in pre-open, page-22

Phil,
Welcome to evaporative mining.
I refer you back to the EPM Mining ventures preliminary technical report (p111)

They propose pumping brine into evaporative ponds @ 121000 Lt per minute.

121000 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 63 597 600 000 Lt Per annum

They hope to produce 2.1 Million tons of Potash salts PA

2 100 000 T = 2 100 000 000 Kg K salts (pre flotation & conversion as per RWD trial).

For comparison:

RWD = 983/10000 = 9.8% (mixed harvest divided by initial brine volume)

EPM = 2 100 000 000/63 597 600 000 = 3.3%

EPM hope to process 2.1MT of potash salts into 300ktpa SOP (equivalent 135ktpa K).

The EPM numbers are in situ estimates allowing for pond leakage where as RWD numbers are from PE lined tanks.

Unless I am wildly wrong you have to process a lot of brine to produce SOP.
I await further testwork from RWD.

From my reading it is clear that brine chemistry isn't quite so simple as we may have thought. I quote below from "Great Salt Lake: A scientific, Historical & Economic Overview", ...solar pond control becomes more complex as the brine is taken past the saturation point of sodium chloride to include precipitation of potassium and magnesium salts...whether the brine is concentrated in a single pond or in numerous ponds in series has a profound effect on the minerals that are formed (as we have seen in the RWD Trial)...the main parameters that affect crystalliastion of minerals are: evaporative rate, brine temperature (average temp, day-night temp, seasonal changes), brine depth, brine sequencing, residence time, pond leakage....

Clearly a bucket under a couple of lamps (Lab trial) for 49 days will be different to a series of tanks and 10000L in the field.