Wow! I must have really struck a nerve with putting up all of these transcripts from previous webinars. This thread is getting a lot of attention!
Anyway, let's continue and now move to the transcripts from the second webinar on 28/9/23.
The first topic from Webinar #2 covers the full update on the output from the Demo Plant and a full report from Saltworks - "Part A"
Sourced from Update Webinar #2 on 28/9/23
Commentary made by Jonathan Neilsen - Project Technical Director and Scott Munro - SVP Technology Strategy and Risk
I'm going to turn this over to Jonathan to get us started on Saltworks and what we learned from a recent report.
JN: "Thanks very much, Karen. I'm very happy to be here today and to have the chance to talk about DLE technology and all the important work that we've been doing with carbonation. One of the things probably to start out with is to make a distinction - we have a couple of different demonstration plants that we've referred to as “demo plants”. The first we're going to talk about here is the Saltworks carbonation work which is separate and apart from the Lilac DLE Kachi plant. So just to make sure that we have a distinguishment there between the two because we will talk about both of them as we go through the presentation today.
Significant milestones from Saltworks and the work that we've been doing in the conversion of the Lithium Chloride to Lithium Carbonate. We’ve done about six months or so of work with these folks. The work that we've been doing here really has been done with the purpose of creating data and providing data to support the process design and the DFS that we're working on. It builds confidence in the system and the technology that we're using in our ability to produce battery grade Lithium Carbonate and it de-risks the project. I mean those are the big milestones that we're trying to achieve when we did this work and we engaged Saltworks in this program. The other thing that we did is we provided a solid base for project due diligence. We've been able to test this at scale, the unit operations each going from reverse osmosis and purification, evaporation, carbonation, all of those we were able to test at scale and provide that basis for future due diligence.
SM: Jonathan can I just jump in there? So, for this Lithium Chloride to Lithium Carbonate part of the plant, this isn’t proprietary technology that's hidden behind a wall. This is all open up technology that's well proven, and we are just looking at to how to put the pieces together in the most efficient manner for our project.
JN: Precisely yes, this is conventional technology. The system that we have as we talked about the unit operations are all conventional, they're all in use today. Lithium Carbonate production is simple chemistry, but it's a bit of an art when it comes to producing it at battery grade and the work that we did was to enable us to hone in on all of those different nuances to help us create the highest quality product that we can. This work was done with 120,000L of Lithium Chloride that was produced at site at Kachi and it was shipped from Argentina to British Columbia. That was the feed material that we used for this. I think, and I want to be careful, but certainly we think this is one of the largest DLE to brine, brine to Carbonate projects that's probably ever been undertaken and one of the questions we kind of get is 'why did we do this?' Why would you have a program of such size and not just use the minimum? Why don't you just produce the smallest amount that you possibly need, and it comes back to what we talked about before. If you're looking to provide data and you're looking to de risk the project, this scale, it gives us confidence. It gives us all of the information that we need to put into the DFS for the process design. And the other thing that we did that's a little bit unique is that we generated a host of recycle and waste streams that we'll use for vendor qualifications later on. Many times in these projects, the vendor qualification has to be done on synthetic solutions that they create because they don't have it. We were able to generate volumes of solution here that we've set aside and we're going to use those for the qualifications later on."
Expand
(20min delay)