I came across a podcast with the MD - dated April 2024: Stephen Bhagdhadi: " I don't know whether you've ever been to. Rare earth processing facility, but I when I toured the mount pass facility, I've done it twice. Both times, I walked away thinking, this is a multi billion dollar exercise, and it is more akin to a chemical engineering facility than it is to a mining and processing facility, and it's highly complex, and it's not for the faint hearted, and I would rather just ship ore down the road and get them to do it."
Curious, why he would pivot on this initial course of action and now they're interested in refinement as the end goal like you say. Perhaps he didn't want to show his hand at the time?
The idea of charging toll fee for two years to generate 500mill makes sense but when I look at M.P who started their venture in a similar way , it took them nearly 3 years to generate about 320mill by shipping the concentrate to China.
I guess the margins will be slightly better because they don't have to ship it to China, but to justify 500 million we would have to hit the motherload of REE.
Some interesting quotes from MD:"The USGS data, which showed a coincident radiometric, uranium, thorium and potassium signature, trending north, northwest, coming straight out of mountain pass, going to the Coliseum, that's what got us really excited about the potential for rare earths"
"But we've also done our own work, and, you know, we've done the sampling of the outcrops where we've got, reasonably good grade in indicator rocks, actually very high grade in indicator rocks."
I'm new to the sector and value your opinion. Thanks!
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