What the article says is that niobium oxides are actually superior to tantalum in making capacitors... but there are problems in using niobium at least in part because of the difficulty in obtaining adequately pure materials.
Solve that problem with purity of materials, and niobium is likely to begin to replace tantalum in capacitors in much the same way that niobium is replacing molybdenum in making stainless steel.
The links I'd posted earlier showed how at Niobec they were gradually upgrading their processing capability... but, they seemed to be at least a generation behind the Brazilians. Even with that lag, the changes in the market that occurred as a function of producers doing their own processing, instead of shipping concentrates to others for processing, was one of the points of my posting the links. Look at those articles again, and note the graphs showing costs and revenues. As supply of concentrate "dried up"... because miners like Niobec became processors, the customers for their concentrate went out of business, and the prices for the end products... increased.
A huge part of the potential value you will get from mining niobium will come from what you do with the stuff once you get it out of the ground. Just as newer steel producers will have an advantage over older steel producers... because the new technology they've fielded enables them to make better steel at lower cost using niobium, so there is a parallel situation with miners who become processors...
There is more than once source of competitive advantage available...
One clearly will apply to the producer with the superior resource... which likely means lower cost surface mining instead of more costly mining underground, and a more advantageous set of deposit features in terms mineralogy, or how well the rock lends itself to lower cost physical and chemical separations processes, and how clean, relative to a comparison with competitors, the deposit is, with an absence of process poisons and residual contaminants in the end products.
Another clearly will apply to the producer with the superior effort and ability, including that in innovation in processes and technology, that are able to be applied to the separations processes and the post separation modifications of products.
Value added in the second and third steps, in separations and modifications... might be significantly more meaningful in terms of the value of the end products than will the front half of the effort tied to creating access to the supply.
Combine the two... in a way that pairs knowledge of natural variation in the deposit, with knowledge of what has (and will have) the most value in the market, with a smart effort in connecting the dots between the two of them... and then... you got something.
JMHO
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