Post by
Mookster3 on Oct 13, 2022 2:51pm
Pak compared to Thacker Pass
The Thacker Pass lithium clays are five times lower in grade than Pak, at only 0.3% LiOH. LAC is well aware of the problems associated with low grade mining and does it’s best to hide the grade by reporting it in ppm rather than percent. Low grade deposits require huge mining scales to become economic, but in this case, it also translates into huge problems getting the environmental permits. The high-grade Pak deposits on the other hand, are economic at virtually any scale. The Phase I development at Pak, which now appears to be focusing on the higher-grade Pak pegmatite (2% LiOH) will have grades seven times higher than Thacker Pass. And Thacker Pass ‘ore’ is in fact clay, which will involve a complicated chemical processing procedure, that I’m not sure has yet been demonstrated successfully at large scale.
The Mookster
Comment by
diabase1 on Oct 13, 2022 7:19pm
Mookster, I like your assessment. I'd like to add that one of the problems with Thacker Pass is that it has to pump up lot of groundwater with the brine. The farmers and ranchers don't like that.