He said Lithium Nevada would be creating value at its Thacker Pass operation by manufacturing highly refined, ultra-pure battery quality products at an on-site plant. The product would be trucked to Winnemucca for rail shipment or by truck.

Transloading facility

The company expects to build a rail transloading facility in Winnemucca to offload raw materials needed for manufacturing to transport by truck to Thacker Pass, and trucks from the plant would return to Winnemucca with product to be loaded onto railcars or trucked out to “where our customers are. We have flexibility to do either,” Zawadkzi said.

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OK, I am referring to this 5 December 2019 article for 2 reasons.

1st   It documents the H1 2020 Timeline for the DFS on Thacker Pass  If you pull up the article it actually reproduces the original Timeline intact...the one LAC first published many months ago that clearly shows the line for the DFS within the first half of 2020.  Just scroll down the article and the Timeline from LAC is shown intact.

2nd  There has been some discussion elsewhere about a claim that going back a couple of years or maybe more LAC stated that they were going to build a battery manufacturing plant coexistent on the campus of the Thackere Pass facility.  I have not seen the documentation for that claim, however in this article Alexi Zawadzki, president of North American operations for Lithium Americas Corp. and chief executive officer of subsidiary Lithium Nevada Corp. clearly states that... at least as late as when he was interviewed in either late November 2019 or December 2019.. that "The company expects to build a rail transloading facility in Winnemucca to offload raw materials needed for manufacturing to transport by truck to Thacker Pass, and trucks from the plant would return to Winnemucca with product to be loaded onto railcars or trucked out to “where our customers are. We have flexibility to do either,” Zawadkzi said.

So it is mighty interesting to me that the man who should and would know differently had there been in late 2019 made no reference to any on campus site provision for LAC setting up a lithium ion battery manufacturing plant at Thacker Pass.   

It does seem strange that if the company published a year or more before this interview that they were building a battery manufacturing plant at Thacker Pass then why wouldn't Zawadzki mention it to this reporter from the Elko Daily Free Press since supposedly that information had been published prior to this interview?   

I can accept that fact that intraoffice communications among LAC executives could have easily taken place prior to late 2019... in fact they probably did, but the claim made elsewhere on TOB is that this information about constructing a Lithium Ion Battery Plant on the Thacker Pass campus was out in the public domain prior to this late 2019 interview with Zawadzki.  That claim just doesn't hold up in consideration of the information from this interview.

https://elkodaily.com/news/local/thacker-pass-lithium-project-on-schedule/article_7b77f1d9-a9d1-5616-a278-41b2fa9d1e01.html