For safety if not excitement, and you think RE prices are...

For safety if not excitement, and you think RE prices are rising, LYC is hard to go past. LYC is self-funding now and can keep expanding Mt Weld production to meet downstream magnet demand as it comes on. Mt Weld is a monster, until this year they were processing a mere 300ktpa of ore when ultimately, billion tonne type deposits usually scale up 10-20Mtpa to really make the economics sing. Of course, until recently RE demand was not there, and neither were RE prices high enough to induce much expansion.

My favoured RE play, BSE, is not for the faint hearted... African risk writ large. They have a mineral sand deposit that is world class, probably the best undeveloped min sand deposit Madagascar location aside. Until recently, RE was dead and min sand monazite was returned into the pit as waste after all the ilmenite, rutile, zircon was removed from the HM concentrate. On that basis Toliara min sand deposit has a 3.5:1 revenue:cash-cost ratio, which is world class for any style of commodity, especially over a 35 year mine life, with almost certainly double or treble that mine-life upside. The HM has about 1.9% monazite, which for a LOM average 1.5Mtpa HMC production means they can simply and cheaply recover approx 25-30ktpa of clean monazite con, containing approx 55% TREO, 24% NdPr:TREO ratio, or approx 3500tpa of NdPr.

That's a similar amount of contained NdPr that HAS is planning to produce in a 27% TREO concentrate, except the Toliara's capex and opex is almost already covered by the mineral sand operation already. The monazite is literally in the HMC con ready to be separated and sold instead of sent back to the pit as waste. Using the sort of NdPr prices HAS does, toliara would double it's revenue for a small increase in additional separation capex/opex. If the NdPr price stays around $75/kg the mine still makes good extra money selling a mon-con. If the NdPr price collapses because of some new magnet or whatever... Meh, just stop separating the monazite, stick it into the waste and carry on, no big damage done. Other RE producers will all go broke needless to say.

There are issues besides being in Africa, namely high U&Th typical for mineral sand deposits. Not many countries in the world like to import and process radioactive monazite, even though storage is a cheap and safe enough price to pay for access to economic critical minerals. ILU will obviously soon be processing high U&Th monazite at Eneabba, Energy Fuels do in the USA, but otherwise only China loves the stuff. There are a few close to perfect RE deposits, but you pay something close to perfection for them. BSE is a gamble but cheap RE option the way I see it.