Thanks for validating. Yep, IXR is the go-to peer comp for ICDs,...

Thanks for validating. Yep, IXR is the go-to peer comp for ICDs, and they really only make enough money to justify development after reaching >10Mtpa from staged expansions. Inherently it has to be so. TREO grades are so low, and payables ~30% of TREO, that $value/t is very low, so it has to be a bulk mining economies of scale operation or nothing as an REO standalone development. High-grading with <45 ore bene into the leach plant doesn;t reduce the pit mining rate from 10Mt but actually increases it because half the already low-value REO/t is lost in the <45 cut. Gains in reducing tonnes to the expensive leach circuit, potentially improving recoveries and reducing acid consumption are somewhat lost in doubling the mining rate and hydro-cyclone processing etc..

You also got that HPA is as most likely economic path with REO as a bi-product. Salazar has came to this conclusion after a longer period of testing similar type poor recovery clay hosted saprolite in WA, it's not rocket science once you try to spreadsheet the numbers involved. Instead of 10% HCL to extract 65% of REO and just 'clean-up' the kaolin to sell as cheap HPK, might as well make it 20% HCL and recover 95% REO and then precipiate the disolved kaolin clay as AlCl3 converted into 4N alumina HPA which is priced in the $10,000s/t instead of HPA in the $100's/t.

Given HPA is more of a boutique scale industrial process than mining process, capex, front end cost and opex is much, much smaller for a much smaller operation (50ktpa ve 5Mtpa or 100 times smaller). Given a much smaller capex and opex, perhaps the REO bi-product credit of a few million revenue actually is material. Reducing the HPA cost by a few million after REO credits might be the difference that pushes such a HPA project below the costs for competing HPA projects without REO credits? Obviously logistics etc become critical variables, but I can see the right deposit in the right location using this HPA bi-product approach to nudge ahead of competitors.