Good News & Bad News, page-11100

Many interesting announcements this week.

Piedmont released their DFS including adopting the Metso Outotec new tech for LiOH production. This tech came to the fore on Tesla Battery Day, with Tesla declaring it reduced LiOH conversion costs (from Spodumene Ore) by 33%.




Does this mean other chemical converters are that much further up the costs curve now? Is Kemerton and Kwinana old tech now ... Ganfeng ... and even POSCO???

Technological change is happening so fast we're lucky we haven't committed downstream ... yet. The fundamental constant is EV/ESS batteries all need Lithium. Maybe we're better off concentrating on increasing our JORC resource and production expansion to capitalise on high prices?


Although, I read boffin banter lately declaring Magnesium batteries could challenge for large scale ESS. Still a long way off I'd reckon, plus with Li-ion CapEx already invested, they'd be hard to budge.

"Magnesium (Mg) ion batteries are better viewed as alternative solutions for large-scale energy storage rather than a direct competitor of lithium-based batteries in the race towards ever-rising energy density targets"

https://www.electrochem.org/ecs-blog/ecs-webinar-follow-up-qa-with-dr-yan-yao-next-generation-batteries-for-electric-vehicles-and-stationary-storage/


VW day smashed LG Chem by moving their supply source to China. Annoyed by the US LG/SK legal dispute they moved from pouch cells architecture to prismatic cells.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/high-mn-cathodes-central-vws-long-term-strategy-shang-bsc-phd

However, ultimately the move is to high Manganese batteries to drastically reduce costs, with the change from high Nickel to LMNO batteries. They still require the same amount of Lithium ... and LiOH I believe.

https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/battery-metals-investing/manganese-investing/manganese-in-australia/#:~:text=South32%20is%20a%20main%20producer,Eylandt%20Mining%20Company%20(GEMCO).


Now we look to set up a digital platform for sales. With all the contract based pricing, the London Metals Exchange has never had a chance of establishing a transparent market for Lithium. Could this become it? Are we walking away from invalidated binding offtake agreements, which proved to be not so binding?

Ken will remember from his old iron ore days when BHP and RIO declined to participate in forward contract pricing and just used spot pricing. The iron ore price skyrocketed to $187pt.

We have the opportunity here to own the spot market. Who are our market competition? Everything else is tied to downstream contract commitments. Other Spod producers will love us (for their contract negotiations) but the Stage 2 Chemical Converters, not so much.

I'm now expecting an announcement for Plant 1 Stage 2 FID and financing of same. It'll take two years to complete the buildout. Nine months just for Stage 2a (100ktpa).