re: Ann: Investor Presentation - Pathway to H... As a starting...

re: Ann: Investor Presentation - Pathway to H... As a starting point assume that NTU figure of 10% REO to tails is correct and thus 90% is retained in concentrate. Based on your figure of 60% recovery by processor from concentrate the processor recovers around 50% of the original material.

This concentrate can be used as a "sweetener" to the process and provides the processor with a strategic fit if the processor is producing mainly light REOs. Thus I assume that the processor will pay say 60% of the recovered metal to give a price of 30% of in situ content. This converts to $100/kg.

Based on a cut-off of 0.2% I estimate that a conservative mined grade is 0.4% or 4 kgs/tonne mined. The value of each tonne to NTU is $400.

Bulk mining for NTU from surface with a simple low capital cost plant - well they mine 1% copper, crush it, float it to produce a concentrate and then refine it to copper metal all for $45/tonne in situ value so NTU operation cannot be much higher than that cost.

It seems to me that NTU makes $300/tonne mined. At 0.4% to produce 3,000 tonnes product NTU mines 750,000 tonnes which produces an operating profit of over $200 million.

Some matters to be better defined - particularly Dy recovery and JORC estimates but the project has excellent margins to absorb some deviations from the above conjecture.