Good News & Bad News, page-319

looks like the thread has been hijacked. Pegmatite deposits are all very different - Greenbushes keeps coming up as world class, unbeatable etc. The main reason is that they have been in the game longer and know their resource so well. The rest are catching up quickly. Hydroxide is in its infancy as far as it being a commercial scale operation. I've been in a few of these plants and they are going to change very fast from an engineering perspective as demand grows.
The combination of spod to hydroxide/carbonate plant is treated as spod is single source so as the downstream plants can fine tune. That will improve and as with most refineries they will develop the capacity to use different feedstocks. The big end of town doesn't like being locked into a single supplier.
Costs will change dramatically in the next two to five years - it kind of has to.
PLS are doing a great job of playing catch-up with Greenbushes. PLS in my opinion need to pick the right partner to make Hydroxide- most likely put it out there a bit and go with a new technology such as Metso-Outotecs patent. Risky yes but the rewards could be huge