I really don't understand why the market is selling this so cheaply. Its as if the market doesn't realise how well the subsequent pieces of the production puzzle will fall together upon release of upgraded resource estimates and an initial DFS:
- Supportive Ontario government in a top tier mining location (Canada)
- Spod bearing Pegmatites are near the surface so the start-up operation is not going to have a massive over-burden removal exercise to get down to ore concentratable to Spod (So it could be the capital lite option Core has, but without the pre-strip of Grants included within that total!!)
- DMS can concentrate with world-class recovery rates
- DMS is concentrating to industry standard 6% Spod
- Core bought a 1.1Mt capacity DMS plant for A$40m so start-up capital costs could be very modest
- Options exist to concentrate beyond 6% which would attract a pricing premium to standard 6% spod pricing
- DMS concentrated spot can be convered to Battery-grade lithium carbonate
- Close to railway links
- Hydro power looks to be available
- Seymour appears to be a low-capex, high-recovery project that could use DMS. This indicates it may progress quickly through the stages and from FID to production could be as short as Core's timeline of slightly over a year.
The DMS results are simply world class.The 15 November 2017 ADV release advised:
And, floation also works to provide an option to increase this already high recovery rate
FFX has conveniently produced tables showing the very strong 80% recovery rate for their project. The only advanced project with a similar recovery rate to Seymour is Critical Resources Rose project with 87% recovery rate achieved (from flotation).
On-Processing the OreFrom ADV's announcement of 12 Feb 2018. The test work to take these high recovery rates through to battery grade have been successful. The flow sheet is through to Lithium Carbonate not Lithium Hydroxide, but that is no longer viewed as a negative due to Tesla using Carbonate in its LFP batteries.
