clear conceptual pathway to lithium production, page-7

In my opinion, your timetable is achievable

I don’t know exactly what are the requirements and standards enforced for environmental permits in Argentina but I doubt full permitting can be accomplished in anything less than six months, and that may be an overconfident estimate.

In the case of Rincon, it is know that Sentient could not produce at commercial costs in Rincon because the high Li to magnesium ratio that demands large amounts of lime to precipitate Mg and then equally large and costly amounts of sodium sulphate to clean-up the calcium. For that reason, Sentient stopped production and embarked into a R&D program with ANSTO to obviate these problems. Even if Sentient’s new technology works – and this remains to be proven – it will not be available to the AGY. Alurralde may have a solution for Rincon's large Mg content but, again, there is no evidence that this so far unknown technology will work at a commercial scale.

Pocitos and Salinas Grande seem to have a better Li to Mg ratios but this need further exploration before it can be stated with certainty that the ratio is low, which in turn requires environmental approvals to explore and time to carry out the exploration.

Then, if everything works, it is the problem of financing the construction of the facilities which are not cheap and may be beyond the financial capacity of AGY.

Taking all this into account, the attitude of AGY management of been very cautious in their comments is most commendable: they are not raising false expectations or making claims which could be unsustainable.

One of the biggest problems of any project, be it mining or whatever, are cognitive biases, the tendency to think in ways that can lead to systematic deviations from rationality or good judgment, which may also lead to wishful thinking. Amongst the most common cognitive biases are overconfidence, the excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. Another is exaggerated expectations, based on wrong estimates of the real-world evidence.

However, what I found most refreshing is that AGY management has not fallen in any of these traps.

So, the answer is simple: although AGY will not be producing in the short term, management will build up certainty in the project, hence it will value add to the SP.

I guess the answer is patience.

Cassandra, qui non credirunt