Ann: First Shipment of HMC Completed at Coburn Project, page-28

OK, looked into it further. I had in mind both my experience which has been more traditional deeper, less altered and higher grade HM, more ilmenite dominant strands like mining operations, and the picture from STA's 'commercial production' release when shocked by how light brown the ship loaded HMC was. The previous HMC picture release below is not a dark as i thought when you consider the setting sun behind the hmc stack casting shadow and the browner hmc front rhs.

Further, Coburn is a highly weathered HM being in free-flowing sands above the water table. This is evidenced by the ilmenite being 63% TiO2 instead of primary ilmenite of <50% TiO2. (which is most definitely black). As ilmenite alters it tends to get lighter and browner, especially when it's heavily altered. Leucoxene (~6% of this HM) is ilmenite which has been very altered is light brown. Zircon is very light brown and 25% of the HM. Rutile is dark brown (7% of HM) and oversize, which cemented silica-iron oxide grains, is also generally light brown. Then there is staurolite and other non-VHM heavies that are lighter coloured... so really, I shouldn't have been surprised the colour was a light brown as it was. Unusual for WA absolutely, but not a red flag...

Otherwise, as I have been saying though, the real de-risking is not in building the plant and running sand through the spirals and producing a HM con, it's reconciling the HM in the concentrate against the ore feed and demonstrating that feed rates, VHM recoveries, HM in HMC, product quality etc is all running to plan. That takes many months and requires reconciliation against the dry plant, not just against recoveries to the wet plant. Early days indeed, and not many plants of this size ramp up seamlessly to 100% nameplate design on every metric without some time to fine tune it.

GLTAH