@bigmattp
The reason most companies evaporate their brine is is lower the cost of extracting the lithium from the brine.
In laymans terms, you need to add products (lets call them A+B) to the brine to remove the Li. The higher the concentration of lithium in the brine, the more will be extracted when you add A+B. If you can evaporate a swimming pool sized amount of brine down to half its original size. You will only need to add half the amount of A+B to extract the lithium, hence reducing the costs.
Brine temperature is also a huge factor due to its positive effect on evaporation speeds. The hotter it is, the easier and quicker it is to evaporate.
Every brine is different and the reason we are adding Chemicals A+B to the brine is to breakdown byproducts that bind to the Li to allow for extraction. The most recent announcement said that these byproducts precipitated off during evaporation so the levels were infact lower post evap as opposed to pre evap. This to me can only further reduce costs of extraction.
Once again, this is only in very laymans terms, there are many posters on here that know more about the chemical extraction process than myself. Im just highlighting the reason why yesterdays ann was very positive and has induced such renewed interest in the company.
