Over the last couple of days there have been reports of $US11,000/t for Lithium Carbonate from Ganfeng. I personally found that a little hard to believe so I went looking for the source.....
"International Lithium strategic partner Ganfeng Lithium put up its prices for a second time in the space of month last week to $11,049/tonne! With rising Lithium prices Ganfeng Lithium market cap is rising as well, now this giant from China has reached 2.3 Billion market cap. Industrial Minerals calls Ganfeng leading Chinese carbonate supplier and you can see the chart below reflecting the market situation in China. It will come as a shock for many:
"Chinese lithium producer Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium Co. Ltd increased the price of its lithium carbonate last week, marking the second rise in a single month.
The company raised the sale value of its material by nearly 17%, from Chinese renminbi (Rmb) 60,000/tonne ($9,470/tonne*) to Rmb 70,000/tonne ($11,049/tonne) - Industrial Minerals"
Ganfeng has announced in China on its website establishing of $170 million credit line to finance expansion of its production facilities, financing of acquired last year mobile lithium battery maker and investing in the development of raw material base. The security of supply is everything.
International Lithium is building vertically integrated lithium business with Ganfeng."
That is from Kirill Klip the president of International Lithium Corporation. ILC is a small market Cap company listed on the Toronto exchange (currently 6c/sh) with their fingers in a few lithium pies including brines in Argentina.
I find it extremely unlikely the president of a listed company would be spreading false information, so I regard the prices of lithium carbonate as true, ie $US11,049/t.
This becomes very interesting as many of the battery makers are starting to turn to lithium hydroxide, I have no idea why, but Tesla is one of them. With the brines, it is easy to make lithium carbonate, but further processing must be used to make lithium hydroxide, whereas with Spodumene either can be produced from the lithium oxide, using different processes.
The effect on the price of spodumene of the latest prices for lithium products, and the rate they are rising, means using $445/t of 6%+ Li2O spodumene is very conservative.
It takes approximately 16t of 6%+ Li2O to get 1 tonne of Li2O, but 1 tonne of Lithium oxide will make something like 2.5-2.8 tonnes of Lithium hydroxide (I don't remember my chemistry that well to work it out), so at $US445/t of spodumene concentrate works out to $US7,120/t of Li2O, but the product they make from it is worth over $US35,000.
So I'm thinking that the price of battery grade spodumene is about to rise a lot, and thinking in terms of $US1,000 is not out of the question, which comes back to over $A1,400/t of 6%+ spodumene concentrate.
I think we should forget technical grade, as there is huge profit sitting in the ground. As Mcduff says, move that dirt!!! The in ground value of our resource is over $7.2b at this type of price, with about 70-80% being profit after costs and royalties.
My personal thoughts on the DFS is that we should be looking at a 2mt/a plant to last 13 years at the current known resource, or 9.5 years on the indicated resource. It should be costing about $150m in capital but return ~$450m EBITDA.
That quite easily gives us the heading of the title of this thread, from current levels!!
