlant will just sit at Alvarroes and process 150,000t of 1.1% ore and spit out feldspar, quartz and about 30,000t of 4.5% lithium concentrate. Then that gets shipped over to Canada, where P1 turns it into the good stuff.
Which brings me to the discussion about a refinery in WA.
I don't see it happening for multiple reasons. Firstly, P1 is only a demonstration/cashflow generation machine. It is being built to prove the process works, to learn from implementation and to start bringing in money to fund bigger plants.
Unless something goes wrong with scaling up, I don't see the team building another P1-sized operation. That means we're going straight for P2.
The thing to remember about P2 is how much the scale really grows. For example, it will use somewhere around 250,000tpa of sulfuric acid. If it produces sodium silicate on the same scale as the P1, we're talking about potentially 350,000-400,000t of sodium silicate. Now that in itself presents issues, as
@w27 pointed out earlier. That's almost 1/3rd of the market for sodium silicate in north america, which would represent issues.
If the sodium silicate price falls, shipping becomes a larger percentage of the total cost, so you need to have the plant close to that market even more.
Plus, I'd be willing to bet that shipping 350,000-400,000t of sodium silicate, that you need to keep clean because it's a finished product, is going to be more expensive than the 260,000t of bulk concentrated lithium rocks that you need to feed the plant.
And that's assuming you can make the 250,000t acid as cheaply as you could buy it from the smelters in Canada, which I'd doubt. They're already trying to get rid of it.
Anyway, that's why I don't think we'll see a plant in Australia. There's not the manufacturing base here to use the products and to provide the reagents.
Cheers
(20min delay)