General Discussion Topics, page-79810

For those of you are curious about what might be possible next year, it might be helpful to look to the past.

In 2016 Galaxy reopened a lithium mining operation at Mt. Catlin that had been closed for many years. At that point they did little to update the equipment, they simply hired people and went to work. They achieved commercial production in April of 2017. The Mt. Catlin mine had a nameplate of 180,000 tpa and in 2017 they produced 156,000 tones. This was done with only 9 months of production.
In their first year with only 9 months of production they only missed their nameplate by 13.5%



So we know that Sayona has put a hell of an effort into upgrading their plant and they believe they can make 226,000 tpa. if they follow in Mt. Catlin's footsteps they should achieve at least 195,000 tones next year.

There are many similarities that exist between Mt. Catlin and NAL. They have around the same grade ore body, they both were plants that were halted and they both have some amount of impurites that need to be removed during processing.




The big difference is that our management put together a plan to fix all the problems with the plant prior to go live, Mt Catlin had huge issues with high cost processing because they did not fix these issues up front. 1 year later they spent millions on a yield optimization plan and attempted to fix the plant while in production. As you can imagine this put a huge strain on their business and their customers.

I feel like our management studied this and learned what they should do to be more successful, and I think it will pay off in spades.