Interview with CEO Keith Phillips on The Constant Investor

https://theconstantinvestor.com/the-home-of-lithium/

New interview, behind a paywall of course.

Here's a snippet - good info here, especially for interested new parties

Are you just going over old known lithium deposits there or are you finding new deposits?
It’s a little of both.  The US Geological Survey in 1942 identified this trend, the Carolina Tin-Spodumene Belt, and they actually – I don’t have my fingers on the actual report but they identified or projected a potential resource of as much as 700 million tonnes which is obviously massive.  Only two large mines were ever developed, the Hallman Beam Mine by FMC and the Kings Mountain Mine by Albermarle’s predecessors.  Those were both 25 million tonne plus projects that ran for 30 to 40 years and are now depleted.  There was some other drilling done in the area, much of the land that we’re active on was under lease by FMC’s predecessor company and those leases have expired and we stepped into some of those locations.  But, from what we can tell the whole belt is pretty intensely mineralised and the challenge is to put together a sizeable land package.  This is all private land, for the most part is private land owned by families and individuals, and many of them are quite happy residents of the area so it’s a process to get them interested in doing something with us.
What sort of rights do you have to drill on those lands?
Well, we have 12,000 acres that we either own or have under long term leases so we own about 300 acres, 900 acres are under long term leases.  Typically, these are six year leases where we have the option to drill on the property, we have the option to kind of fully explore it in exchange for annual lease payments and drilling payments.  Then we have the option to buy the property typically at a premium to appraised value.  That’s really the carrot to get the owner to allow us to do what we’re doing.  We have full rights to drill on all the property we have, we are drilling really on one main core property now and if the project proves up the way we suspect it will and if the lithium markets stay robust we will at some point in the next several months or quarters be exercising those options and buying that land.
If you’re going to build a mine do you have to own the land you build the mine on?
We wouldn’t have to.  There’s no reason we couldn’t mine on leased land so one of our property owners would prefer to maintain his ownership in the land.  We have a long-term lease agreement with him, with that family, most people will not and I think ultimately even that person might just turn around and sell the land to us.  But, there are certainly lots of mines in the US on leased properties so that’s something we can do on certain land.