@WinSomeLoseMoreThey drilled on the edge of the boundary for the...

@WinSomeLoseMore

They drilled on the edge of the boundary for the same reason Galan drilled on the edge of the salar at HMW. It pretty easy and a low bar to increase the resource size attributable and both sit on alluvial fans. It will NOT translate to an equally sized reserve estimate. Galan has barely managed to squeeze out just a 100kT proven reserve after an apparent ~7MT or whatever resource (like ~5MT in M&I).

That all said, at 20ktpa does not require a massive reserve and LEL should still be a good resource. The Lanshen silence is worrying.

AKE is NEVER in a million years going to make a play for this thing. They have more resource than they will ever get close to mining (on this salar alone let alone adding SDV) and even more if the merger goes ahead. LEL needs to be shopping this to new outside third parties not already holding massive brine reserves and looking for their own feedstock. They need to do it pretty quickly because they have no chance of getting this close to production alone. I can't even see any viable next step for LEL besides selling this. A good JV with someone with cash might be the second best option but I don't think these guys have the interest (unlike GLN) to take this all the way. They have bungled the Lanshen deal at least in terms of keeping to self promoted schedules and in any sense of keeping the market informed.