"what would the value of the end result from pond 1 at todays price?"
Nothing,
@piehole. You can't monetize half-evaporated and unprocessed brine. The brine needs to pass through seven ponds, then into a processing facility, and then into two finishing ponds before a sellable product is produced. It's explained in the phase 1 DFS and summarised more briefly here:
https://hotcopper.com.au/posts/72421471/single
Separately, thanks for the thoughtful comments on the earlier GS post from others above. A few final thoughts from me:
@Lorry2022: I like Joe Lowry but even an apparent lithium luminary like him got the 'GS buying stock after issuing a sell' narrative badly wrong earlier this year. Pretty astonishing someone as knowledgeable as him can't read a basic ASX filing and see it was a borrow/lending agreement, not someone going long. The problem here is that so many punters see someone like that peddle the story and think "Joe believes it so it must be true", even though it's not hard to disprove the narrative. Joe can't admit that GS called the lithium crash and he - an alleged expert - did not, so he continues to double down and sledge them... although I see from his last tweet he's possibly becoming a little more contrite.
@Gwaihir: I'm not suggesting GS will be right this time, merely that rubbishing their research is something many have done to date, to much personal damage. As for this:
"Goldman feel compelled to release predictions though". Completely agree. At the end of the day, they're a broker: they win by clipping the ticket. What they want is people buying or selling - not just holding. They win by creating
activity. As long as we understand and acknowledge that fact, we can still benefit from their detailed research. I've said before that during the thermal coal boom plenty of very clever people were rubbishing GS's mid-long term coal price of US$150/t (IIRC) when the price was much, much higher. Look today - it's trading below that and futures are implying somewhere in the region of US$140/t. It's not that they get every call perfectly correct, nobody does. But on some commodities like coal and lithium,
they were far more directionally correct than all the other so-called experts... Joe, Rodney, Howard - you name them. I know who gets more likes on Twitter though!
(20min delay)