Amigo, I held onto BPL for many years - like many who post here. We were there during the 12 month battle with Cobalt Blue (COB) and we felt its debilitating effects on the shareprice. But through it all, I have found that the board has led us to greener pastures in a way that wasn't obvious to me at the time (only in hindsight). For example, when ARR (still called BPL) was in its early stage in January 2000, the company couldn't fill the shortfall in the share offer of 1.5c even after extending it several times. It was a great opportunity for exisiting shareholders to top up big time - some did but many didn't. It is no accident that they are the only Aussie junior with two rare earth deposits in USA - the board wrote to shareholders 12 months ago and told us that USA was where we had to be. They were right, again! So I give the board credit for being masters at choosing a great direction and following it - they are very experienced and it shows where it counts. Also, the split with COB shows that they have nerves of steel and are pretty smart too boot. Nevertheless, I understand your view that they could be drilling to find increased grade, and I admit that I had that feeling in the darkest days. But the board has a different approach - and I think they are correct, again! Their main priority from day one has been to prove up the mineral that carries the rare earths and refine the metallurgy for concentrating the mineral, then extracting the rare earths. So far, as I understand from their announcements, ARR is getting confident that allanite is the main carrier of the rare earths and that it can be simply concentrated and acid leached to give the separate rare earths. My understanding is that additional metallurgial research is underway to improve on those processes, and maybe there could be announcements about that sooner or later. Their lesser prioity has been to explore for richer grades. That may seem strange, but my guess is that the board has the view that, with La Paz, they already have a huge, consistent deposit which covers several square kilometres and it is clearly amenable to easy open-pit mining. They know that the key to developing a rare earth project is finding a process that will have cheap capex and cheap opex. So the metallurgy is the key to success. This quarter they will take small steps with a 6 RC drill campaign that should reveal the grades for mineralisation at depth (still only up to 60m). When La Paz was discovered in 2010 the only drilling was a simple pattern of RC drilling to a depth of only 30m. That drilling was not based on anomalies in the geophysics or geochemistry - it was just a pattern of 4 lines of regularly spaced drilling. Today, in contrast, many junior explorers begin with exhaustive geochem, rock chips and geophysics then follow the best anomalies with expensive diamond drilling (to 100m to 200m or so). In the end, faced with the track history of this board, I am happy to let them do their thing and allow us to ride along.
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