You answered it fine. The only extra issue is that the conversion always has some loss. I've read plants getting 85% recovery from the SC6. Roughly 220kt gets about 28kt of carbonate with say an 87% conversion yield. 220kt/28kt = 7.86x factor in conversion. I've seen Rodney Hopper use a 8x factor in his analysis, so I think its pretty close. The issue with hydroxide is that brine produces need an extra step of processing which is costly, hence the talk of why hardrocks are attractive for it.
So looking at PLS update.
* 85% output (22,375 dmt in May) and recovery on track.
* SC6 converter capacity bottleneck still there.
* Relevant for AJM,
'This industry-wide situation is also true for Pilbara Mineral’s Stage 1 offtake customer group, where both General Lithium and Ganfeng have been constructing, commissioning and ramping-up substantial new chemical conversion capacity in the last 6 to 9 months. In each case, this has taken longer than expected.'
'the demand for battery-ready lithium chemical stocks remains strong, which indicates that the current weakness in the spodumene concentrate market is due to a temporary bottleneck caused by delays in the ramp-up of chemical conversion capacity in China'
'Consistent with the current trading conditions for lithium raw materials in China, spodumene concentrate pricing has also continued to soften and is currently in a range of approximately USD$600-640/dmt CFR China (SC6.0 basis).'
Will be interesting to see if AJM have any such comments in its next announcement (I'm ignoring the clusterfark that is JRO).
AJM Price at posting:
10.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
