Of course the meaning of the word "discovery" has become somewhat confused over the last decade or so, and in reality it probably never had a clear definition. There are economic implications of course, but also geological/scientific.
The amount of times a company can drill one, two, even a dozen holes and know for a fact it has an "economic discovery" are of course incredibly limited, it almost never happens. Because there are so many factors that can influence whether mineralisation is economic to mine or not, some of those factors being impossible to envisage at the early stage of exploration.
Then you have "brownfields discoveries", finding an expected style and type of mineralisation in a known area, i.e. just down the road from a mine. This has much better economic certainties attached to it, but of course it's not really a discovery in the geological/scientific sense.
This announcement is a true "greenfields discovery", a new style of mineralisation never before observed in that area, in fact, probably never before observed in Australia. So the geological/scientific elements of the discovery are very real, and this creates huge opportunity by opening up a whole new area to exploration, allowing geologists to target REEs in a new way. But naturally the economics of the discovery have a lot more question marks.
CPN Price at posting:
34.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
