Thanks Kate and Bassomatic for the heads up on the podcast. 40 minutes well spent for anyone interested in LAC, whether you’re optimistic, pessimistic, anxious or excited. This is all meat. Everyone will have their own takeaways, but I’ll be so bold as to offer a few of mine for those who might not get the opportunity to listen.

First, I cannot get over how calm and well spoken Jon Evans is. He exudes confidence and it is no wonder that he is held in such high regard in the industry.

He acknowledged that everyone is anxious for the DFS, but he said that a silver lining to COVID was that everything slowed down a bit, allowing introspection and the opportunity to make sure they’re getting the engineering right such that they can produce both carbonate and hydroxide to meet market requirements. And don’t worry about offtake agreements. He doesn’t want one yet because he wants to get the right one at the right time to maximize the benefit. People are calling him all the time wanting him to commit. He also took a shot at people beseeching him to make PR statements, saying that we should all trust him and his team (I chuckled at this one given many comments on this board and others – no offense).

He called LAC an “advanced developer” as opposed to a junior due to where they are with respect to upcoming production. He stressed that the CO project is easily scalable and can support much more than the 40k tpa their starting with. 

He noted that current production in the US is 5k tpa, and in 2030 it should be around 350k tpa, but to hit that basically all current development projects would need to be successful, and then some. Even then, the US would have 350k tpa out of a world wide production of maybe 2 million tpa. I found this scale interesting. 

He loves his team and would put them up against the best in the industry. He feels one of his biggest upcoming challenges is scaling up from a small company to a big company. There was some talk of ESG but not one mention of the environmental opposition to Thacker Pass, which I found very reassuring.

Overall, you come out of this podcast with a great feeling about the short and long term future of the company. I believe Alexi Zawadzki, CEO of Lithium Nevada, is up on Joe’s next podcast. Can’t wait for that one too.