Banter and general comments, page-14903

I hold both CXO and LTR so I want both to succeed. The two shouldn’t be compared to each other though and there’s not much point comparing us with other projects that already have a very large resource (PLS). There are totally different pros and cons for each.

Obviously the greatest asset for CXO is that they will be producing in a couple of months and will receive record prices for that product. According to this recent cap raise; in 18 months we will be increasing our production to 2Mt p/a, which is equivalent to some larger operations. The profits will be enormous. This aggressive approach is exactly what we need right now.

CXO are very close to port so every Mt we find costs less to bring to market. Power costs for us are lower as we can hook into the grid. We don’t need to build camps or pay a big bonus for remote work as people can live in Darwin and commute to the project. We have extremely clean spod with low iron and almost no other lithium bearing minerals (recent announcement stated >99% of the lithium bearing minerals are spodumene). Our spod is coarse and can easily be processed to a concentrate with high recovery without needing a floatation circuit. Very simple and cheap.

Our biggest limitations are that our deposits are relatively small and are sub vertical, requiring deep underground mines for each small deposit. If we find a few larger deposits, several more smaller ones or we find the motherload down at Barrow Creek then our situation will change. As things stand we will have to make do with our extremely profitable little operation for the next 10 years.

We are spending $13 million on exploration this year and $25 million next year. I’m hoping/expecting that we won’t be a little operation in a couple of years. Until that happens let’s just appreciate what we have. Based on our profits in a few months we will rapidly get rerated without any extra resources needed.