That's a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question; very...

That's a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question; very hard to give a meaningful answer.

The testing itself would likely take several weeks. A lot of things can go wrong with an HPAL plant. Remember, at the beginning of the process you're running machines full of concentrated acid, at elevated temperatures and at high pressure. Not a user-friendly environment. A mechanical failure is not just expensive to fix but will often incur a time delay due to the specialized nature of the plant. A quick trip to Bunnings usually won't do much to help. Once you've leached it all and bagged up 40+ tonnes of dry-ish mud you then have a few thousand litres of leach liquor from which to crystallize the sulphates, and that again takes time.

After it's all done, the metallurgists will do their technical evaluation and then the JV management will do their commercial evaluation and once a meaningful, reportable outcome from the testwork has been determined then we get to know about it. There are no sensible short-cuts. Maybe CTM would release some progress reports along the way, like "the sample today cleared quarantine" or "pilot-testing will commence next Tuesday", but for market-shaking news we're pretty much like kid's waiting for Christmas; we can't make the process go faster, we'd like to chill but instead we agitatedly wait for the inevitable to happen and keep hoping and hoping that Santa Simulus brings us what we're all hoping for.

Sorry I can't be more definitive; it will be many weeks.