Interesting debate and points being made on this AGY/RIO...

Interesting debate and points being made on this AGY/RIO situation which I alluded to when RIO bought next door.

As it is, I never really read or investigated much about these DLE processes as there are few around. I have heard of Ansto Materials developing a DLE process for Altura mining but I am not aware of the results with their plant in China and yesterday as this stock has been mentioned on this thread I went through the announcements of LKE dating back to January 2020, (Mods please no cross advertising here.)

LKE formed a partnership with Lilac Solutions with Lilac to earn a max 25% stakes into LKE project back in about 2019-2020.

Then the timeline was to have High purity LCE samples by April 2020, samples to battery makers by H1 2020 and phased expansion from 10'000 tpa to 25'000 tpa LCE 2022-2023.

Lilac/LKE refer to the similarity of their process with the chemical techniques employed in the water industry and as one of my last project was to manage the construction of one reverse osmosis installation in a 24ft container, I still remember some issues but one which stand out still 12 years later was the actual pressures involved, approx 100 bar or 10'000 Kpa and all the problems with welding, polishing, reliability of the pumps, etc.

Few days back LKE advised that they received the modules which hopefully should let them move to the next stage which is if I understand is to demonstrate the process, Lilac mentioned 2.5t of LCE in 3-4 months and I guess this should enable them to create the samples to send to the battery makers which was originally planned for H1 2020.

From my limited research, some limited conclusions,
As mentioned above LKE are at list 3 years behind the initial schedule.

IMO it would be safe to assume that AGY should be able to earn a similar percentage or slightly less with RIO or anyone else for this matter just for our process.

The main difference between AGY and LKE is Mr Pablo Aluarrlde has proven is process nearly 3 years ago at AGY and in is past 30 years of employment at FMC he has presented is invention as patent to extract LCE from concentrated brines on sodium chloride and has the previous experience to scale up is process which really make me feel at ease with my proportionally very high investment in AGY.

If I was a SH in LKE I would be concerned about the scale up of Lilac process if not the actual process itself?

The size of our resource and our 2000 tpa plant have been mentioned has too small to attract 2nd tier investors but taking into account our planned extra 10000 tpa future plant into consideration it would be interesting to have a comparison between our 12000 tpa LCE versus the main Australian spodumene producers