I originally started looking into RDG with their Peloton JV over...

I originally started looking into RDG with their Peloton JV over the red mud, because it involved making HPA...plus everything else under the sun.

Digging into it, Peloton is a vehicle by a Mr Wellham, and Peloton brought in a patent by Mr Wellham involving the extraction of alumina from the digestion of red mud, and extraction of alumina specifically using organophosphate collectors with solvent extraction. This is ostensibly similar to the same technology Mr Wellham sold to ChemX, just using a slightly different organophosphate chemical, and differentiated on the basis of red mud as a feedstock.

I thought it was strange RDG was so far down the whole Peloton project that they were handing out - don't quote me - $2M for a pilot plant, and had gone neck deep into that. But there's about $116M p.a. spent on red mud recycling research every year globally, trying to turn it into something, and there's government R&D. So I thought RDG's strategy was founded mostly upon the 40% rebate on R&D cheapening the risk for them, plus the limitless amounts of red mud piling up in Kwinana, Worsley, etc.

The problem being, red mud is terrible as a feedstock. The SX provides sufficient leverage to get HPA, of that I am sure, but as far as my reading of Wellham's patent, and the CmenX process patent as well, the SX is also followed by ion exchange, which does most of the heavy lifting in extracting the purified HPA. SX is expensive, and IX is even more expensive, so the thought of daisy-chaining both....nuts.

This is why RDG hasn't said anything about the cost of their process. Similarly, ChemX has taken 18 months to install electrical wirign around its pilot plant tanks, which tells you all you need to know about how desperate they are to finish.

Meanwhile, from what I can tell, the vendor has made off like a bandit from both vends, and is kvetching about competitor processes that don't use SX/IX. Good luck to him.