Ann: TECH Project Feasibility Study, page-398

Curious about the HPA malarkey that has only seen the light of day in this release. Why even bother with the refinery if they aren’t going to use their own ore? And what does this mean for the chemistry of the engineered landfill or ‘no solid waste’ argument? What happens to the crappy aluminum hydroxide that is no longer being used? There is no mention of it as a saleable product and you damn well know they would have included it if they could.

To me this is looking like ‘during the course of the study we realized HPA with the NC ore was a dud… but since we did the work to model out a HPA refinery that slightly boosted the NPV figure we left it in’. Just cut your losses dude, this thing is already complicated and adding some non-core process that comes with its own (now unknown) supply risk and mysterious end product price risk is weird.

I can’t help but feel this is poor form - it’s got sunk cost written all over it.

As always, happy to be schooled on why I’m wrong with this.