AGY LOM Equivalent, page-315

Understandably, a lot of people are talking about the permit approval, some obviously just being deliberate trouble makers who don't take themselves seriously but hope you will, and some who have genuine concerns.

Many people have said I'm silly for thinking this, but for quite a while now I've been expecting the permit to come shortly after the 2,000TPA plant is operational. Some say there's no reason to think this, but I think there are several.

The permitting process is laborious, it involves experts to do a lot of work (or at least, pretend to) and various office paper pushers to get off their arses and do some work, which they're never prone to doing, and they have financial incentives for dragging the process out (they're paid to do paperwork in the office, creating more of it keeps them in a job, etc etc). AGY doesn't need the permit until it is ready to start working on the expansion plant, so it has little incentive to be the squeaky wheel which gets the grease long in advance. Given that AGY doesn't need the permit until after the 2,000TPA plant is complete, and given that the 2,000TPA plant gives a perfect opportunity to assess what the 10,000TPA plant will be like (it's simply a modular expansion), it makes sense to take the opportunity to assess the initial plant before giving the go ahead to creating more of the same, rather than approving it before this opportunity exists. I'm only speculating, but this is perfectly realistic.

Anyone who has done business in a non "western" country (funny how we use that term even though Australia is in the east and South America is geographically in the west) will know how things work when dealing with the government. The vast majority of Australians who haven't have no clue about what's involved, and would find the realities difficult to believe. Australia is one of the most extreme examples in the world of government departments doing their jobs as they are supposed to in a fair manner, and by global standards this is extremely unusual. Through various methods, to get a government department to do anything, in the majority of the rest of the world, Argentina being a fairly typical example of a non 'western' country, businesses need to actively take various actions to get the red tape pushed through. No, I'm not only talking about bribery (though that is extremely common and indeed is normal practise in more than half the non western countries in the world). Often, things just don't get done until they need to be done (this is a common phenomenon in South America, even more than the rest of the world where it's pretty common anyway).

When one side has an active desire to drag it out and the other side has no need for it to happen quickly and will have an easier job letting it take longer, it's no surprise that we're seeing this time frame. I have no doubt that if we had the funding and were ready to get started on construction about six months ago, we'd have had the permit about six months ago. It's no surprise that some permits are issued more or less promptly than others and it would be completely stupid to expect them all to take the same amount of time to issue, or to say that since one was done in x months it is concerning if the timing of another is different. The timing is no coincidence. For those who think all this is crazy, you can simply consider that if they were going to decline the permit, and you think they don't deliberately drag things out, they would have declined it long ago. If there was nothing to wait for, they wouldn't have been waiting.

We'll get the permit on the predictable schedule, ie, a bit after what would have been the perfect time for us. Even the most naive among us know that it all comes down to money and lithium prices have skyrocketed since the application was made, and to whatever extent it's genuinely about environmental impact, they approve some truly horrifically environmentally destructive projects, and rightly or wrongly, lithium is seen as a 'save the world' deal. I'm not talking about the reality I wish to see in the world, just the reality which does exist. I'm not even a fan of electric cars, I can just see the path the world is taking and I might as well make money from it.