Latest Lithium Related Articles, page-895

At this stage those are mostly platitudes. If it's less complex then again, why haven't the "big 4" ramped up production in a mega market? Why are the established players in cheaper and less complex production losing market share to Johnny come lately upstarts operating expensive machinery in Western Australia?

Because "cheaper" for brine is post potash credits, which means that the operating expenses are closely linked to the price they get for that commodity to subtract from the overall costs. As more gets produced the potash price goes down and so do their margins. The potash price has almost halved in four/five years and continues to fall.

Because "less complex" means no huge grinding and filtering machines like hard rock, but it also means it's much harder to scale up. How do you evaporate a bigger area quicker to get more lithium into a starving market? Stare at the lake more? Then it rains and it's problem.

Every single one of these brine players has struggled to ramp up whereas ramping up hard rock is easy, although costly up front, you build a bigger machine. Orocobre, were ahead of Galaxy in terms of production schedule but how did that go? Did the "less complex" ramp up work out for them? Check out their problems with attaining grades that can even be used for batteries, to the chagrin of the Chinese.

The lithium market needs to be serviced now. Sal De Vida will be starting up into a fast moving market that will look different to how it does now. The market now needs lithium and fast, yes a spodumene plant is expensive, but with a good grade feed and a large enough plant to service North America done asap. That's where it's at for mine