Kicking the tyres, as you do on a Saturday night ...I'm...

Kicking the tyres, as you do on a Saturday night ...

I'm presuming that Ozaurum has joined the lithium rush primarily to tap into the cash that is flowing into anything lithium (and flowing out of anything gold). Don't blame them but it does look like a hail mary to me. The immediate sugar hit they are looking for will probably come from the Linopolis Jaime project rather than the bunch of tenements they have applied for. So I am going to focus on Linopolis Jaime which is in Minas Gerais state, Brazil.

The nearest big town to the Linopolis Jaime project seems to be Governador Valadares, which has a population of about 281k and is about 13 hours north of Rio de Janeiro by road but with no regular direct flights. The applied for tenements are just to the west of Governador Valadares and are 65 km to the west of the LJ project so I'm guessing LJ is likely about 50 clicks to the east of GV.

To see what the permitting of lithium projects are like in Minas Gerais and Brazil I looked at the TSX listed Sigma Lithium's Grota do Cirilo project which is also in the state of Minas Gerais and earlier this year moved into phase one production. According to Ozaurum's announcement the Grota do Cirilo project is about 200 km north of Ozaurum's Linopolis Jaime project. Sigma Lithium conveniently has a timeline for their project, here. It seems to me that they got serious about developing the project in 2017, IPOed onto the TSX in 2018 and in July shipped its first consignment of Li2O lithiumconcentrate. So close enough to 6 years from go to whoa for them. Compare that to Quebec which is taking more than 5 years just for permitting.

What that suggests to me is that any commercial spodumene found in Quebec from now on will not end up in batteries until after 2030 whereas it is plausible that anything Ozaurum finds at Linopolis Jaime could be in use before 2030. That is a massive advantage for projects in Brazil over projects in Quebec if you believe that time is money.

Here is a recent article about the Grota do Cirilo project. Pretty impressive: by the end of next year they hope to be producing more than half a million tonnes of concentrate a year. So there is at least one lithium elephant in Minas Gerais, can we dare hope for at least one more.

And for future reference, here is a 2023 KPMG report on the mining sector in Brazil. Going on the Fraser Institute rankings included in that report Brazil as a whole is not a high ranking jurisdiction for mining companies but it does have Vale. As it happens about half of the iron ore from Brazil comes out of Minas Gerais state (there are 26 states in Brazil).

Anyway, as I have indicated before this appears to be a last gasp throw of the dice for Ozaurum but it is probably better than the alternative.