General Discussion Banter GLN, page-14845

Paul Graves says that Galan's 6% lithium concentrate is "basically salt water, it is not a product" and that it will have to be transported in vaste quantities. So much so, he says, that Galan and Glencore have "not thought through the practical constraints" of transporting this product.

Well he is wrong about that. Galan's product is 31% LCE (12.9% LiO2, 6% Li). This means they need to truck 3.84 tonnes of this Lithium Chloride product for every one tonne of LCE sold. A 5,400 tpa project (Galan's phase one due to open next year) will produce 15 tonnes per day, which will equate to 58 tonnes of their LiCl product. This will be roughly 58,000 litres of liquid, or about two road tankers worth per day. Hardly a burden. The project is on a major road and it will not be an issue trucking this daily output to numerous carbaonate plants in Argentina. When Phase two is complete in 2026, the output will be eight tankers per day.

Mr Graves then talks about the fact that the brine has to be re-injected into the aquifer to manage the impact on the hydrology (ie they have to replace much the brine they have pumped out) and that this is a regulatory requirement.

Well he is wrong about that too. DLE projects re-inject, evaporation pond projects don't. Why is this? Well becasue on a pond project pretty much all the brine has evaporated and so can't be re-injected. Galan's resource is around 800ppm ie 0.08% lithium in the brine. By time it has gone through all those ponds in the sun over 18 months of evaporating, and has been concentrated down to 6% con, that is 75 times concentration which would imply that 98.7% of the water from the brine has evaporated. Re-injecting the 1.0% of the brine that is left as waste will have a meningless impact on the hydrology of the aquifer, and I would be surprised if it were a regulatory requirement. Even if it was, re-filling two tankers a day with waste brine for their return journey to HMW for re-injection is just a relatively small additional diesel cost.

As you can see from the flowsheet below, Livent's Fenix project on the Hombre Muerto uses a hybrid system of pre-concentrating ponds feeding into an absorbtion DLE plant. That DLE plant will be producing large volumes of spent brine which gets returned (ie re-injected), which I guess what Mr Graves was thinking about. It is a very different process to Galan's.



Mr Graves goes on to say that Galan and Glencore have not thought through "the environmental and permitting permission constraints". Well he is wrong about that too, since Galan's HMW Phase One is already permitted.

Lastly he says that if "Glencore found someone to convert this cloride product into carbonate, they would be very very grateful". Wrong again! Arena Minerals is already trucking its 35% lithium chloride product from its Sal de Puna project some 100km every day to Lithium Argentina's lithium carbonate plant at the Salar de Cauchari, an almost carbon copy of what Galan is proposing to do.

Perhaps Mr Graves is the one that has not thought this through.