What you’ve missed is that the expertise you refer to didn’t...

What you’ve missed is that the expertise you refer to didn’t exist at the time. If you haven’t, listen to the Jon Evans discussion with Joe Lowry, and it will show you that some of the so called experts got brine processing very wrong.

You can get a head start by buying experienced chemists, if you can get them to leave their families to head to the middle of nowhere to do it, but they still need time. The kind of science needed to make lithium carbonate from brine has zero shortcuts. No matter how much money you can throw at it, It takes time to build up the knowledge to learn how to do it efficiently.

This is why the big guys like Rio and Exxon are still years away from significant lithium production.