John, more important regarding Lilac, is there present and past relationship to another lithium mining company you may have heard about recently:  Cypress Development Corporation.

Cypress, as you well know, is the same Cypress that Elon Musk and Tesla were in negotiations with recently in order to try and establish a supply contract for Tesla.  Those negotiations failed, no doubt because Elon kept to his habitual low ball offer technique and Cypress rejected what would have been a bad deal for them and good for Elon.

The failed negotiation with Cypress was, in fact, the turning point for Elon and Tesla and it was after Cypress rejected the Trojan Horse offering of Elon that Elon looked eleswhere for some other "Bargain Basement" deal he could offer some unsophisticated sucker company for their 10,000 acre lithium mining claim.  We don't know at present who "company X" is.  There has been some sort of speculation here and elsewhere that the 10,000 acre lithium claim might, in fact, be Thacker Pass.  I can only hope that should that be the case that Jon Evans negotiated much, much better terms than the terms Elon offered Bill  Willoughby, Cypress CEO.

Let's take a look at the Cypress-Lilac connection as it was reported back in 2019, only a short year ago:

"Cypress has developed an innovative leaching process which reduces the quantity of sulfuric acid needed to leach lithium from clay. After the lithium is leached into a sulfate solution (the “leachate”), Lilac can extract lithium from the leachate to produce a high-purity lithium solution (the “eluate”), which can be fed into conventional process equipment to produce a high-purity lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide product.

Lilac extracted lithium from the clay leachate using Lilac’s patented ion exchange process. Following initial engineering work on the Cypress leachate, Lilac was able to recover 83% of lithium from the leachate while simultaneously rejecting greater than 99% of sodium, potassium, and magnesium impurities. The remaining lithium in the leachate can then be recycled back to the leaching stage to effectively allow further recovery of the lithium.

“Lilac’s results are promising and offers us another path forward to effectively recover lithium from our process solutions” said Cypress’ CEO Dr. Bill Willoughby. “Our project is a significant potential source of domestic lithium and we are pleased to be working with Lilac in applying their ion exchange technology.”

Cypress and Lilac plan to advance engineering work towards a pilot plant and commercial development. Cypress is now completing a Pre-Feasibility Study which incorporates the Lilac process."

https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/battery-metals-investing/lithium-investing/cypress-development-and-lilac-solutions-demonstrate-high-lithium-recoveries-from-clayton-valley-project-in-nevada/

This July 2019 PR emphasized the nature of the type of lithium mining that would be associated with Cypress Development:  LITHIUM CLAY Mining

Funniest thing, that is the same source of lithium as we see with LAC at Thacker Pass:  Lithium CLAY.

See the following paragraphs from the July 2019 PR:

Today, most lithium is produced from lithium brine resources in South America or hard-rock resources in Australia.  Clay resources offer a potential new third branch of the lithium resource base and include large domestic United States resources such as Cypress’ Clayton Valley project. However, to date, clay resources have not achieved commercial lithium production due to technical challenges associated with lithium extraction.  Cypress and Lilac are addressing these challenges together with a highly efficient and modern mining process.

“Cypress has established one of the largest lithium resources in the United States and Lilac is excited to work with the Cypress team to move this domestic resource towards commercial production,” said David Snydacker, CEO and founder of Lilac Solutions. “The United States is home to a variety of important players in the electric vehicle sector and is an epicenter for innovation. This Nevada project has the potential to deliver the critical raw material needed by every North American automaker to compete over the next decade.”

Just sayin'     Okiedo