I personally care very little how or where we get financed, so long as the deal is reasonable. Considering interest rates, that shouldn't be too hard. IMO the problem will be finding sources willing to take the risk.
The following is just my opinion having watched this for years on end now.
Niobium is fine, but the market could be severely undercut by Brazil so from a lender's perspective, challenging investment to commit to.
Titanium is a bigger market, but also not a big money maker for NioCorp. Thus not worth the investment risk as a lender.
Therefore Scandium is the risk and key to getting this going. There has been plenty of talk about "latent demand" because there has yet to be a reliable commercial source at a reasonable scale. NioCorp sort of offers that (arguable about meeting demand once proven viable) but again, not proven therefore high risk.
What I'm wondering is why hasn't (correct me if I'm wrong) there been a plan to build the mine in phases which are more manageable from a financing perspective? $900M given the above risks is clearly not very palatable to those who might have the interest to help finance this.
For example, (I'm making up numbers for the sake of discussion) why not build out the capability in a modular manner where we could get to say 20% expected full capacity in order to reduce initial CAPEX? Maybe it isn't that easy or would cost 35% of expected CAPEX just to get the initial 20% online and over the long term the total CAPEX may be more.
But that may get the latent demand of Scandium started & therefore encourage additional investment (or buyout). We could at least start generating revenue (any is better than loans from the CEO or further dilution) and prove the viability of a commercial Scandium source.
Then after we have revenues, reduce the risk associated with latent demand, additional capacity build out could be started. Maybe second round gets us to 50% or whatever.
It's fairly clear that we aren't going to get a Solendra type investment from the government, although we may get something. We need something to happen or we'll start running out of permits or cash or something to make all this "progress" to be wasted.
