Assay laboratory and brine pilot plant of the Salta Puna

Preparation, conditioning, custody and consolidated freight — the small capital door, and the only one that needs no seal at all. Everything that today leaves the province for Jujuy, Mendoza, Buenos Aires or Chile is prepared before it travels: drying, crushing, splitting, labelling, chain of custody and shipment consolidation. It is a physical service, it is charged per sample and the client needs it whether or not its destination laboratory is accredited. You start with two to four clients. And there is a where, not only a what: the sample is concentrated — Arizaro gathers 17 of the province's 54 advanced exploration projects plus 13 surface ones, and Río Grande 9 advanced and 5 surface prob.

Water and environmental monitoring under a framework contract — the segment with no lock, and the one with three different payers: the operator that has to report, the hydrogeological consultancy that subcontracts the analytics and the body that audits. It is a regulatory obligation and nobody's opinion, it does not require accredited scope to start and its volume does not depend on the lithium price.

Pilot-scale testing without building the pilot plant — the door almost nobody looks at, and it exists because the equipment is already installed in the city of Salta. The mineral beneficiation institute of the province's national university has a pilot plant of 310 m² and 250 kg/h, modular, with «circuitos de tratamiento que pueden adaptarse o modificarse según los requerimientos del diagrama de flujos», and among its declared modules are the three a brine test needs: dissolution in stirred, steam-heated tanks, solid-liquid separation with thickeners, filter press and basket centrifuge, and dehydration with vacuum evaporator and spray evaporator; its service list includes crystallisation by cooling and by vacuum evaporation, and in the laboratory, atomic absorption with a graphite furnace. It serves the private sector by its own charter —part of its funding is «los ingresos procedentes de las prestaciones al medio»—. The limit has to be stated: the university names neither lithium nor brine, its plant is for mineral beneficiation, and adapting those circuits to a brine is engineering work and not a catalogue service. What changes anyway is the newcomer's arithmetic: pilot-scale testing can be offered with your own engineering and someone else's equipment, instead of with a million dollars of capex.

Your own accredited scope, or someone else's brand — the decision that defines whether the business scales. Accreditation is a long process —we estimate it at twelve to twenty-four months estim— and each scope carries the laboratory's address verif. There is multisite accreditation for whoever works at several sites, but that a new site in Salta has to pass its own assessment is our own reading thesis, and that turns the distance to the nearest accredited laboratory into a real barrier and not a logistical detail. The realistic way to avoid waiting two years is coming in with a brand —a joint venture or a franchise of a laboratory that already has a quality system—.

The check sample and external quality control — the door to the big block, and it opens where you would not expect. You do not fight the operator for its plant laboratory: you sell it what its own laboratory cannot sign. The professional who signs a resource estimate and the regulator who receives the report need a third party, and there the argument is not price: it is independence.