@romasLOL.. You are right
Most of those meme gifs probably collected from
@TrayonRanger's and
@cash hound's post over the years by me. I feel so relaxed in these days, especially after the LG deal when we got $380m in the bank, so I just wanted to make a funny post as you can imagine.
@PolocookYou said "
CEO said at diggers forum they were making 6% if that’s what the market wanted, but would also consider making lower grade if that was more economically sensible".
Correct. It's up to the grade you feed in the plant.
What I said on my post was; "
We can't even produce less than 6% when our high quality feedstock completes the WOF process circuit".
If we feed lower grade ore from our sorted or even unsorted DSO ore (which was considered as waste before) then we get less recovery and a spod concentrate less than 6%. The cost would be much lower than the cost of 6% spod then indeed. Of course we sell it considering China buys everything from Australia. See even MIN sells its 3.9% grade spod concentrate from its Mt Marion mine.
We don't have a DMS (Dense Media Separation) or HMS (Heavy Media Separation) circuits. Our spod has to go through the state of the art floatation cells in the WOF (Whole Ore Floatation) circuit. All of the other producers including Greenbushes and PLS use DMS and HMS together with floatation.
That's why I said "We can't even produce less than 6% when our high quality feedstock completes the WOF process circuit". It's not possible to produce less than 6% when we feed it with 1.5%+ grade ore which is the planned grade and what we have.
Sorry but we don't have a low grade ore other than the rocks we considered as waste.
@Egeria"
...most plants are built targeting 6% con in WA, economics favour lower grade which is acceptable to offtakers so why not maximise li unit yield and lower cost / improve margins..."
We are hearing the same BS that most plants are built targeting 6% concentrate, bla bla, economics favour lower grade which is acceptable to offtakers. Total BS. All of those claims by the explorers and developers are false IMO.
No it's not. No one other than Greenbushes can produce 6% spod other than a lab environment. Only LTR can produce 6% plus spod together with GB.
We are in this lithium business for 10 years and learned a lot. We always said not all lithium is equal. We learned it over the years by doing a lot of research and not hungry for any BS.
I you genuinely want to learn the issues around that matter, I will give you some links and you can read and learn.
For example; read this one. It's quite old. I've read it 8 years ago. I'm giving it you but not writing as my own opinions, because it's old, it's from a lithium consultant which is also very old and experienced
"
Are All Chemical Grade Spodumene Concentrates the Same?"
Grant Harman, Lithium Consultants Australasia, 28 August 2016
See what it says: "
Recent articles in the press and company announcements might create the impression that the group of mining companies that are commissioning spodumene beneficiation plants at present will produce spodumene concentrate that is interchangeable with Talison SC6.0 chemical grade concentrate".
Read the article please. You will see it says three factors are important;
- Grade
- Impurities
- Particle Size Distribution of the Concentrate
That is what tried explain more than thousand times here. KV resource have all these factors.
KV deposit has very high grade ore with very low impurities. Everyone knows that well now. That complies with first two factors. But you may not know that particle size is also a very important factor. Our KV ore is very brittle. That's why we can use the SAG mill, otherwise we had to use a ball mill. A SAG mill has very big advantages over the ball mill. (we explained all these here many times as well). KV ore gives very consistent particle size when crushed and in the SAG mill as well, So our recoveries will be very high over the time when we are producing 6% plus spod concentrate.
Also producing spod concentrate is not an easy task. There is science behind it. That's why LTR has done more than 400 test before production for doing the proper setup of the plant.
If you want to learn about the science behind the spodumene processing and if you don't want to accept BS from anyone, there are a lot of articles around. Here are a few examples.
"
Physico-Chemical Characteristics of Spodumene Concentrate and Its Thermal Transformations"
"
The Recovery and Concentration of Spodumene Using Dense Media Separation"
"
Mechanical enrichment of converted spodumene by selective sieving"
"
Lithium extraction from hard rock lithium ores (spodumene, lepidolite, zinnwaldite, petalite)" (Chinese source- Very good explanation in details)
DYOR please.
PS:
Nothing is linear in spodumene processing. There is a lot of factors going up exponentially. Therefore cost of producing 4%, 4.5%, 5%. 5.5%, 6% spod is not increases in a linear way, it increases exponentially as you can't see no linear lines on the graphs below.
(20min delay)