Hey mate, I appreciate your input, and you raise some good...

Hey mate, I appreciate your input, and you raise some good points. Unfortunately assumption based planning is all that can be done until commercial operations are underway, and it is a widely accepted practise to accept the 10yr average cost from a DFS, which in lenders terms is a bankable level of accuracy. Do you have any other methods of analysing data? i'm curious to learn how you do it.

"no mine has ever managed to achieve sc6 in its first few years of operation, not even Greenbushes."
Interestingly, PLS in their maiden shipment Achieved SC 6.2 (SC6.256), with a 75% recovery rate, see Quarterly Activities Report dated 16 Oct 2018, which was sustained reasonably consistently in early years of operation. they were viable from 2018 with a Realised price of US$545/dmt on an SC6 basis.

Also, in the PLS case, they commenced at a 1MTPA operation and then expanded, they had an accelerated ramp up and commenced sales prior to normalisation of steady state production, ramp up of 200% increase to production occured during operations. LTR having over 12 month of mining operations and commencing at a scale 3x PLS initial production already has the ore mined to acheive steady state significantly fasters than PLS, which took about 2 years. PLS OPEX CIF (Not FOB) in first 18 months averaged US$500, and standardised around $330 after around 2 years from commissioning. Is this a consideration? definitely. Does this invalidate my whole post? i tend to disagree.

anyway appreciate your input.