Banter and general comments, page-38417

I thought Leo's primary problem was not around the price of lithium but operating in a country high in the corruption index scales where adherence to rule of law was low. The way government officials in Mali probably expected things to work was that Leo / Ganfeng would pay them significant bribes. This project would set them up for life and they could retire allowing the next government official to take a turn at extracting their bribes. I presume Leo didn't pay those bribes so the permitting pathway was anything but smooth. Those annoyed officials made life sufficiently difficult that Leo had little choice but to bail out. Now that Leo is cashed up, it will be interesting to see what Leo does with this cash and where its spent (assuming its not handed back to shareholders).

"there so many lithium mines now..."
The supply and demand situation is an interesting one.

• A 1.3% deposit processing 1Mtpa of ore with a 70% recovery rate will produce 22.5ktpa of LCE
• A large high project might get near 100ktpa (4Mtpa @ 1.4% with a 72% recovery rate is 100kt LCE)

Its generally accepted lithium demand is growing at 200-300kt LCE per year. If that increase in demand was met from small scale hard rock projects, 10 or more projects would need to start each year to meet projected demand. Even meeting it with large high grade projects takes several projects every year. That increase is being supplied in 2023, 2024 and probably 2025 through the combination of Sigma, NAL, Arcadia, Goulamina, Mt Holland and Kathleen Valley all coming online together and expansion of several existing mines. If this had happened 5-10 years ago it would have put the world into a multi-year huge supply surplus but with current demand growth it only meeting supply growth requirements. If there was a serious supply surplus, prices wouldn't be >US$1,000/t. What's the pipeline of big projects after that?

The cupboard is sufficiently bare that Ewoyaa's Atlantic is projecting to be top10 in the world. This is interesting when observing that Core's JORC is 48.2Mt @ 1.26% across multiple deposits. Atlantic's JORC is 35.3Mt @ 1.25% across multiple deposits. Core's JORC is larger and the same grade as a company with plans to be (briefly?) in the top 10 for hard rock production capacity in the world.