LAC and ORE had many years to trade acreage and tidy up their...

LAC and ORE had many years to trade acreage and tidy up their respective footprints in to nice contiguous bundles but chose not to. In fact both parties continued to add more acreage in the basin. It really doesn't matter that it is not contiguous.

I was a little surprised when ORE decided to spin the Cauchari project out in to AAL, but they had their reasons for doing so. It probably made sense at the time, and I think it still does. The Cauchari development has moved along much faster than ORE would have been able to progress it, and there is a transparent market valuation on the asset. In addition the deal making around the development and off-take is open to the highest/best bidders, whether from Japan or otherwise. So yes, it made sense and ORE took care to protect their strategic interests. If AAL now moved to sell some acreage, they would need to do it with ORE's blessing - both as a 30+ % shareholder in AAL and having pre-emptive rights.

I can't think of a good reason for AAL to sell any acreage at this stage.
~They have a well funded JV partner and major shareholder (ORE) - directly and indirectly ORE have an approx 50% in the project and I expect ORE will want to maintain (or grow) that interest.
~There should be plenty of interest from prospective off-take partners. The stand-alone project is currently a 401m USD project for 20ktpa. Depending on the debt equity assumptions, I can't see AAL looking for any more than 100m USD equity input from non-ORE sources. That doesn't seem too much of a stretch.
~There are other options if a stand-alone project can't get up - brine sales to ORE, for example - but I don't think that is a risk at this stage.

At the same time, I can't see a good reason for LAC/Ganfeng to buy anything from AAL. The Minera Exar JV already has a large resource with many decades of life - additional acreage provides little near term benefit. Further, they are in the middle of a major cash outflow while building their plant (which seems to be going a little slowly from the satellite shots) so I doubt they would find the ready cash for a purchase.

I had been expecting a deal by around mid-year, but this may be slowed a little with AAL's management change. One way or another I think we'll see a major announcement before the end of this year.