[rmm]

from what i can see the media/government minister have blown this out of proportion.

First off it looks like they identified 15M tonnes of lithium hosting rock (pegmatite) which has a grade of 0.4% of lithium in the form of spodumene (which then needs ot be processed to extract the lithium out of).

But in general, how it works is they drill a bunch of holes in the ground and analyse the cores. From that that interpolate the size/shape of the ore body and calculate an estimate of size.

The more holes they drill the greater the confidence.

There is a lot of 'art' to this science

[chefandy]

Roughly what how much volume would 15m tons of pegmatite take up? I have no intuitive sense of scale with these things.

[Jensson]

Rocks tend to be 5-10x denser than water, so assume 2 million cube meters. That is just 2 square kilometers 1 meter high, so not mountains or so. As a comparison, for a large iron mine they dig up many billions of tons of rock, and that is for very cheap iron, so you wouldn't need a very large operation to dig this up.

[chefandy]

Useful tool to reason about this. Thanks!

[hackernewds]

curious how you know all this info, if you can share to the level you feel comfortable