The 2 largest producers of Lithium chems, ALB & Ganfeng are preaching from the same book wrt future demand and product mix. They are both forecasting hydroxide will see 60% market share by 24/25. Ganfeng have battery ready chem demand will be 900kt by 2024 and ALB 1.14 mill tonnes by 2025.
Since 2016/17 ALB & SQM have touted meaningful expansion for their Atacama operations, none of which has eventuated, instead, majority of their capital has been invested in Oz hard rock. Livent who delayed expansion in ARG, recently followed that trend and invested in New Nemaska, which is a hard rock project in Canada.
Joe Lowry may not admit it, but he is very bullish on WA hard rock, among many others. The narrative gradually shinning through, is that spod will be the key feedstock for chem production, especially for the next 5ish years. There is only 2 maybe 3 near term brine projects/expansion plans coming on line in the next 18months. (i.e. Ganfeng/LAC and GXY in ARG, maybe ORE). However, history would suggest those brine projects will take a few years to ramp to nameplate and achieve quality specs.
Ganfeng announced long term Chem production targets of 600kt LCE units this week. If one assumes 300kt will come from brine sources and rest from spod, they will need roughly 2.1mill tonnes of spod. Off the top of my head, Ganfeng have secured ~800kt of spod supply to date, which assumes they are taking 100% of Mt Marion production. Anyways, they have a long way to go, and plenty of future investment required.
Chinese chem producers are pilling in on AVZ for offtakes, however AVZ management seem to be holding on to the rest of their spod capacity, for downstream chem production purposes. So, on that last note, another base load product already sold out.
Most on here are aware that Greenbushes, Wodgina, Mt Holland are all base load projects and all are focusing on down stream chem production, thus their spod will not be available to external converters. I'm waiting patiently to hear PLS's downstream strategy, which will obviously remove more spod from the market.
Long story short, there is a looming spod shortage, and majority of credible hard rock juniors are also touting vertical integration. What price will encourage spod producers to sell spod under longer term offtakes.
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