Its fair to say that low iron in your spodumene sales will get you a higher price. How much more is uncertain but certainly more, and at a guess at
least US$50 per tonne more IMO if the Fe in your spod is say 1% compared to say 1.8%. That is a
total guess btw but hard to get your hands on what the actual discount for high impurities in your spodumene is (noting at some level if impurities are too high the buyer will refuse to buy the spodumene IMO btw, or significant penalties will apply). If others have a different perspective or have data please share.
Low iron also means you can target both the technical grade (TG) and chemical grade (CG) lithium market, which I yabbered about below.
And the main reason why I am assuming a higher price for 6% spodumene sales with low levels of impurities is because having low levels of impurities per se in your spodumene sales means you can target the growing hydroxide market (where prices are better than the lithium carbonate market), and like I said above the technical grade market as well.
In part, the discount arises given the higher cost downstream converters have in removing impurities in the spodumene btw, but I provided some context in these posts, the first one I posted on the AVZ thread about Fe content and impact on converter recoveries, a well as what are the specs for TG, CG, Carbonate and Hydroxide etc, whilst the last two I posted on the PLS thread, when for some weird reason people were debating the issue LOL:
Post #:
38364396Post #:
38419435Post #:
38419566In essence, impurities reduce lithium recovery in the spodumene concentrate (through clinkers which I talk about in the first embedded post above, been the one I posted in the AVZ thread, and at worse can mean the product is not suitable for the hydroxide market.
Whilst the prices received will IMO be certainly higher the lower your impurities are in your 6% spodumene sales, not much literature about on what that actual differential is btw.
Another factor is moisture content in the 6% grade spodumene sold. The higher the moisture content above the standard, I suspect that will also impact price received.
6% grade spodumene means that 75% of the spodumene sold is spodumene, the rest needing to be taken out by the offshore converters. So the higher the bad impurities are in that 25% and mositure content the lower the price received IMO. Now if you can produce 6.5% grade spodumene that means 81% of the spodumene sold is spodumene, the other 19% needing to be taken out by the converters (and having a high grade and higher % in spodumene sales also likely means lower 'bad' impurity content that offshore converters need to deal with, hence why I would prefer AVZ sell greater than 6% grade spodumene. Furthermore having a high grade deposit (i.e. averaging 1.6% Li20) and a thick dense homogeneous pegmatite system allowing for a very very good strip to ore ratio means you can sell IMO more high quality product (and therefore attract a higher price) than those hard rock deposits that have high strip to ore ratios and having a (series of) pegmatite systems that are not homogeneous.
This link below says essentially the same thing as well:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/all-chemical-grade-spodumene-concentrates-same-harman-grant
All IMOIf you work on 850 g LCE per kWh (note I use 900 g LCE per kWh) then 50 MWh = 42,500 kg LCE or
42.5 tonnes LCE (42,500/1000 = 42.5 tonnes).
All IMO
