Vulcan CEO - Response to shorts who have to retract22 Dec 2021 16:11
Standard Lithium mentioned. Tick.
"Dr Wedin said Rio Tinto’s announcement that it’s acquiring a direct lithium extraction project in Argentina for more than $825 million was a ‘vote of confidence’, as was a $140 million investment by a subsidiary of Koch Investments Group into Standard Lithium, which is planning to extract lithium from tail brine in Arkansas.
Vulcan has offtake agreements with four tier one car manufacturers, including Volkswagen and Renault groups. Dr Wedin said securing these agreements has involved visits to the geothermal site and numerous presentations.
“I’d say the smart money is investing into this space,” he said.
“There’s a lot of debate in technical circles about whether direct lithium extraction works, it has been operating commercially on brines to extract lithium since the 1990s.
“For each project, the brine is slightly different geochemically. You need to tweak the brine and absorbents to suit what you are doing and you need to tweak the parameters to optimise it, but it’s not a binary – will this work, wont it work, it works, it’s happening, it accounts for a significant amount of global production already, so it’s just a matter of tailoring it to your particular project.
“There’s always execution risk with any chemicals project and there are a lot of moving parts, there’s lots of things we have to control, there’s a lot of risks we have to control. We are building a geothermal project, a lithium extraction project, a lithium processing project.
“What would, in the normal course of events, be at least three separate businesses, we’re rolling into one fully-integrated renewable energy and zero-carbon lithium business, I mean there’s heaps of execution risk, so we shouldn’t shy away from that, but individually, all of those different technologies, we’re very confident all of those work.”
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