Replies to post #91374 on Niocorp Developments Ltd (NB)

[Boilermaker1]

We will not see a revised FS this month
There is a chance we will see more demo results. That news last month was good. They can extract at least 92% of the REEs and might be able to fine tune for a bit more. But that just means they can extract the REEs and get them into a concentrate. What they are working on now is separating them and refining them. They probably need to get up to 99.0% or 99.9% purity. There are really two goals: They actually have to prove (demonstrate) that they really can do this. But just as important is data. They need to know exactly how many pounds of solvents are need to process each pound of concentrate. They need to know how many SX stages are needed. They need to know residence time for each dtage. I suspect that when they get the demonstration part done they will announce the results. They have in the past. They need all that data to actually design the processing plant. Once it is designed then they figure out what it will cost (CAPEX.) They need the info on amounts of solvents to calculate OPEX. Once they know exactly how much they can extract and the purity they can calculate the value of the product. They compare this to OPEX and say yes/no it makes good economic sense to do this. Does it generate profits? Once they officially make that decision it is material info and must be PRd. That PR in effect says we are going to produce more products and that announcement starts a 45 day clock. By the end of those 45 days they must issue a revised FS with all the details. When we see a PR that says we will produce REEs, then we will see a revised FS within 45 days. We will not see a “we are going to produce REEs” PR until sometime after we see the “we have successfully extracted xx% of the REEs and refined them to xx% purity” PR.

On a side note: they do not have a lot of flexibility in when they release this stuff. On some stuff it is a judgement call on what is or is not material info. But a lot of stuff (the letter from the EXIM bank for example) obviously is material info. They are required to announce that and to do so promptly.