Another uninformed comment on someone sour on lithium and thinking Copper is gods gift to the investing world.
You are right that if Copper had the number of mines coming online that is occurring in Lithium it would take 5 years or perhaps longer for the supply/demand balance to come right. You seem to have forgotten that while copper is growing at mid-single digit annual rates, Lithium demand is growing at strong double digit rates of around 20-30%. Typically Copper has taken 20-25 years to double in demand. Lithium is doing that in 3-4 years. World class scale projects like Kathleen Valley while huge, are adding additional supply to the market measured as a few months.
The forecast below is now slightly old but was from Goldman Sach (one of the lithium bear's). Between 2024 and 2025 they estimated LCE demand to increase by 398kt.
So take LTR's Kathleen Valley project as context. At 3Mtpa processing the ore reserve grade of 1.3% with perhaps a 75% recovery rate the project will deliver 72kt of LCE. In the copper market that would be a year's new supply. If any other projects were to come along it would flood the market and push the copper price down.
On the GS forecast below 3 months demand growth is 99kt and with KV adding 72kt to supply it doesn't even get to contributing 3 months of lithium demand growth. To supply just the demand growth from 2023 to 2028 (the 5 years you reference) requires 22 KV scale projects to come online. Accepted that Brines and existing project expansions may do some of this but good luck identifying even 10 new projects of close to or the same scale as KV that have a chance of coming online by 2028.
