I haven't forgotten about tantulum or tin but there needs to be a technological development that allows them to be extracted from the same process, or they will continue to be attained through the tailings or AVZ will need different pits around these minerals. Post #:
31669795
The other thing we don't talk about with AVZ is technical grade lithium. Chemical grade lithium is what makes the batteries but it cannot be used in technical grade lithium applications because technical grade lithium needs lower iron content than chemical grade applications. Now technical grade lithium can be used as a substitute for chemical grade lithium but not vice versa because technical grade carbonate can be used in battery making as well. Now I suspect based on the assays reported to date that iron is actually quite low so AVZ, or whoever buys it, IMO could also be in a position to produce both chemical grade and technical grade lithium. Obviously I am making an assumption here.
Greenbushes produces both chemical and technical grade lithium, so that is possibly another revenue stream for AVZ if the deposit is low iron - for Greenbushes refer to this quote from this website:
http://www.talisonlithium.com/projects
"
The Greenbushes Lithium Operations has two processing plants, one producing technical-grade lithium concentrates and one producing chemical-grade lithium concentrate. Ore containing Li2O is fed into the processing plants which upgrade the lithium mineral, using gravity, heavy media, flotation and magnetic processes, into a range of lithium concentrates for bulk or bagged shipment."
Technical grade lithium is used predominantly as for feedstock for glass and ceramic industries, and hard rock is the primary source of that as well, but as I said above technical grade lithium can also be used for batteries. Its another potential revenue stream (assuming iron content is low for AVZ) but not much gets said about this aspect by AVZ and ML because nearly everything they ever talk about is about batteries (and yes batteries is the growth sector for lithium so that certainly should be rightfully the focus so no question there). Reason why I raise technical grade lithium is because, on research, the main buyer of technical grade lithium is China and Europe - see
http://www.goldendragoncapital.com/lithium-price-3/
Therefore that is possibly another revenue bow but depends on the iron content. Don't think any of the Australian plays outside Greenbushes can produce technical grade lithium (but could be wrong there) either because they either a.) have a resource with higher iron that means it can't be used in technical grade applications and/or b,) they don't have the resources available to tap into this revenue stream so they go after the predominant revenue streams available been chemical grade applications in the battery market.
With the scale and size of the AVZ resource, assuming low iron well it could be another revenue stream to tap into if it can also serve the technical grade market, whilst predominantly targeting chemical grade applications in the battery market.
All IMO
(20min delay)