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Wondering about off takes
Mark hinted pretty strongly about producing Niobium Oxide or Chloride. He already has off takes for 75% of the Niobium which would be ferro niobium. He might be thinking I don’t want to lock up all the Niobium in offtakes because I might want to use some of it for production of oxide. It was not until they completed the demo plant work that they realized this was an option.
I am glad that he did sign an offtake for 10% of the Sc because this helped to demonstrate that there was a market. With regards to the other 90%, the big question might be: Do we want to sell that as Sc oxide or as AlSc master alloy? He has always been big on vertical integration.
I do like this concept of product flexibility. They can sell Ti, Nb, and Sc each in a couple different forms. This allows them to be flexible and adapt to market demands.
Wondering about off takes
Mark hinted pretty strongly about producing Niobium Oxide or Chloride. He already has off takes for 75% of the Niobium which would be ferro niobium. He might be thinking I don’t want to lock up all the Niobium in offtakes because I might want to use some of it for production of oxide. It was not until they completed the demo plant work that they realized this was an option.
I am glad that he did sign an offtake for 10% of the Sc because this helped to demonstrate that there was a market. With regards to the other 90%, the big question might be: Do we want to sell that as Sc oxide or as AlSc master alloy? He has always been big on vertical integration.
I do like this concept of product flexibility. They can sell Ti, Nb, and Sc each in a couple different forms. This allows them to be flexible and adapt to market demands.
A few thoughts on this Edison report
In these calculations they:
Include REE revenue
Show Ti being sold as tickle
Use increased Ti recovery
Use increased Nb recovery
I am not questioning or rejecting any of that. The purpose of the demo plant was to demonstrate that they really can accomplish these things. However, the processing plant described in this report is the same plant that has been in previous studies. It includes an acid regen plant and does not include rotary kilns or Ca/Mg removal. The CAPEX and OPEX in this report would be the numbers for the old design adjusted for inflation.
To issue a revised FS they need to utilize the data from the demo plant to design a new processing plant. Then they need to estimate OPEX and CAPEX for this new design. I imagine that is in progress right now and what is delaying the FS revision. However, Scott is very confident that this new design will improve both CAPEX and OPEX. This means that CAPEX and OPEX in the revised FS will PROBABLY be better than what this report shows. The big caveat is REE extraction and refining. The existing plant design does not include equipment to accomplish this. Addition of this equipment would tend to increase CAPEX and OPEX.
Not disputing what you said
but there is more to this story. A Kg of Tickle (that sells for more than Ti dioxide) actually contains 252 grams of pure Ti. A Kg of TiO2 actually contains 599 grams of pure Titanium. Yeah, we are recovering about twice as much Ti and the price of Ti has doubled (assuming Mark was talking about dioxide,) but each kilo of tickle we sell contains around half as much Ti. We have twice as much product to sell.
Absolutely
I just cannot see him making a presentation with a title like that unless we have issued a PR making REE production official. They are required to issue a revised FS within 45 days of that PR.
Going to be real interesting
to see summary results for the FS. Ti has always been kind of the poor relative in our product suite. It’s in our ore, we might as well recover it, and it will produce SOME revenue. With regards to Ti Mark made some interesting points today:
We can now recover more than double the amount we had previously assumed.
The price of Ti has doubled in the last year.
We will produce it as Titanium Tetrachloride.
Niocorp has stated that this is a more valuable form of Titanium. We could end up seeing Ti revenues 4-5 times what they were in the last FS. More revenue from Ti, 4% more revenue from Nb, and revenue from three REE products all adds up to the exact selling price for Sc is not nearly as important as it was. We probably will not even be selling Scandium oxide on the open market. It might all get converted to master alloy.
We will probably end up owning patents to breakthrough technology for refining these minerals. It is anybody’s guess as to what a license to use this technology would sell for. I believe a patent is good for 17 years. That means that for nearly half the mine life this technology is protected.
Just trying to be logical about this
It seems like there are at least two things Mark will not do. He will not go to a conference and announce we plan to produce REEs. That is material info and there are well defined rules for how it gets released. Announcement at a conference is not it. He will also not go to a conference and talk in any detail about actual REE production unless Niocorp has already announced it. These guys know and follow SEC regulations.
There is a third thing that at least IMHO he will not do. I sincerely doubt he will go to another REE conference and announce we are thinking about REE production. Too many people remember that he said that a year ago. These people that remember that are also aware that demo plant work was completed months ago.
If NIO announces they plan to produce REEs that starts a 45 day clock. A revised FS must be filed before the end of that period. I cannot conceive of NIO spending the time, money, and effort to produce two revisions. I think the next revision will be the whole package. All of this leads me to believe the next few weeks will be interesting times.
If Jim does as in the past
I looked up some data for Niocorp from last year. This was when they updated the FS to include REEs as a resource. On May 18, 2022 Jim issued a PR that included summary data and highlights of the revision. On May 25 they hosted a webcast in which they discussed the data. The actual full revision is dated June 28 (41 days from the PR.) If they follow a similar approach for this revision and they want the actual revision to be out about the time of Mark’s presentation, then we could be seeing summary data and highlights very soon. This revision will be much bigger than the one last year. There will be lots more to discuss. Hopefully we will be seeing several discussions.
I agree, those seem like the next big
news items. When they announce really significant items they are required to update the FS within 45 days. Adding REEs or doubling the amount of Ti are probably big enough to start this 45 day clock ticking. In the past, when they were in the process of revising or updating the BFS, they usually announced summary data from the revision 40-45 days before they issued the official FS revision. If they think the FS revision will be ready to issue in late October, we could be seeing summary info this next Monday.
The other big pending item is financing, probably EXIM bank. Maybe I am missing something but I just don’t see and major financier making a multi million $$ decision when they know a revised FS is on the way, but they have not seen it yet. However, if Niocorp starts issuing preliminary data, that means the FS revision is more or less complete, it is just in final editing and printing. They could certainly get some NDAs signed and share a draft of the revised FS. A financier could spend 45 days reviewing that and be prepared to issue a final decision shortly after the official release of the FS. It would not take them long to look at the final version and say that there are no significant differences from the draft we got 6 weeks ago.
Strictly a guess
but I think that three step process described in the PR is significant. Step 1 is in progress now or will start soon. That NDAA will probably not get passed for several more months. Nanoscale and Niocorp are PROBABLY jointly funding step 1. I imagine Nanoscale recognizes the future demand for Sc and wants to prove their technology is applicable. Step 2 will be bigger and more expensive. I would imagine the NDAA money goes primarily towards that. I imagine that money is meant more towards developing the technology that is needed to produce master alloy and demonstrating that it works. Step 3 is basically building a commercial scale facility that will be owned by Niocorp or jointly with Nanoscale. It is expected to be operable about the same time as the mine becomes operable. I imagine that gets financed along with the rest of the mine. I am not sure the DOD is going to help finance the construction of privately owned full scale commercial facilities.
Thank you Antler
Appreciate your insight.
I am sure that chart gets updated
in the revised FS. There will be a lot of changes:
Obviously new numbers for all the prices
Dysprosium, Terbium, and Ne/Pr gets added to the products and resources
The amount of Ti gets doubled including the income from Ti
Titanium tetrachloride gets added as a product and has a price higher that Ti oxide
Niobium quantity goes up 6%
Will we see Calcium Oxide and Magnesium Oxide as products?
Will Niobium Oxide be listed as a product?
Who builds this master alloy production facility?
Just wondering if it gets included in the EPC processing facilities contract or this will be another contract. Is this a joint project between Niocorp and Nanoscale? The PR clearly says this is their proprietary technology. Perhaps Niocorp builds, owns, and operates the master alloy facility but pays Nanoscale some set fee per tonne of master alloy produced.
The biggest market for Nb
is adding it to steel to make HSLA steel. The method by which Nb is added to steel is to add ferroniobium to molten steel. That is why Elk Creek will produce ferroniobium. The biggest market for Sc is adding it to aluminum to make AlSc alloy. The method by which Sc is added to aluminum is to add AlSc master alloy to molten aluminum. Looks to me like Niocorp has figured out what the market wants and will provide what the market wants.
If we make 2% Sc master alloy
we will need 49 tonnes of aluminum for each tonne of Sc. If we are going to use up all 100 tonnes per year of Sc then we will need to ship 4900 tonnes per gear of Aluminum to Elk Creek.
“Been away for a few days”
Thank you, we all appreciate that.
I asked Scott about this several years ago
He said we would all like to know exactly how big it is. However, drilling costs a lot of money and we don’t have a lot of money now. We drilled and got enough data to define a resource that will provide 30-35 year mine life. Now is not the time to spend more money to support a longer life. We take the data we have and proceed with FS, financing, and construction. When we get the main shaft sunk we will have more money and we will have core drills and people on site. We will get drills into the bottom of that shaft. We will drill down from there and outward horizontally. That will allow us to get a much better handle on what we really have and will cost a lot less than drilling from the surface.
FWIW: I said suppose we find out it goes down several thousand more feet. Do we shut everything down and sink the shaft deeper. He responded definitely not. We finish construction, start generating revenue, we go over to the other side of the ore body and sink another main shaft as deep as it needs to go.
Everyone here understands
that Niocorp is DEVELOPING a mine. We understand what DEVELOPING means. Did you just discover this?
Our Sc is triple nine 99.9%
I asked Scott about this a year or so ago. He says you can design a system to produce lower or higher grades. However, triple nine is the most common. That is the biggest market, that’s why we picked 99.9. We could install more refining equipment (which would increase CAPEX and OPEX) and get 99.99. It would sell for a much higher price but you could not sell very much of it because there is not much demand.
We decided to sell our Nb as ferro niobium because that is how most of it is sold and has the highest demand. I am interested in seeing what’s in the next FS. There is, or will be, an increased demand for Nb oxide for use in EV batteries. The demo plant proved we can produce Nb oxide. I am guessing we will add this to our product line.
Grunt, I agree
4% more Nb
Nb oxide
Twice as much Ti
Higher grade Ti
REEs
A neater, cleaner processing plant that should cost less to build and operate
If you add all this up (we on the forum can only guess, but that is exactly what revised FS will do) I think we will see some very attractive numbers.
According to Platina’s website
they sold this Scandium project to Rio Tinto for 14 million.
College chemistry was a looong time ago
but I calculate that Titanium dioxide is about 60% by weight titanium. Titanium tetrachloride is about 25% by weight of titanium. They both sell for about US$2,000 per metric ton. However, when you sell 1000kg of Titanium dioxide you are selling 600 kg of Titanium. When you sell 1000kg of titanium tetrachloride you are only selling 250 kg of titanium. Our titanium makes a whole lot more tonnes of tetrachloride than dioxide.
I am suggesting that a
Feasibility study and a detailed design are not the same. In a feasibility study you make some reasonable assumptions and design based on these. These assumptions are made by qualified persons with demonstrated expertise who are not Niocorp employees. You also add contingency money just in case the assumptions turn out wrong. For a final detailed design you go out and actually measure these parameters to be sure your design assumptions were accurate.
Pilings are generally used in very soft ground such as swamps. The design of the surface plant deliberately avoided such areas. Pilings are used when you need to support big loads spread over a small area such as bridge piers. They are used under the columns of tall steel structures because under some conditions there can be uplift load on the columns. Other than the head house over the shafts none if the structures are more than 3 stories high. They will be doing test borings at these locations. Most of the buildings that house the equipment are quite large. It will be possible to install large foundations to spread out the load.
PC, I’m like you
I don’t recall any hyping. The demo plant work was described as three phases and we were told what would be done in each phase. Phase 3 (the LAST phase) included separation and purification of the three REEs. We were told that they would announce results as they became available. No one ever said they would become available the day after the lab work finished. They have announced results from phase one and two. They have announced that they were able to extract at least 92% of the REEs. They have announced that they were able to precipitate mixed REEs in solid form that was nearly all REEs with few impurities. They announced the percentage of each target REE in the precipitate. The final step is separating the three target materials and purifying them. I can almost guarantee that the announcement of those results WILL NOT include any info on actual production and selling of REEs. After you prove you can separate and purify them you have to do an economic analysis to decide if you can profitably produce and sell them. I would point out that the ONLY date that has been given for that is “later this year.”
Timing of the geotech work is significant
This processing plant will have big heavy pieces of equipment. There will be big concrete foundations under these pieces. The key question is how big. Different types of soil have different load bearing capacities. How many pounds can you put on a square foot of soil before it starts to sink? Might be 20, maybe 50, maybe 100 pounds per square foot. You do not need this to do a feasibility study. We did not need it for any other studies. For a feasibility study you ask somebody like Olssen (who does a loot of this work in Nebraska) to give you an estimate. You design your foundations, figure out the costs, and put it all in an FS. You also add 10% contingency in case it turns out the foundations need to be bigger. Before you do the FINAL detailed design you go out and actually measure the soil load bearing capacity. You will probably discover that is actually higher that Olssen’s estimate. Engineers tend to be pretty conservative with estimates like this. If it turns out the capacity is lower than you used in the design you make the foundations bigger and use some of the contingency money to pay for it.
My point in all of this is that the geotech work was not done because we are getting ready to revise an FS. It was done because we are getting ready to do final detailed design work on the processing plant.
Maybe you could supply some specifics
What “word” did he not make good on? Exactly which goalposts got moved? OR, are you just venting?
I like the potential flexibility
Eventually Nio will confirm what the can produce and what they plan to produce. It sounds like we can produce Ti dioxide, aerospace grade Titanium, and TiCl4. That gives us an opportunity to react to the markets. Niobium can be marketed as Niobium Oxide or ferroniobium. Scandium can be as oxide or in master alloy. I am sure Scott has a much better handle than any of us on all these markets. He is probably looking at costs to produce all these varieties and comparing to market value.
Take your numbers or Grunt’s numbers
And add to them:
4% more Nb
50% +/- more Ti
Aerospace grade Ti as a potential product
Nb oxide as a potential product
We do not know the CAPEX and OPEX associated with these additions. But we do have video of Scott about a year ago saying that if these new flow sheets are proven to work, adding REEs would likely incur no increase in CAPEX or OPEX. In this same video he predicted 92% REE recovery. Looks like we will end up at 92-93. The demonstration plant has already proven the new flow sheets do work. The only remaining questions are separating the 3 REEs and hitting target purities. There is nothing new, different, or innovative about this. Scott says we know exactly how to do it, we have done it before. I believe him.
Scooter- you can’t compare the two
Rio Tinto designed their plant to extract Sc from the waste stream of an existing process. I assume they know how much waste their plant puts out and they designed a system to handle that. Elk Creek is primarily a Niobium mine. It is designed to process a certain amount of ore and produce a certain amount of Nb per year. IF you extract and purify the Sc that happens to be in that ore you get about 100 tonnes per year. Ti and REEs are pretty much the same. We are mining and processing this ore. It has a couple other valuable elements in it. Might just as well extract and sell them. Niocorp believes that if there is a stable dependable source of Sc the demand for it will grow rapidly. They have already signed an off take that is pretty close to the current world annual production.
We have SOME news but not all
They have announced that they can extract and put into solution at least 92% of the target REEs. They have announced that they can precipitate out a fairly high concentration of the target REEs with minimal impurities. The questions not yet answered are:
Can they be separated from each other?
What purity can we get?
We might be comparing apples to oranges
I spent some time on the Vital Metals web site. They own an REE deposit in Saskatchewan. It is an open pit surface deposit. In 2021 they did indeed mine some ore. They used a front end loader and a portable crusher. At the end of 2021 they shut down all mining and removed the equipment. They shipped this ore to Saskatoon where they WERE building a processing plant. The processing plant was designed to process 1000 tonnes/yr. I believe Elk Creek is being designed for about 1000 tonnes/day. They planned to use this ore for commissioning the processing plant. The processing plant was designed to produce mixed REE concentrate, not separate pure oxides. They are having cash flow problems. They halted all construction on the processing plant at about 50% complete. They are concentrating on drilling and assaying to further define the deposit. They have not done any mining since 2021. This info all comes from PRs on their web site. I am glad Niocorp is not emulating the Vital Metals business model.
We had this discussion
a couple years ago. AT THAT TIME the mine was more or less break even without Sc. Revenue was enough to pay OPEX but there were no profits to pay down the debt. The mine plan was designed to be flexible. Depending on sale prices the mine could adjust the Nb/Sc split. A whole lot has changed since then. Market prices have gone up, but so has inflation. We are extracting more Nb and a whole lot more Ti. It looks like our product line will expand considerably ( Nb oxide and ferroniobium, a couple grades of Ti, REEs). We are looking at major revisions to the processing plant. The real answer to your question is we don’t know until we see the revised FS.
I hear a lot of hot air
about Niocorp management and what they should and should not be doing. This is a discussion forum, everyone has a right to express their opinion. But the fact is, it is all opinion, no one on this board has any real world experience in developing a mine on a green field site. Perhaps instead of blowing smoke we should do a little DD. Look around, read, study. If you can post here you have access to the internet, use it. When you are done with that point me to the one junior mining company that is developing a specialty minerals mine that is making more progress than Niocorp. I did spend some time. I determined that it is NOT Texas minerals with Round Top, it is NOT U core with Bokan mountain, it is NOT Bear Lodge, it is NOT Scandium International with Nyngum. What company has better management that is making more progress than Niocorp? Give me some names. JMHO but if NIOCORP is making more progress than anyone else that just might mean they are doing a good job and our understanding of the process is limited. I think it is way more complicated and I think our management understands all of this way better than me.
Certainly seems like REE news
would be the next big PR. But I will be the first to admit that I did not see some of the recent PRs coming. They say these REEs react similar to Sc and they anticipate hitting similar purities. But anticipating is not the same as actually doing it which is exactly why they call it a demonstration plant.
If you are going to put out
several PRs in a single week. You put out the least important news on a day when the NASDAQ is closed. The bigger more important news gets released on a day the NASDAQ is open. JMHO, but seems logical.
This surprised me too
This is a major holiday in the US. This is not news that had to come out today. So why did it come out today? My guess is Jim wanted to get this one out of the way because he plans more releases later in the week.
Ah ha! You are right
I was racking my brain. That name seemed familiar but I could not remember where I saw it. Matheson is the Sc expert.
Tomorrow is a national holiday in the US
I believe NASDAQ will not be open.
You would think that people
in our Department of Defense would be taking notice. You cannot build modern high tech weapons systems without Rare Earths and aerospace grade Ti. Nearly all of this comes from China or Russia. That should worry a lot of people in the DoD. Sure seems like coming from Nebraska would be preferable.
I think the answer to your question is
because he already knows the answer. Chico posted the answer. It was pretty clear. He just wants to stir turmoil. To apply for a patent you have to be fully aware of all the details of the technology you are trying to patent. At this particular point in time the only companies that are fully aware are Niocorp and L3. Jim made it very clear months ago that Niocorp owns the technology that they paid L3 to develop. Niocorp owns the technology and Niocorp has filed a patent application on the technology THAT THEY OWN. This is NOT complicated (unless someone wants to make it complicated,)