Been meaning to comment on this from a post couple of days ago but got distracted with all the chatter. Nobody can seriously invest in RE stocks without considering the mineral sands market. Before the 80's nearly all RE was extracted from mineral sands monazite, and it's making a comeback obviously. It's no coincidence that I turn up sniffing around RE stocks, mineral sands is bit of a hobby, worked for Iluka once 20 years ago as coincidence has it. Great training for mineralogically complex deposits like mineral sands and RE. The economics always comes down to mineralogy and chemistry, headline grades can be very misleading.
Balranald is the new mine ILU announced a couple of days ago. Very interesting, world first new technology they are rolling out to mine it. If they get it right opens up huge potential for other deeply buried deposits globally.
Although a relatively small mine at 1Mtpa, it's very high grade still makes for material production levels. Only 4ktpa of high value, high quality >60% TREO monazite/xenotime concentrate but it's only a bi-product. All mineral sand deposits operating or looking to develop have REO as a bi-product. The worst numbers I've seen still has enough ilmenite, zircon, rutile to cover all operating production costs... the REO concentrate revenue is all profit, it comes for free. I know right, little different to the hard rock deposits trying to square the circle from just REO production.
There is all sorts of implications I see in the interaction between min sand RE, hard rock RE and specifically hard rock Re deposits looking to ride min sand's coat tails. Not that I have any idea what I'm talking about, but not much get's past
@copperroad and they have highlighted the critical implication for DRE as ILU is courted for that precious Eneabba RE plant spare capacity. ILU is rightly keeping their options open but the way I see the numbers, there can only be one large off-take if Wimmera get's into production by 2028. Well, until the Eneabba stockpile is finished in 2032 anyway.
Wimmera, if you;re interested, is a more traditional min sand mine with a current mine reserve containing 300,000t of monazite/xenotime (light and heavy REs) producing ~15ktpa of REO-con mining 10Mtpa (I expect they will double production to stage 2 after a few years, it's a large deposit). In rough terms (because xenotime DyTb is ~6.5 times more valuable than monazite) Wimmera Stage 1 produces roughly ~3200tpa NdPr-Ox equivalent (ie ~1600tpa NdPr-ox and 270tpa DyTb-Ox worth ~1600tpa NdPr). Basically, a bit more than HAS Yangibana's current production average of 3000tpa NdPr.
I'm sure there's room for everyone with strongly growing magnet-RE demand, even if there's not room for everyone in ILU's new Re plant. Now things have quietened down a touch here, I can get back to the original task of digging into the Gifford Ck Re projects and see what falls out. Never know, those that don;t have me on ignore might even learn something...
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