By Dwayne Sparkes, 3-01-2024“No coffee today as I spat it out...

By Dwayne Sparkes, 3-01-2024

“No coffee today as I spat it out reading Goldman Sachs' lithium supply table which popped up in my twitter feed.

What i find most intriguing about this table is that it states the majority of lithium supply will come from China itself, in particular internal lepidolite and brine.In my opinion, this is unrealistic and the numbers don't quite seem logical. Lets break down the lepidolite numbers:

They are predicting that 462,000t of LCE will be produced internally from Chinese lepidolite in the year 2030.Using a previous post of mine (i'll put the link in the comments below), for a lepidolite ore of grade 0.55%, you need approximately 14 tonnes of lepidolite to get SC6 equivalent.

Roughly 6 tonnes of SC6 is needed for 1 tonne of LCE.You need around about 14 * 6 = 84 tonnes of lepidolite ore grading 0.55% to get 1 tonne of LCE..
. 84 * 462,000t LCE = 38,808,000 tonnes of ore grading 0.55% to meet 2030 yearly output prediction alone.

That's 6 years away...The largest documented lepidolite mine within China is the "414 Mine". Approximately has 130Mt @ 0.38% li2O.

That's roughly equivalent to a #GL1 Manna deposit in terms of contained lithium. Plug the above 0.38% into the previous calc and you're almost processing half of China's biggest documented lepidolite deposit yearly...

Defies logic for me.Also, the above is just talking about pure tonnage. The waste products (which i've touched on in previous posts) from the deleterious elements (iron, fluorine, potassium, etc.) within lepidolite will be astronomical.

There are already reports of converters sending ore back and tailing storages blowing out in size. How is it going to look when you are processing 38Mt+ of low grade lepidolite ore a year?

Lepidolite contains more deleterious elements than spodumene, is generally lower grade, is slower and more difficult to process, especially in the leaching stage.

I'm sticking to my view that the lepidolite deposits and stockpiles get exhausted soon and that the processing of lepidolite is a short term attempt by China to squash the market.

IMO there is no chance lepidolite will ever be cheaper than spodumene to process and it isn't a realistic solution to meet future lithium demand. Cheers for reading”.