Banter and general comments, page-30389

"Concentrating fines to 5% will not become spodumene and can only be sold as 5% fines."

While correct that fines are not glued together to make a larger product, a 5% lithium fines product a still a 5% lithium concentrate and at least some operators have called fine texture material via flotation Spodumene Concentrate (see SYA picture below).

The following was recently published by Atlantic as part of its recent DFS (29 June 2023). The CEO there is Keith Muller (ex Allkem GM at Mt Cattlin) so he knows a thing or two about how to run a lithium operation. IMO this is the sort of scoping study that Core should be doing. I think the market would react favourably to something being scoped that could potentially add 40ktpa of concentrate production. If you took 300kt of fines (35-40% of a 1Mt operation and assumed for some reason some of this material isn't suitable) that were 1% and upgraded them to a 5%+ product with a perhaps 70% recovery rate then its 42ktpa of SC5.0ish product to sell.

"The large chemical producers are 50c coin buyers, they dont want 10c coins."
If you look at the end product from flotation by SYA and soon to be LTR its a fine sand like texture product. My understanding was that major customers buy Spod that has been concentrated via flotation and has a very small grain consistency (10c coins). With major purchasers buying flotation output I can't see how particle size is the key factor. I thought the most important factors were the lithium grade of the concentrate material and whether the iron (Fe₂O₃) is low. What other metals are in the concentrate are also an issue.