SLI Demo plant commissioningDEMO Plant Commissioning consists of tweaking and refining the performance for preparation of commercial scale. What this all means.... Production is not a key driver, hence the LiCarb product is turned back into the reserve resource thru re-Injection, so the DEMO plant can be fine tuned!
Think of the Re-injection as off spec, back into resource much like a Recycle until The DEMO plant arrives at it's PEAK performance!
Establishing peak rate of recovery, swing bed performance & finding the turnover rates is essential to arriving at accurate data required by Shareholders & JV parties Lanxess.
Anything short of Accurate numbers for PEA would be disappointing.
If it turns out the recovery rate is marginally lower than expected... that's not a problem, as thru put would just be increased, offsetting any recovery rate not estimated, so long as LiCarb purity spec is met!
When these parameters are clearly defined, the Production spigot will be opened & re-injected will be minimized/reduced from when it was needed/required during the tweaking and performance refining stage.
Production & PEA will be well defined for Scalable production plants...
The DEMO will likely continue to produce, until they relocate it to another resource(Tetra).
This transition to Production will happen quickly from the Tweak & tune period.
Production numbers will be clearly reported & needed for Scale up!
Yes the Q4 numbers they report to the AOCC will be markedly different than we’ve seen up to now!
as for the Brine.... it's an endless circular media fluid that contains Li. to varying amounts on average 220-230PPM by the looks of AOCC data.
Not all Brine is equal, as a mixture (solution) of dissolved Metal & Salts from ground formations.
SLI have already stated that each extraction plant can & will be custom made for the Brine solution native to that area. If LI is in the Brine.... They - SLI can get it out thru Extraction!
There will be more Customers lined up at their SLI door after Lanxess & Tetra....