amanda interview, page-3

AUST Business today (extract):
MINERS FOCUSED ON EXECUTION
Tansy Harcourt

Takeover target lithium miner Liontown Resources and critical minerals miner Lynas have told investors at the Macquarie Australia conference that their strategies are focusing on execution rather than corporate plays and legal battles.
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While critical minerals miners have also been enjoying surging stock prices as demand for electric vehicle-making products increases, ASX-listed Lynas has been dealing with negative sentiment after Tesla announced plans to remove rare earths such as neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) from its vehicles in future.
Lynas is the biggest rare earths miner in the world outside of China and produced about 2500 tonnes of NdPr in the last half.
Lynas chief executive Amanda Lacaze said while there would always be alternative technologies, rare earths were the number one method. “Rare earths are not the only way to power electric vehicles, they just happen to be the best,” Ms Lacaze said. “It’s the most efficient, generates the least emissions both through the production of the material and the life of the vehicle and actually improves the efficiency of the vehicle because they are lighter batteries.”
Demand for NdPr, used in permanent magnets for EVs and wind turbines, is expected to double by 2030. “Telsa has about 3 per cent of the global automotive market and they may choose not to use rare earths, but many other firms do,” Ms Lacaze said.
At the moment Lynas does not produce magnets or metals but Ms Lacaze said a move downstream was not off the table. “Maybe, (but) we have enough on our agenda just to date. Plans are great. Execution is everything, and we may think about taking a different position in the value chain, but not today. We have some projects we have to deliver.”

Among those projects is its Kalgoorlie cracking and leaching plant that is working to get up and running. The pressure is on to get the Kalgoorlie site operational because the Malaysian government has only given it a three-year extension of its operating licence conditional on not importing lanthanide concentrate needed for cracking and leaching after July. Lynas is appealing the ruling, issued by the Malaysian government under increased pressure from activists opposed to Lynas’s operations in their country. If it is unsuccessful it will shut its Malaysia processing facility until it has Kalgoorlie up and running. “It has been problematic,” Ms Lacaze admitted, but politicians in Malaysia “are no better or worse than politicians anywhere else in the world. We have to work our way through the process.”