Agreed 19stevo71,The messages haven’t been clear on what caused...

Agreed 19stevo71,
The messages haven’t been clear on what caused the delays but, from what I can gather, the initial results of 99.9% purity came from bench level testing at small scale. It seems that there may have been a delay at Lilac (though not expressly mentioned) in commissioning the much larger scale pilot plant before starting to run the first 20,000L of Kachi brine through it. Maybe they had to tweak the composition of the beads or something (very much a guess), but they would have had the $20M in backing by Breakthrough to invest in any new equipment or additional equipment or bulk bags of beads, etc. that they would have needed for the larger scale pilot plant processing. Delays involved with external/third party suppliers has been referenced - but it would have been far better IMO if that was spelt out to us SH rather than the deathly silence we had for some weeks! All that did was increase doubt and negative speculation about things not working or going to plan.
I agree with the sentiment regarding knowing how fast the pilot plant level processing is going.....and how much faster this is than bench level. This will help give confidence about the ability to scale the process successfully.
Dont get me wrong. I’m not blindly defending what has transpired. More transparency would have been good to have. I believe we are still in a great position and, if the indication of the internal Lithium Chloride purity is anything to go by, it is a good indicator that we are on track for a similar 99.9% pure Lithium Carbonate sample.
I believe that the BOD has refrained from publishing those internal lab numbers to avoid the possibility of being remotely misleading. Anyone that has anything to do with qualification of samples will know that internal lab results (particularly those of an intermediate product conducted by a non-third party accredited laboratory) would have been dangerous to put out there due to the inference that some would have attached to them. Better to wait for actual third party accredited lab testing of the final product that will be sent to possible offtake partners. That is what will matter in the end!
In the meantime, bring on those weekly samples and send them off for conversion as promised.