Thanks! You are right, you wouldn't process material that is cash flow negative, but a few things come into play. 1. In HRE's case, holes directly next to each other have vastly different response to leaching (acid consumption and REE extraction). So the question is, how continuous and predictable are the pockets of good stuff in reality? We won't know this until they do closer spaced drilling and test many more samples, but in the interim I like to err on the side of caution. 2. Cherry picking the good stuff has implications for width and strip ratio in an open pit, so mining costs may go up. When your material has extractable value of say $25 AUD/t, with mining cost $3/t clay, a 1:1 ($6/t feed ore) or 2:1 strip ($9/t feed ore) ratio starts to eat into your margin.
Acid cost, apologies I was looking at equivalent costs if you directly replace HCl and H2SO4 chemistry wise, please ignore my 2.6x. For a cost comparison, I used values shared by VTM, below, which appear to be from a distributor Redox in April 2023. Real prices direct from acid producer will be lower for both, but the raito between them will be broadly the same. Note that HCl is produced at 32% so costs provided at a 32% basis must be corrected to 100%, as acid consumption rates are expressed per unit HCl (100% basis). H2SO4 is produced at 98% for comparison. So the cost ratio on a tonne basis is 1250/360 = 3.5x cost for HCl compared to H2SO4 per tonne acid.
Hope this helps, as always DYOR and I am interested in anyone's thoughts as I am learning a lot about these clay REE plays and still so much nuance to get my head around. GLTAH.
HRE Price at posting:
9.1¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
