DMS plants involve significant lead times. Even when the FID...

DMS plants involve significant lead times. Even when the FID occurs, there won't be immediate onsite activity. The E25 Butcherbird site does however have the major benefit that it is not space constrained.

There are start-up lead times but they primarily relate to getting staff onsite and turning the equipment back on again. For a concentration plant operation, butcherbird was about as simple as it got. Ore was dug out of the ground, crushed, washed, put through a sorter that didn't involve any reagents and shipped. That's partly why is was surprising they got it so wrong. The equipment is still there so all a restart involves is some staff to be told how to run the equipment, monitor the issues and fix them so up-time is maintained. Until the FID is made on the upgrade, temporary contract staff would work.

JB has posted on social media about GEMCO issues so he is clearly aware of the damage and the impacts. It was going to impact the supply/demand balance for Manganese because GEMCO was a major supplier of particular higher grade ore. What wasn't clear is how much this supply/demand issue was going to change price, and more particularly the price for different product grades.

While its easy to talk about ore percentage grades, from a processing perspective I suspect the impurity mix among the 56-70% of the rock that wasn't manganese is probably as important if not more important. While the E25 ore didn't have the same concentration level as GEMCO's ore, it may have had a more closely aligned impurity mix which is why the 44% pricing with appropriate adjustments was the best choice.

Rocket knows a lot more about impurity issues as he had and probably still has significant investments in the smelting side of things.