The three producers Niobec, CBMM and Anglo are all between 50% and 58% recovery. It is the norm for Nb processing.

I have never seen anything published for metallurgical recovery for SRSR

It costs 20-30 million to sink a shaft, but operating costs are about the same for underground bulk tonnage mining and open pit these days. Being able to high grade is very helpful.

I have no clue how you can say the grades are equivalent.


NioCorp:

Indicated 19,319,000 .67%
Inferred 83,288,000 .63%

The resource estimate was derived from the drill data which was from 400m X 600m x 400m in depth area

Some of the 30 drill holes are below:

NioCorp

EC-11: 71.6m 1.19%

EC-16: 67.1m 0.91%

EC-29: 201.2m 0.99%

NEC-11-001: 235.2m 0.73%
Including 54.3m 1.17%

NEC-11-002: 179.18m 0.87%
Including: 131.03m 1.02%

NEC-11-003: 130.37m 0.58%
Including 34.16m 0.94%

Sarissa's Nb deposit is probably 200m X 200m X 200m - 300m depth from all the evidence I can see

The average drill hole is .4% nb and the highest grade hole is .58%

My guess is the deposit is 30-40 million tonnes at .45% nb

This is a lot different than NioCorp's Elk Creek of roughly 100 million tonnes between .63% and .67%

The thing about an underground mine is you can go after the high grade sections first. Elk Creek has significant tonnage near 1% as you can see from the drill data above.

Also Elk Creek has a paved road, electricity, water and rail on the deposit which is pretty expensive to build for SRSR.

I will say that I like both projects and am invested in both...