Lithium Brine Pond Comparison

Primary tickers: $LAC $ALB $LTHM $SQM $RIO $AKE:ASX    

Evaporation ponds aren't the only factor to consider when looking at lithium brine operations, but they typically represent a large component of capital investment and can be a limiting factor toward production capacity.

The following is as apples-to-apples as you can reasonably get with a simple visualization. We're not talking about evap rate, brine grade, or many other controlling factors here. If nothing else its a look at how much brine can be staged at the surface, concentrated, treated, and ready for whatever processing ensues.

Current pond areas shown at the same scale in an equal-area map projection

You'll notice how the legacy operations are are kinda ad-hoc, the newcomers are much more compact/coherently designed, and the DLE players are small. Tianqi hasn't built their ponds yet, so that is the design from Neo Lithium's 3Q DFS. RIO's Rincon is still pilot stage. ALB's Clayton Valley ponds are so old I'm not even sure they have liner underneath them. Obviously, SQM has a huge operation. I did not include Bolivia's Uyuni op because... well, its unapproachable to investors.

Evaporation is an essential component of concentrating and refining lithium brine. Ponds suit this purpose mainly because they're simple, they utilize free solar energy, they crucially serve as unfathomably large holding tanks for time-consuming treatment with reagents, and they allow for stockpiling.

When assessing traditional or DLE brine ops with an evaporative component, there are some requirements that investors can screen with:

Ponds are objectively large and need a sizeable footprint which is determined primarily by the planned production capacity, the brine grade, and the evaporation rate. The scale spans the order of hundreds to thousands of hectares, depending on the op. Most of the ones shown are over a thousand hectares.

They also need to be on nearly flat ground and above the high-water-line of the salar, lest they risk the ponds being contaminated with diluting surface water or otherwise compromising the inpoundment. 

Finally, at a minimum, they must hold the permits and surface rights to the land the ponds are to be built on.

If a project meets these requirements, they'll generally talk about it in PR, presentations, or ideally in a feasibility study. If they do not meet these requirements, one should remain skeptical and invest only with a very high confidence in the deposit, other significant derisking events, or wait for a feasibility study to confirm some level of engineering which accounts for them.