That's obviously the 64 thousand dollar question. I believe it...

That's obviously the 64 thousand dollar question. I believe it will be but there are a few hurdles. There is no downstream lithium chemical producer in North America other than the one Elon is building at Corpus Christi in Texas and others planned by Piedmont and Allchem. The spodumene from Quebec isn't going to be shipped to China and unlikely it will go to Texas. The market is waiting for a plant to be built in Quebec. When will this happen? It's a big capital project and hard or impossible for juniors to undertake.

The Quebec government also needs to complete or announce a start date to complete the road to the Trans Taiga Road in the north to allow more direct all-weather shipment of spodumene to a new lithium chemical producer ideally in the south of the province. These actions will give the market more confidence I believe.

On a positive note, I read over the past week that Rio Tinto is looking at more lithium acquisitions and growing their lithium business. They already are large landholders in James Bay and any M&A action from them would quickly see a focus on Canadian lithium. With the lithium price in the doldrums and projects relatively cheap, now would be an ideal time to move in my view.

I'm not sure the Yellowknife projects are economic given the narrow widths of our neighbour Li-Ft Power at Hidden Lake. In this remote part of the world a project needs to be large (greater than 50 million tonnes) to be economic and I can't see how hits of 25 metres are going to cut it. LIFT.V remains at a market cap of $20 million in spite of all their drilling success over the past year.

I'm more bullish about Scotty. This is a very large and globally significant project with likely high grade. What most punters fail to understand about sedimentary projects is that the process train produces lithium carbonate without going through a downstream chemical process thereby cutting capex significantly. This allows the project to avoid all the downstream logistic issues faced by hard rock projects in Quebec. The clay at the Scotty project is amenable to processing via calcination avoiding the sulphuric acid route as the lithium is relatively weakly suspended in the matrix. Borehole mining is far simpler and cheaper than blasting, grinding and acid process trains. I'm optimistic about this one. Check out some of the youtube videos put out by our neighbour at Scotty Nevada Lithium (NVLH.CN) for more detail on this.

Just some of my thoughts as we start 2024 and hopefully a rebound in the lithium price by mid-February as Chinese New Year triggers more EV buying in China. Good luck to all holders.