Ann: Ionic Clay Hosted Rare Earths Discovered at Rand Project, page-9

yes aware just highlighting that my clere had high deleterious elements and that it would be worth checking what the values are here as they didn't seem to reported in the announcement (which admittedly I haven't had time to review intimately, not to dig separately)

in terms of the comparison to hard rock be the clays, it's really a trade off of several factors. you could have a very ionic deposit. but if your thickness of intercept is low and strip ratio high then it doesn't matter if it's 100% ionic or not.

you can look at lynas a hard rock deposit at a given grade etc etc. there will be an economically comparison to a clay deposit. but the clay deposit will still need a few pieces of the puzzle to work. i.e need the grade to be right, thickness to be there, recoveries to be god and that tells solve things from a mined/t perspective and keeps you competitive on the mined tonne perspective.

but the reason why the ionic aspect is so crucial is that the reaction of liberation is via cation exchange. it's what makes a 92% concentrate achievable. that's 920,000ppm. so as I've mentioned in a few stocks. simply getting 70-80% recoveries means nothing unless you're actually able to concentrate the product. admittedly that's a further piece of the testing but generally unless you've got a large portion why is ionic absorbed and leaches via salt (and average recoveries for salt leaching is usually 30-40% range) it gives you preliminary education that the concentrate will be amenable to being able to be concentrate to a higher concentration.

hitting it with acid or even weak acid simply doesn't give you that data set. the second aspect that generally gives you indication to ionic nature is such that HREO usually recover at high values than LREO. so typically La, Ce, recover poorly. and nd pr are okay. then the HREO recovery alot better. to the point where if you had 50-60 recoveries across the HREO and 25% on the LREO this would look much more appetising. it means that not only is it likely to be ionic. but secondly you're actually not recovering low value elements such as La, Ce. in this instance you end up with a concentrate composition with a higher value than the head grade basket. almost like filtering out Low value stuff and ending up with a more valuable product on a per/kg basis.

for context, other IAC's have proven profitable with an ok portion of ionic nature. but they also need 2000ppm grade average to offset that. As i continue a bit of a broken record, leach it with salt (nacl) or ammonium sulphate and look at your recoveries. if you're recoveries are horrible or low, you have a very low ionic deposit or none at all. Salazars splinter found that almost zero product leached in salt. but 90% recovery in weak HCL. aka not ionic. Not to say that it's impossible to be profitable, but there's not many if any projects that have shown viability via production, or in studies that don't have a substantive amount of REO in ionic form.

I'll await the leach results with a monovalent salt.

SF2TH