Lithium Related Media Articles, page-23113

Hi @ETSOD

The answer to that is in my older post #:71818239
I said;
"Those lepidolite resources are of China is about 6mt LCE in total, including low grade and high grade. If you compare it with what LTR has in terms of LCE in KV project which is 5.7mt, you can see that whole of China lepidolite is not that much for a whole country."

Yes that's true. But it's not a positive for China. Because that mean's that only an individual company like LTR has a resource at same size of the total resource of a huge country like China. That makes LTR's resource significant.

Btw, in terms of demand, 6mt LCE resource will be the equivalent of total demand in 4 years from 2025 to 2029, maybe less. Say China used all of its resource then it will run out of all of its lithium resource. Then it will totally be dependent to lithium exports, as in oil imports. Therefore China wouldn't process and spend all of its own resource in 4 years.

Also the other important thing is those lepidolite resources are very low grade in comparison to spodumene resources of LTR. So, lepidolite mining is expensive and dirty. China’s lepidolite mines are typically low grade with some reaching more than 0.8% Li2O – and yields are very low for 0.3%-0.4% Li2O lepidolites. For example, 8 tonnes of 0.4% Li2O lepidolite can produce 1 tonne of 2.2% Li2O mineral concentrate. To produce 1 tonne of lithium carbonate, about 25 tonnes of lepidolite mineral concentrate is required.

Similar conditions are valid for the Chinese brine resources. They are low grade and high in impurities especially for magnesium which is hard to remove. Even though the Chinese have developed many different process techniques to produce lithium carbonate from those brines but their cost is still quite high.

If you read my old post you will see there is more info.