Cheers @Glish Yes, still at 'letter of interest' stage.The...

Cheers @Glish
Yes, still at 'letter of interest' stage.
The team's recent SK trip with the Premier you would think have worked on what's needed to tick the remaining boxes required to receive conditional funding support.
For me, this would totally realign the market's view of the project, if another 250M+ suddenly appeared in the debt covered column of the table.
Let's hope ANZ, QPM's ECA Coordinator, are working hard to get this over the column line.
They have runs on the board with K-SURE:
https://media.anz.com/posts/2022/09/anz-structures-inaugural-korean-export-credit-agency-loan-to-fun

Interestingly, ANZ made a submission regarding the EXPORT FINANCE AND INSURANCE CORPORATION AMENDMENT (SUPPORT FOR
INFRASTRUCTURE FINANCING) BILL 2019, where they noted:
In ANZ’s experience, the amount of support Efic provides to individual projects and transactions is, on average, markedly lower than the support typically provided by overseas ECAs to foreign transactions and projects. This is illustrated in Table 2 which shows that Efic is not amongst the top 20 ECAs in the Asia Pacific. Providing Efic with access to additional capital to increase its support capacity for individual transactions and projects will ensure it keeps pace with and, where required, can compete with other ECAs.
https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=c509a652-b84b-48ec-9489-c9819382cc4c&subId=667082
(EFA was formerly known as the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation).

The submission also notes:
the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (K-SURE) and the Export-Import Bank of Korea (KEXIM) – the two official ECAs in South Korea – offer an ‘Untied
Investment Support Program’ for large and high profile Korean investment projects with no fixed limit attached. The loan amount is decided on a case by case basis, and loans and insurances provided via these programs are not governed by the OECD Consensus.

While governments must be constantly under the Oliver pump from all parts of the economy, that was 2019, and now even more important in the IRA-fuelled critical mineral supply chain battle that the government has stated is a huge opportunity for Australia.

K-SURE must be waiting on the results of SGS Canada's piloting of the on-spec cobalt, and perhaps confirmation of Lava Blue's improved HPA specs with the further use of the new kilns removing impurities (I'd forgotten HPA is used in lithium ion battery separators, so perhaps POSCO or LGES are potential off takers).

Giddy up SGS, Lava Blue and Aust Govt...