Vinny,Whilst DLE has some advantages over traditional methods,...

Vinny,

Whilst DLE has some advantages over traditional methods, you have chosen to overlook the many disadvantages in your assessment (and trust me there are many).

Proving up the technology and recovery rates at scale is just one that gets the majority of attention, but the most glaring that is yet to be addressed by a Hydro Report is how you propose to account for dilution over the life of the project (whilst conserving your water).

I'll give you a quick hypothetical scenario. Image I have a can of coke which contains 10g of Sugar. I plan to extract 10% of the volume of liquid each year, put it through a plant to remove the sugar and reinject the liquid back into the can (I'll assume 100% recovery just to keep the numbers simple).

In Year 1 - I remove 10% of the liquid, I collect 1g of sugar and reinject the liquid back into the can leaving 9g of sugar remaining
In Year 2 - I remove 10% of the liquid, I collect 0.9g of sugar and reinject the liquid back into the can leaving 8.1g of sugar remaining
In Year 3 - I remove 10% of the liquid, I collect 0.8g of sugar and reinject the liquid back into the can leaving 7.3g of sugar remaining

You see the issue with removing liquid from an aquifer, extracting the lithium and then reinjecting the liquid back into the aquifer is that you dilute your resource over time. Your resource is already extremely low at 250mg/L. What happens to your model and financial metrics by say year 5 when that is under 200mg/L ?

The same volume of water through the plant is going to result in less product on the back end, year after year !