Nice to hear an optimistic take and hopefully this is the one that comes to life. However, on this bit: "
every OT partner to date for Galan has been met with undue criticism" I think these critiques were fair, not 'undue'. I have never seen a junior enter a deal with
Glencore and come out the winner. They are the savviest of sharks as anyone who has read about them will know (JP signed a binding offtake in return for nothing more than an 'offer' to finance the project).
Chemphys are/were relatively unknown, posters could only find one other lithium deal they'd been involved in which is unusual for a company that were going to stump up US$40M in funding. As for
Authium and this deviation from 3+ years of formal studies (July 2020 to October 2023), I think this part of the presentation outlines the issue quite cleanly:
Galan has gone from a robustly-studied approach using conventional pond/liming/evap approach to a novel DLE technology based on some samples being tested at a Sydney laboratory in March. Anyone who has listened to JP's numerous conferences over the years knows he was a fierce proponent of conventional ponds over DLE, so this is a big U-turn. Given it's now their third offtake/funding partner it's not hard to come to the conclusion that they were desperate to get a deal over the line.
(20min delay)