My pessimism is partly based on personality and experience...

My pessimism is partly based on personality and experience (young 2ic was a lot more optimistic) but mostly on geological probability. I see geology, exploration, economics, speculating as all probability based, even if my language sometimes strays into more absolute terms. Having read up on carbonatite geology, and the economics of carb hosted deposits including Nb, I'm thinking about how to best explore, what results to look for and what they mean...

I've just described the lateritic weathering profile that develops supergene enrichment of carb minerals over primary deposits. By definition, SG blankets will be wider and HG than primary mineralisation as the weathering process spreads minerals/elements away from the source physically. That simply makes SG blankets a much larger, shallower, easier and cheaper target than the primary mineralised carbs.

Secondly, what are the chances that the primary carb Nb or REE mineralisation is formed in a tight, coherent and HG deposit pre-weathering? The world's most famous and probably only primary HG carbonatite deposit is Sulphide Queen in Mountain Pass, US. Name gives it away, it's a 750m x 120m sulphide orebody in plan with considerable depth outcropping at surface. If SQ underwent lateritic weathering, there would be a huge SG blanket and gossan you couldn;t miss on 160m wide holes and infill follow-up by AC drilling...

If there was no SG blanket, the odds that a SQ type deposit (or other Hg coherent Nb deposit) had formed in the carb but 'blind' with Nb mineralisation inthe overlying carb to become a weathering enriched target zone is incredibly low. Hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack, deep, blind and targetless primary deposit is a very expensive low probability game. It's not like gold deposits where very thin tight structures can host very high value deposits... Nb is a bulk mineral competing against other deposits ideally suited for bulk mineral economics (large tonnes, high grade, low strip ratio, well located etc).

@salpetie great map of AC depths gives an excellent picture of what we are dealing with at Green. The arcuate structure of mineralised carb-complex is deeply weathered with SG mineralisation starting ~60m +/-10m, and Ac drilling ending around 100m depth. Think about the strip cost to access primary Nb mineralisation below 100m, and then the higher drill & blast mining costs, crushing costs to mine primary like rock instead of soft, shallow HG clays...



The Nb market is not large, not with huge growth, Luni will need to muscle in, so I think it reasonable the market is looking for sensible exploration probabilities to discover deposits with economically competitive metrics. Each to their own though, and I also would walk away without at least deeper RC drilling to confirm the nature of primary mineralisation from which the SG mineralisation evolved.

GLTAH