AVZ (ASX) The Road to Manono

Originally posted by kcheers ↑

With all due respect, im gobsmacked. What do you define passing as meaning? You feel you can predict and built a road for when trucks are passing each other? Ive got no response for that. Sure roads will have the ability for pee stops, sleep and meal breaks, towns and breakdown areas. Not all parts willbe elevated and have no shoulder and width. Overtaking lanes are desirable and for safety. But these roads in early years may not have extremely high passenger traffic, but it wont take long. On a transport side, you wouod find the trucks used would have a lot of similarities as they more often come from large transport operators. There us not the owner driver network there like it is in australia. But your thoughts of buildinf infrastructure and necessitating stop go guys on bridges seems a little foreign to my thinking. Road safety willbe important from outside interests and relying on 24/7 CONTROL on bridges seems a little delusional to me

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kcheers I respect your trucking experience, real world practical logistical experience and your sensible contribution to this thread but I think you are misunderstanding me (which is the only reason I think you'd be gobsmacked).

I was trying to take a sort of systems engineering (for lack of a better word perspective) to identify if it would be *possible* (not ideal, not even likely just possible) using only trucks and only the 617 route to to support a scenario which I could envisage as being a base line startup scenario involving an offtake agreement, on site mining facilities to turn 2Mtpa into about 300,000 - 360,000 tpa spodumene concentrate with 6% lithium.

Why would I want to do that? Because when there are many variables being thrown around you have to assume some things to see what the implications are for other things.

If a scenario could be put together (and I can't yet see why it couldn't) using stop/go guys and some numbers of trucks per day to get the amount of spodumene concentrate to lubumbashi then I'd be confident that scenario in itself would be useful - until more optimal ones were produced by the company or just folks like me (and perhaps you and Dr_Manhattan and others) - useful because it would be a proof in principle of that aspect of a bootstrap operation. Not for a moment would I imagine it would the practical solution they'd ultimately run with - but it would be something immediate to put back to detractors who say Manono is hopelessly stranded.

This road to manono thread - once promising because it put logistical matters apart from the noise is now itself becoming noisy - so I know what you mean about possibly missing stuff. I was working on logistics on thursday when Klaus's bombshell made me turn my energy to governance ethics and legals. For me that is what I need to consider next and in detail now before transport logistics.

If I was going ahead on logistics - in the spirit I understood Dr Manhattan had with this thread I'd recommend forking the thread again into multiple possible roads out of Manono. From Manono there are at least three roads outward to Lubumbashi - if trucks can get out on any of them (at financial breakeven with respect to the rest of the project in an offtake scenario) enough to move say 360,000 t pa then that is an aspect of the systems engineering shown to be feasible - not optimal just feasible.

And with just google earth or satelite map searches any mug AVZ punter can help build up a body of knowledge about exactly where the bridge locations are, about passing points (in a scenario where stop go guys on bridges prevent passing on bridges).

I haven't explained optimally what I have or had in mind. But perhaps you get the idea.