I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this comment, but it seems...

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by this comment, but it seems to me that you assume IP is only locked up in a patent or something like that.

That is far from reality.
Intellectual property includes know-how and so-called exclusive knowledge - in our case, what Puna Mining has built up over the past 6+ years developing the Rincon project.
There is clearly a wealth of knowledge, built upon Pablo’s previous work, that has evolved over time and culminated in the delivery of a successful BG processing solution for our Rincon brine.
This is indeed IP, and extremely valuable imo.
One way to protect some forms of IP is to patent it, but this “protection” also reveals a great deal of that IP to the world. This can be undesirable in many cases.
Some companies do this in a massive way, eg tech products, because they know that their products can be (usually) reverse-engineered and copied relatively easily and rapidly.
We don’t really have that problem.
Our in-house processing knowledge stays in-house if the team is “secure”, and imo is indeed very valuable to other want-to-be brine producers, particularly those dealing with similar feedstock.

Afaict Rio thinks they can commercialise/utilise the tech that the prior owner developed, and seem to be pursuing this pathway. Imo if they have some serious stumbling blocks wrt that process, they may indeed seek “help” from Puna Mining in some form.
Perhaps they’ll offer to buy out half of AGY’s stake in Puna Mining, in a deal that allows them to JV and access the processing tech?
There are tonnes of options and possibilities; only time will tell.

In the meantime, they seem to be pushing ahead with their starter plant and trying to get the “other tech” to work viably. We’ll see.


Imo
Dyor