Banter and general comments, page-38902

On paper DLE looks great, until the capex cost blew out on the solutions. Here's all these problems with existing processes that work. DLE solves this problem and that problem. Blah Blah. Invest in this.

Issue #1: No-one has got DLE working at a commercially significant scale.
Issue #2: Every brine is different so even if you find a brine where DLE works, you haven't found a solution that works across multiple brines
Issue #3: The plant needs to be built where the brine is, and in many instances that's not a great place to be trying to build, operate and maintain very expensive bits of kit. How many times have you bought an item that works well, for a short time then breaks?
Issue #4: As shown by LKE is the capex costs of the plant to do it are astronomical.

On the capex side, LKE's phase 1 is a theoretical capacity of 25ktpa of LCE. The estimated capital cost of this plant is US$1.38b (Ã$2b).

To provide context, 200kt of SC5.5 is 27.2kt of LCE. There will be some recovery losses during the hydroxide conversion process but if you are trying to scale an industry quickly DLE is not the answer.

The lithium industry is growing at 200-300kt LCE/yr. If you were to try and meet the mid point of that demand through DLE, it would require about A$10b/yr of new capital to be raised each and every year. Companies are needing to do deep discounts for even the current levels of capital raising.