Relevant Excerpts from Lake Update Webinars, page-85

Resuming from where we left off before we all had a great weekend......aside from a couple that were obviously busy posting on HC.....

The topic covered in this transcript is "Why did we run such an extensive Demo Plant program?"
Sourced from Update Webinar #2 on 28/9/23
Commentary made by Jonathan Neilsen - Project Technical Director

KG: One of the things that we talked about just a little bit ago, but I think we do get questions about it, is why did we run the demo plant as long as we did? Why do we have this program?

JN: We have two significant demo programs that we’ve run with Lilac on the brine and we just talked about the Saltworks carbonation. Really it comes down to that Naysayer question and building confidence in the process for us and for the market. This program that we've been running will be finishing up here in another month or so. By the time we're done, I think the estimates are we're going to run some 4 million litres of brine through this plant and produce a couple of hundred thousand litres of eluate. That's a tremendous test program that de-risks our project fantastically. That gives us fantastic data going into the design of the process for the DFS, including all of the things that we need to optimise. So, using this phrase again, “putting ourselves in the best position for success for the commercial plant” is gathering all of this data and feeding it into the commercial design….and that's what we've been able to accomplish with this.

The other thing that we've done (and it dovetails a little bit with the conversation with Saltworks), is we have a little bit of a unique situation here where with the eluate production that we have, we again will have vendor qualification work that will be in combination with the streams that we have from Saltworks. We have real eluate that we're going to be able to supply to those vendors, that they're going to be able to do that work on when we get into the FEED. Again, that's unique. Most of the time they have to do all that work on synthetic solutions because they don't have it available. We have real solution, so again de-risking and confidence in the process is really high.