"Our current facilities in Argentina are operating at record levels and as you saw this quarter, we're successfully managing the seasonal production variation caused by weather conditions. In addition, our debottlenecking project will add an incremental 2,000 tons to 3,000 tons of carbonate production in 2018 with the remainder coming in 2019.
Next, our agreement with Nemaska to buy 8,000 tons a year of carbonate, starting in 2018 runs for multiple years and we remain confident in Nemaska's ability to meet their commitments to FMC. We will continue to look at similar sourcing deals where terms and price make sense. However, our first priority option to source additional carbonate is to significantly expand capacity at our Argentina location where we are planning to invest $250 million to $300 million to add 20,000 tons of capacity. This facility is one of the lowest cost producers in the world, significantly lower than it was in 2015 before the Argentine peso devaluation. We estimate our current cash costs are less than half that of a typical bitumen-based producer.
Expanding this facility has low risk execution. We have operated at this location for many years and have benefited from our ongoing manufacturing excellence programs. We are progressing the engineering work and we are in discussion with local authorities to finalize these plans. As we have stated since March 31, it is our firm intention to create two independently listed public companies with leading positions in their respective industry. To this end, our current plan is to move toward a separate listing of FMC Lithium in the second-half of 2018. We expect to announce a final decision on the timing by the second quarter of 2018."
"Now we learn that Tesla is looking for similar projects in Argentina as a company executive visited government officials in the country last week
Bob Rudd, a former VP of Energy Storage at SolarCity and now Director of Energy Storage and Microgrids at Tesla, met with Gorvernor of Salta Province Juan Manuel Urtubey’s Cabinet Chief, Carlos Parodi, and the Minister of Environment and Sustainable Production, Javier Montero.
In a press release, the Gorvernor said that Rudd expressed Tesla’s “interest in investing in renewable energy” in the region and the province’s potential for lithium exploitation.
They added:
“Rudd said that Salta is the first place in the country that they visit with intentions to invest, due to the advantages offered by the province, both for its natural conditions and for predictability for investors through the official policy of ensuring legal security for development of productive projects.”
Argentina still gets most of its electricity from fossil fuels and therefore, there are a lot of opportunities to develop solar and energy storage projects, but it’s especially interesting that Tesla chose to visit the Salta province, which has been described as “ground zero” for lithium, an important material for Tesla’s batteries.
Tesla has previously looked in Chile, where there are large lithium deposits, for partnership with local lithium miners, but it’s the first time we hear of Tesla looking in Argentina to source lithium.
Some of the resources needed to make Tesla’s batteries have come to the forefront of the junior mining industry trying to bring online new mining operations. Especially since Tesla announced that it tripled the planned production of the Model 3 to over 100 GWh per year and now plans to start working on 3 to 4 more Gigafactories.'
GXY Price at posting:
$1.76 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
