Your maths is fine and don't disagree. I think if they are...

Your maths is fine and don't disagree. I think if they are considering any material revenue from the REO they need something in the degree of 3-5mtpa front end design.

If the front end is designed as such they could screen out the 45um in stage 3.
This as the conceptual flow chart shows both reduces the REO content by mass but presumable to similar extent on the kaolin part.

The downside is obviously this is a fairly large front end circuit (but low in complexity) but also potentially massive volumes of kaolin still to process in the leach and filter press.

I think it begins to look more like a HPA play with a REO credit.
To get anything substantial in revenues the front end needs to increase considerably.
There's the cut of the fine fraction and the recovery loss in the leach itself.

I would also think that the REO leaching would need a significant step change in overall recovery.
As mentioned previously, if REO is to be primary revenue - need to hope that the composite sample contained a bunch of material outside the MRE and therefore not representative. If there's zonation within the MRE which are more ionic and you can screen the sub 45micron stuff then maybe there's a dual stream revenue opportunity - but still requires something in the realms of 2mtpa not 200ktpa.

For context IXR full ramped production front end design is 10mtpa ~3800-4000tpa REO out the back end ~ 175M USD in revenue.

That's a similar ppm head grade but recoveries ~40-70% across element suite.
ITM would sacrifice half the REO by mass with 45um screen so would need recoveries in line with IXR and likely only result in half the REO concentrate out the back.

Might call Mike to get his views but have fairly well formulated my own here. Not dead and buried by any means, area's under explored and there is some ionic material in the area clearly which is unlike some others who got 0% to leach out with salt - but obviously i'm not as optimistic for REO as the primary economics, as i was previously. The graphite IMV is still solid and was also what got me over the line as having 2 good opportunities here.

SF2TH