Fascinating video.  Howard Klein's comments bridge the time from Western Lithium days to the present and one of the things he addressed in his comments was the topic of when Western Lithium shipped lithium clay samples to Germany for processing into battery grade lithium.  It appears that when Ganfeng came on board to the situation and after Western Lithium became Lithium Americas it was Ganfeng that axed the proposed process that had been on a trial basis in Germany.  Ganfeng apparently decided Western Lithium should look for a different process re: lithium clay.  I was not aware of that sequence of events until Howard Klein commented on it.

There are many more "jewels" in Mr. Klein's presentation.  I would have to conclude that it is a real "eye opener", but it brings me back to one of chief concerns about LAC, one that I expressed yesterday:  the real future here for LAC is so very dependent upon exactly what is happening at the Reno, Nevada LAC lab.  Klein explains in detail as to why extraction of lithium from clay is not as simple or as easy as Elon Musk claimed in his recent Battery Day presentation.  He also gives an excellent recap of the things that all long time LAC investors know as a result of following the individual steps of Western Lithium and then LAC for many years:  Taking a mining claim from initial purchase of the claim all the way to first day of lithium production is a long term and complicated process... not something that can be done overnight.  Klein generously allowed that maybe Musk might be able to do it in a total time of 5 years at the earliest, but more likely it would take him 7 to 10 years.. in other words the average time for the industry as a whole to develop a new claim into a working lithium producting mine.  There will still be those who think that Musk has a magic wand and simply has to wave it to turn water into wine, but on the other hand there are those who have mining experience and no full well all the intricacies  required in the real world of mining.  Klein pointed out that Musk has at his disposal an army of computer and technical types, but only a handful of those with real mining experience... and it isn't as if that commodity can be generated out of thin air.  Lithium may not itself be rare on planet earth, but experienced mining engineers in the field of lithum mining are indeed a rare breed.

In the comment section I found a reference to a company in California that has a lithium ion exchange processing of lithium brine as their bread and butter.  LAC seems committed to sulfuric acid extraction processing, but if they were to consider transmogrification of the lithium clay into a brine salt solution and going forward with that line of processing then the following technical process might be something to consider.... the claim is that it does so in 2 hours!

 http://www.lilacsolutions.com/technology

Thanks for your post, WB DT !!