Niocorp Developments Ltd (NB)

[Boilermaker1]

We don’t have the final numbers
for REEs yet but I expect we will be seeing them soon. Scott said some of the goals for L3 were to simplify the processing and to optimize the processing. It appears that those goals have been met. Titanium is the least valuable of our products and we are extracting almost 90% of the Ti. For all of our more valuable products we are well over 90%. That sounds optimized to me. There is going to be a point of diminishing returns where you use more and more reagents and more processes and only get a bit more product. Scott has said these new processing techniques were a lot simpler and would probably cost less to build. We now know that they work. They have been demonstrated. They have proven that they can remove the Mg and Ca up front. That makes all the equipment after that smaller and eliminates the acid plant. I am really looking forward the revised CAPEX and OPEX numbers. The other thing that has come out of L3 is quite an expansion of our product line. Although the final decision has not been made, it certainly looks like we will be producing three REEs. We will be able to produce Niobium oxide in addition to ferroniobium. In addition to the Ti that we planned to produce we can also produce titanium tetrachloride and high purity aerospace grade Ti. We have a lot more products, we are extracting more of each one, and we are doing all this in a plant that will probably cost less to build and operate.

The downside is these are some major changes to the processing plant. A lot of redesign work must be done and then cost estimates prepared. These guys are pretty good at setting priorities and figuring sequence of events. The recent geotech work provides some of the data needed for the design of the surface plant. I believe that work was done because that data is needed now.