Presumably 600kms is a much longer way to truck rock than the 200kms from Ravensthorpe to Esperance?
600km from James Bay to Val-D'oR is a much longer trucking distance than Ravensthorpe to Esperance, but then Esperance doesn't have a converter there and requires shipping to China (or wherever) so more travel time and cost.
Though of course they would need to truck from Val-D'oR to perhaps Quebec to be shipped out, but that weight has been massively reduced by the conversion process.
Or perhaps rather than shipping they might truck it down to LG based down in Detroit. They have missed out on 7,000tpa supply from Nemaska falling over.
But according to Guy Bourassa shipping spod from Canada to China is much further than from southern WA??
Because Australia is so much closer to Asia, where the major battery makers and a budding electric vehicle industry has translated into rising demand for lithium, Bourassa said mines there can simply ship the hard rock lithium concentrates to an ample number of buyers in Asia.
In contrast, his company had to build an electrochemical plant to convert its mined lithium concentrates into lithium hydroxide, a higher margin product for which fewer buyers exist.
Only by creating a more refined product — lithium hydroxide as opposed to lithium spodumene concentrates — was it economically feasible to build a mine on the wrong side of the globe, in Canada, he said.
“In Quebec you can not really compete with the Australians on selling concentrates,” said Bourassa. “You can not compare the two, one has direct access to the market in China, and in Canada, we cannot have access — we need to do the conversion, so the (financing required) is bigger.”
