Think firstly you have to look at a company called Lynas. They are processing their Mt Weld REE clay hosted material at Kalgoorlie ( the hard rock is below it) and it is not ionic. China and Brazil REE deposits are in ‘wet’ heavy clay hosting geology- yes ionic characteristics but beneficiation would be problematic for them, that’s probably a reason why they don’t do it to increase the recoveries. Here the geology is much older , so metamorphic processes developing the regolith clay hosted material are different. Metallurgy is about using different studies depending on characteristics of ore hosting material and mineralogy. There’s no one size fits all. It may be that a cheap gravity circuit for example could do something like reject 30% of the unwanted material ( gangue) in the REE zones, but we don’t know- so just have to wait for results that inform rather than speculate.
VMS Price at posting:
1.3¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
