The Kitumba example wasn’t meant to be a direct comparison, it was just an example that came immediately to my mind about a significant project where funding for a DFS was withdrawn before it was completed.
I don’t want to go into the differences here about the lithium market and the copper markets as I could go on all day long. You are right however to say that the falling copper price contributed to the failure of that project but there were also issues arising internally from the scoping studies done on Kitumba that helped stop the project. I won’t go into a lot of detail here but the problems revolved around not having enough shallow sulphide ore to drive the sulphidation circuits to enable the winning of the copper cathode metal product, along with the copper concentrate product, which was to be roughly a 58%/42% product split as part of the mine plan. The mine originally was going to be akin to a downstream refinery, able to keep treating concentrates and electrowinning them into copper metal after the end of mining but by this model it would have needed to buy third party sulphide concentrates at the beginning of its life cycle and sell them towards the end. The CapEx numbers proved to be too large, the NPV too low, and the breakeven Cu price proved to be too high. Subsequent plans looked at CapEx cost reductions and scrapping the electrowinning, hence making the mine independent of needing to by third party concentrates. Half way through the final DFS study the company just packed the study in and stopped funding it altogether.
There are many reasons why projects don’t proceed and the underlying commodity price is just one. You can not assume that just because a scoping study has been completed, a DFS will also be completed and a mine built, it doesn’t always happen that smoothly. Esh
