Ann: Very High Metallurgical Recoveries, page-212

You make good points on the cost savings for mining and mineral processing side and that is attractive for clay based REE.

But I think you need to keep in mind the sheer magnitude of the potential acid costs here. Below my rough calculations for acid input costs (without the full data available of course). The below also assumes the weaker 25 g/L HCl case that ANSTO presented, the 100 g/L HCl case is of course 4x worse. For comparison, the value of IXR ore is approx. $108 AUD/t assuming 100% recovery and also 100% payables on high purity REO benchmark pricing (reference: slide 18 of https://hotcopper.com.au/documentembed?id=uOMxKKzFkiWRTLKhOROKAxjvTDYL4g25yRn0v%2F5h7bFiGug%3D)



Happy to be corrected by any resident chemists/chemical engineers/metallurgists.