Understanding lithium demand, page-311

As always great stuff @Scarpa.

People often forget that many industrial proceessing plants are constrained not by their ability to produce the desired product, but by the ability to separate/remove the waste.

In your example above lets say a converter is set up to use 6.5% concentrate at say 100,000 tpy feeed into the plant, this means they will need to process and remove 100,000 tonne x 19% = 19,000 tonnes of waste. Now lets say someone offers them 6% concentrate, which means they will need to process and remove 100,000 tonne x 25% = 25,000 tonnes of waste to process and remove.

That's an increase of 6,000 tonnes ... not much? Well that;s an increase of 37.5% in the amount of waste generated, with associated increase in variable costs to do that, plus you get hit by 6,000 tonne reduction in saleable product and therefore revenue ... from a production engineer's, and indeed, the business's perspective that's a "poo sandwich with no bread" scenario, and I would be letting the procurement boys and girls know that they need to screw the supplier of the 6% concentrate down to compensate for the additional processing and logistics costs and loss in revenue.

If the plant has the capacity it might be able to offset the lost revenue in the above example by feeding more lower grade concentrate in, but what if it can't because the back end of the plant can't physically deal with the additional waste. They would need to de-bottleneck. At what dollar and regualtory compliance cost?

Some people have discounted the size and homogeneity of Manono but think of it from a downstream processors perspective, knowing that for the next 20+ years you could have access to high grade low deleterious concentrate, in massive volumes ... a dream scenario for them IMO IMO