ASN General Discussion, page-19491

ASN got a mention on one of the Stock on Next Invetors comms... Hopefully, they research into ASN & see that it is much better than MAN

	MAN Produces Battery Grade 99.9% Pure Lithium Hydroxide from its US Brines

Disclosure: S3 Consortium Pty Ltd (the Company) and Associated Entities own 2,860,000 MAN shares at the time of publishing this article. The Company has been engaged by MAN to share our commentary on the progress of our Investment in MAN over time.

Is something big brewing in the US lithium market? The US Inflation Reduction Act incentives will be coming into play over the next 4-6 years. We expect buying decisions from the big carmakers to slowly shift toward US domestic supply. Starting this year, the US Inflation Reduction Act requires that EV manufacturers source 40% of critical battery minerals domestically… OR with free trade partners by 2024 and ~80% by 2030. Partly due to the US IRA policies, price reporting agency, Fastmarkets, recently forecast ~500% growth in US lithium demand through to 2030. So it's a good time to be proving up large lithium resources in the USA. Mandrake Resources (ASX: MAN)has ~ 379 km2 of ground in the Paradox Basin, Utah, USA. It is former oil producing land, full of old drill holes. Turns out that MAN’s ground also contains lots of underground lithium rich brines… … which MAN is planning to extract at a low cost by the existing old oil drill holes. (in the resources game, we have all seen how expensive it is to drill a deep hole - MAN doesn’t need to pay for that) Yesterday MAN announced it successfully converted its lithium rich brines into 99.9% pure, battery grade lithium hydroxide in just one processing step. MAN just showed the market its lithium rich brines can be processed into battery grade lithium hydroxides. AND without all of the energy or chemicals typically required when using DLE technology… The market liked it - MAN was up 15% on relatively large volumes yesterday. Next we want to see MAN finish analysing old well data, announce a maiden JORC resource estimate and update the market on potential DLE tech partnerships. MAN’s lithium project sits in Utah, USA - in the same region as $168M Anson Resources. MAN is currently capped at $23M, and had a healthy $15M in cash at the end of last quarter. Anson is capped at $161M and just recently signed a binding offtake agreement with LG Energy Solutions. LG Energy Solutions is already one of the biggest battery manufacturers in the world, and is obviously looking to secure US based lithium supply that it can feed into its ~8x battery facilities.

Here’s where all the Paradox Basin lithium developers sit on the map:

A big difference between MAN and Anson right now is that MAN is “pre-resource”. At this point, MAN has a 1.7mt and 5.6mt of contained LCE exploration target.