Okay, let me be very clear the $13.49 is what 371g TREO is worth...

Okay, let me be very clear the $13.49 is what 371g TREO is worth in 415g liquor. BTW it's actually ~$15 if you use correct rounding. so lets use that figure and i'll debunk it in one foul swoop and then show you how to calculate concentrate value.

IXR So if 1T processed contains 415g of liquor is worth $15 and makuutu is producing 5000tpa of concentrate i.e. 5,000,000kg. you then need to do to 5,000,000kg/.415kg x $15 = $180,000,000.
Take 75% payability = 135m in revenue. Guess what, that's exactly what i indicated the projects revenue to be, see table below.

You can do the same with PM8 which will be a 14kg sample worth x amount and divided it by its annual throughput to get a revenue figure.

But then lets go to the below which is how i calculated it to get to the same figure.

In ground value of head feed - is literally to amount of dirt inside one tonne of unprocessed ore.
If you have 1T of dirt with 1071ppm TREO.

I have added a column for explanation which is the raw value of 1T of unprocessed dirt.

Feed stock:
Makuutu value is ~ 30USD of TREO value in 1T
PM8 value is ~220USD of TREO in 1T


Thats the end of the feed value conversation. Done ended finished. If you start talking about recovery and concentration you are now implying you are processing your dirt. Ok see lets do that.

Note recovery column, this is how much of the TREO you effectively capture in you process circuit.
In hard rocks the recoveries are fairly linear across all elements.
In ionic clays the HREO and CREO typically recovery at higher rates than LREO.
What this means is instead of selling a product full of low value stuff you're increasing the high value.

Ok, so just so we're clear when you process dirt you have 2 things that occur, you try to recover the rare earths and you also try to concentrate it. Let me use an analogy.

Imagine 1L of coffee. the entire coffee is your concentrate. i.e. coffee powder diluted in hot water.
The amount of coffee powder (how many teaspoons you put in) is the TREO contained
so a 90% TREO concentrate means it's 90% coffee with 10% hot water.
Recovery simply determines how many spoons i need to put into that coffee. So a 50% recovery means if i put 2 spoons in, 1 spill 1 spoon worth.



IXR's recovery means that when i process 1T of dirt I lose roughly 55% of my TREO but i produce a 90% concentrate. So my 1071ppm TREO in 1T of dirt - becomes 374ppm in 415ppm liqour. So i have a very strong concentrate. around 90%. This is equivalent of 374g TREO in 415g concentrate

PM8 recovery means that when i process 1T of dirt I lose roughly 65% of my TREO and i produce a 35% concentrate. So my 14000ppm TREO in 1T of dirt - becomes 4899ppm in 14000ppm liqour. So i have a weak concentrate around 35%. This is the equivalent of 4899g TREO in 14000gram concentrate

Now if you simply apply a valuation to these 2 samples you're comparing 2 different sized samples. To be exact the PM8 sample is 33times larger by volume. To compare the actual value of each product they need to be converted back to the same mass, pick any size you want but i used 1kg.

IXR's sample is 415g so the formula is 1000/415 * 371 = 900g.
PM8 sample is 140000 so the formula is 1000/14000 * 4899 = 350g

This means that in 1kg of concentrate ixr has 900g TREO
This means that in 1kg of concentrate PM8 has 350g TREO

This aligns perfectly to the reported concentrates the company states that will do, which makes sense because what i done is simply extrapolation to match the figures.

The value of each of these figures is determined by using the % of elements multiplied by the element value. This then gives you the total value of all the rare earths in the concentrate.

IXR = $33
PM8 = $5.48

Payability is 75% for IXR and IMO will be 40-50% for PM8. This is essentially what the processor will pay for you're product. Ionic clays are easier to process hence why they get higher payability.

Factoring that in you get 75% of $33 and 50% of $5.48 = ~$24USD/kg for IXR and $2.74USD/kg for PM8
As i indicated, PM8's opex costs are lower they quote around $1.1USD/kg.
Makuutu opex cost are yet to be determined, but as i have repeated frequently biolantanidos is a project in chile. it's an ionic clay deposit. It's half the grade of makuutu and the PFS reported opex costs (with evvvvvvverything included. That's right the low grade of 472ppm, the environmental costs etc etc.) It states that hey we can produce 1kg of concentrate to around 90-95% concentrate with a 50% recovery and it will cost us 6USD/kg.

So we don't know what the operational costs for IXR will be, that's literally the entire purpose of the scoping study, lol. And i have suggested as such.

What people keep banging on about is value of the TREO is 1T of dirt. You can have 1M dollars worth of product in a tonne of dirt but if it costs you 2M dollars to extract then that's an issue.

Ionic and hard rocks are completely different projects. Here some old information i shared. which shows you how ionic clays compare against hard rocks.
Note the highlighted. Low grade in feed stock, high value basket price. (this is strictly head grade, no processing).

Then note the ranking of projects in terms of economics, highlighted are ionic clays.
The reason they are ranked so highly is that despite the higher grades of hard rock, and the higher in ground value in T of dirt is that they typically produce a low concentrate, low value product.




i compared the economics of project in this table. If anyone would like to challenge my figures i'd be happy to. Revenue for IXR based on expected profit margin. i.e. 27USD/kg for the product and using Biolantanidos's opex costs. So IMO opex of IXR may change and i'm happy to accept that but don't expect it to be materially different to what Biol has suggested.

SF2TH