Information from China, page-8

From your post:

"This is from Ganfeng on their brines. It totally refutes the information given by a poster earlier today that stated it would only cost 10%. This is from Ganfeng themselves!!"

I said earlier today that feedstock represents 80-90% of production costs for a refining business. I stand by that observation and can support it with the stoichiometry. Or did I just make that up too?

Maybe your friend, if real, has stated something like "of the refining process costs, the purification stage is more than 10% of the refining process costs" That is a bit different to the argument at hand. I agree, although it depends on his technical translation of where "purification" starts. I would contend that the running of an ion exchange including wastewater recycling would be less than 10% of refining process costs.

The refining business is 80-90% of costs in feedstock and 10-20% of costs are the refining process costs.

I showed you the stoichiometric ratios so lets take this relationship to a new level. Time to go to second base.

If there are no losses at the refinery, you will use exactly 8 tonnes of technical 6% spodumene concentrate to make one tonne of Li2CO3 - that's in the world of promoters, journalists and brokers. In the real world it's going to be more like 9 tonnes of technical spod con to get a tonne of lithium carbonate. If PLS lets the Chinese do the met accounting at their JV refinery it will be 10 tonnes!

So if you say spod sells for $600/tonne and Lithium Carbonate sells for $7,000 tonne;

there's at least $5,400 worth of spod in every tonne of Li2CO3. Let's pretend the refinery is making no money and the price he sells lithium carbonate is merely breakeven for him.

feedstock is thus 77%. But the refiner is making a positive margin on his sales, let's say 12% and that's an aberration, by the way. That would imply a total production cost today of $6000/tonne carbonate inclusive of feedstock and refining costs. Wow - feedstock would therefore be 87% of the cost of producing carbonate.

Want me to back it up. Sorry - I will defer to Mendeleev, you know, the guy who wrote the periodic table and other "unsubstantiated" stuff.

Now back to the brines. Is your "translator" seriously saying that brine-sourced feedstock is so expensive to process that it cant compete with "cheap" spodumene?