Except there was hardly any third party independent opinion provided. Only the CAPEX's used in scenarios i-iv were deduced by Primero and had the +-50% margin applied to them.
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Scenarios v & vi, which included AGY's in-house CAPEX, and the scenario used in the announcements highlights, had zero input or verification from Primero.
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Primero played no role in the OPEX estimate other than providing a +-35% margin, I assume after comparing the costs provided by AGY themselves to other projects estimates and being satisfied enough to stick their neck out and provide some much needed input.
I suspect these reasons are why Primero did not have their company logo plastered all over the document like every other PEA I've read, and instead was covered with AGY's logo, as it was largely in an in-house economic assessment.
Also, there's not a single lithium brine PEA out there that accounts for all revenue, as no one actually drills out and provides a resource estimate for 100% of their resource, nor do they create scenarios where they extract and process 95% of their resource estimate without first defining their reserves (except in this case..infact, this case is even more egregious than assuming they can extract 95% of an indicated JORC estimate). Let me just breakdown what AGY has done here by assuming they can produce 10000tpa over 16.5 years, ie. 165000t of product overall. They have a JORC estimate of 245120t. They say 95% is extractable, so 232864t. They then say in this PEA that "The abstraction and evaporation system operates at 70% efficiency due to losses in the transmission network and seepage losses in the ponds". 70% of 232864t is 163004.8t, already below the required 165000t, but we'll give them some leeway as it is reasonable to believe they rounded up the 16.5 year figure. What is not reasonable is to assume that they can achieve 100% recovery rate through the processing plant, as the 70% only applies to the extraction of the brine and the concentrating through evaporation ponds. Here is an example of a breakdown of efficiency rates from another project, and while I understand that Pablo is using proprietary tech, assuming 100% recovery rate through the processing plant is not realistic in the slightest.
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And ALL other PEA's account for 100% of their operating expenses, not just those related to the processing facility, so there's some additional revenue AGY is awarding themselves where no one else does.
