New Lithium Related Article, page-2010

Anthony Tse

SoRahul, we sold the resource in the northern tenements for $280 million, which implied a measured andindicated resource value per tonne of about USD 177. So clearly, kind of the resource on that Salarhas a marked kind of value -- intrinsic value in there. I think there's a couple of things. I'll talked about the strategic side and then hand over to Brian. From my understanding, there's a certain depth that we drilled previously, which Brian will talk about in a moment, and then we're looking to go a lot deeper. From our perspective, it's twofold. Firstly, I think we recently just sold 1.5 million tonnes or whatever, 2-point-something million tonnes of total resource to POSCO in terms of the transaction that we announced back in May. We think that the resource actually has -- or those properties that we have in the south -- this actually had nothing to do with POSCO, so all of that drilling isactually down in the southern tenement. We'd like to think we could potentiallybe in a position where could basically recover what we've essentially just soldto POSCO in terms of volume in a very short space of time and with a very deminimis amount of exploration expenditure, that's the first thing.

Thesecond thing is through some of the interactions that we have had with ourstrategic parties, I think there's a genuine level of interest to look at thelonger-term potential because obviously, some of those parties also recognize that Argentina is ina much better spot competitively in terms of production cost versus probably some of their neighborsin Chile and definitely, compared to the hard rock plus converter kind of facilities in Australiaplus China. And so some of the questions that we have had from the strategic investors is, why is the number 25, i.e., why is the number 25,000 tonnes per annum? Could it potentially be 50,000 tonnes per annum in terms of what one could end up producing out of Sal de Vida? And so it's probably -- on those two fronts that we have been thinking strategically in terms of how much near term and very kind of low cost potential is there for us to actually unlock from the Sal de Vida resource. So that's kind on the strategic level. I'll hand over to Brian probably just to probably cover off on some of the kind of technical detail of that exploration work.