A lot of chatter re North America based lithium discoveries. Reports are dime a dozen, plenty of intercepts at decent grade albeit at fair depth.
Sya's NAL was a marginal asset to begin with, life of mine strip ratio of 5.3, a swarm of thin veins, a recipe for challenging processing. This gets overlooked with fanfare at the moment, NAL forecasts AISC cost c.usd500/t, which is probably optimistic but who's to challenge feasibility studies after all no spodumene producer has come close to achieving feasibility metrics in real life.
Sya signed a pretty unattractive deal much in favour of Pll, without which the bid probably wouldn't have been successful. To realise true value that binding offtake with pll needs to go. The alternative is to develop a converter which seems to be the way forward for them.
Comparatively, James Bay is a superior resource in all respects. Exposed at surface, lom strip of 3.5x, lower in early years. This is close to pilbara minerals pilgan deposit lom strip. Such assets are rare while a lot of others are boasting about >3% hits +200m below surface. Liontown will be the first test for viability of underground spodumeme mining and one to watch closely in terms of cost.
Looking forward to James Bay resource upgrade and approval to get things started.
Aimo
AKE Price at posting:
$11.96 Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
