They need those few million dollars just to feed the cash burn fire and keep the lights on. If a few million dollars was enough to pay a few experts to solve the problem, they'd just do it, no hesitation, problem sovled. They'd have done it years ago.
It's not actually that easy.
Clearly there's a nasty problem (or problems) which is beyond a few million dollars of consultancy fees away from fixing.
Incidentally, clearly the pilot plant didn't work. If it did they wouldn't still be trying to solve the problem(s). It's funny that even though they mothballed it after it never produced more than a trickle of product (relative to nameplate) even with sky high lithium prices and a stated goal of using it to fund the expansion (at a time no one expected prices to go as high as they did), the cheer squad here insisted it was a success and JZ said it had done what it was supposed to do.
The revised story was that it was meant to get the method sorted out, but years later we can see it clearly hadn't achieved that goal either.
