Kwinana is to refining what Silicon Valley was/is to tech. The size of what's been constructed to date at Kwinana is amazing, it will be interesting to see how COB go getting a land site, good proximity to existing projects is beneficial I would think. Imagine our neighbours - Tianqi Lithium Refinery, SQM/Wesfarmers LHM Refinery, BHP’s Nickel West Smelter plus a host of others with projects all over Australia looking to refine at this deep port location.
What the WA Government did was facilitate conditions to attract players, each added to the ecosystem, better logistics and importantly people who network within the critical minerals space. The prospect is exciting, probably all up we would be looking at $60m total refinery cost, the same as forecast at Broken Hill for that refinery project, so much more appealing at Kwinana. The Broken Hill main project will go on as planed and will be a guaranteed bulk product stream into the refinery, importantly the WA refinery can handle input from just about anywhere. The team will look to meet the main requirements of the IRA and depending upon funding partners may well have directions on where it can supply etc. However it is also important to know that not all customers will fall into location specific supply. India for example do not have the same requirements on supply as EU and US have.
COB have to put this together and much work to do, I get the feeling they have been on this track for a while and its advancement could be far faster than we know, my earlier puzzlement on what was happening has been largely answered by Joe's recent update.
Cheers
Phil.
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