Banter and general comments, page-6382

The following appears in Liontown's equity raise presentation of 1 December (pg 26)

It would appear the experts advising Liontown consider Hydroxide rather than Carbonate is the direction to go. I'm not sure why they reached this decision, but I'm pretty sure they would have received a lot of advice on the merits of different options. While the price of Carbonate is currently higher, will it stay higher in 5, 10 and 15 years time as probable additional salt lake brine lithium carbonate capacity is developed?

From LTR's proposal, the A$2b capital cost is $538m for the mine and A$1.5b for 3-trains of Hydroxide conversion that would deliver the capacity to convert 570k of Spod to Hydroxide. A ball-park guess is therefore a core 190ktpa Hydroxide plant has a capital cost around A$0.5b in today's money. With this sort of price tag, Core would also be going substantial due diligence around both the processing plant configuration and whether Hydroxide or Carbonate is the way to go.

Interestingly the LTR presentation pack doesn't even reference the word Carbonate (or if it does, its as a picture rather than text).

However for Core, a large resource upgrade is needed before it even makes a spot of difference between Hydroxide and Carbonate. I'd be surprised if you would commence a project like this without 20+ years of reserves, particularly since there are no other nearby lithium mine's in NT.