Extended Q&A with Cleantech Lithium's Gordon Stein as he discusses funding & the path to production

Описание: London South East were delighted to welcome Cleantech Lithium Chief Financial Officer Gordon Stein to discuss funding options and the path to production for CTL's three direct lithium projects in the Chilean Andes.

These three projects are all potential 'Lithium projects' in themselves, at Laguna Verde, Fransansisco, and the latest at Llamara to the North of Chile.

CTL have just announced a successful scoping study for Laguna Verde with one to come soon for Fransansisco Basin and as Gordon says, what has been achieved in his 15 months with the company has been 'astonishing - we are moving in a very nice direction'.

Mining projects generally take 5-7 years from discovery to production if advanced at high speed, and often they take more. CTL are targetting production for late 2025 or early 26 says Gordon, which is fast by industry standards.

CTL have already raised £20M in difficult markets in the last year or so and are funded to the Pre-Feasability Study.

Laguna Verde Pre-Feasability Study
• Gordon thinks that the next 6-9 months will see many ‘catalyst events’ which will see the share price re-rate significantly as the business works towards a Pre-Feasability Study (PFS) for Laguna Verde
• Round about Q3 this year you will get the PFS for Laguna Verde
• In terms of funding, he sees a debt/equity split of say 60/70% debt
• He sees many sources of debt and equity, starting with the obvious one, the banks. This is a high quality green lithium project, lithium supply is constrained and despite CAPEX costs of $383M the project has a payback period of just 20 months
• Chairman Steve Kessler made the point that strategic investors, an obvious source of capital investment/share stake, won’t invest until the PFS is available
• Many options are available and even now early conversations with potential lenders, funds, banks and strategic investors are being had


Fransansisco Basin
• Fransansisco Basin is 6 to 12 months behind LV so there will be synergies in funding
• If LV needs CAPEX of $383M, the projects jointly will only need funding of $5/600M as LV begins to throw of cash in a relatively short period of time
• We are drilling our 2nd well in Fransansisco Basin right now and we will drill 2 more wells there
• We already have ½M tonnes from the first well
• We’ll have the results for all 4 wells in the early part of Q2 2024
• We hope to have 2 Mt of Lithium reserves, with higher quality brine then LV.
• Then it’s a Scoping Study looking at what’s required to bring that project on stream

Llamara
• Llamara could potentially be huge
• We are in a court process and hopefully we will be getting licences this month or next
• Hopefully we will be hitting the ground quickly with an exploration well which will cost $2/300,000
• We know from Oil & Gas surveys there’s brine. We are pretty confident there is lithium there, what we don’t know is if it is commercially viable with our DLE technology.

Sunresin
• In the 2nd Q of 2023 we have commissioned a pilot plant from SunResin which is coming from Belgium
• Sunresin don’t extract, their clients do, and three of their clients are working on projects producing lithium right now, successfully producing from much lower quality lithium brine
• The lithium sticks to the resin in a very clean way, can be extracted and we will end up with battery quality rated lithium.
• We are still looking at whether we end with carbonate or the next stage which is hydroxide

#CTL #Lithium #Chile #Andes #batteryqualitylithium #greenlithium
#GordonStein #CleartechLithium #Cannacord #FoxDaviesCapital #Stevekessler #AldoBoitano