Hi Anndy,
I do agree with your summation:
"Talk is cheap, and as as it was said at D&D, there is so much BS spoken in the industry."As to your rhetorical questions of the 'NTU cheer squad' (not that I consider myself a cheer squad member, more a bemused observer and fact checker of downramping trolls), I have waded through the latest Mt Weld MRE and ore reserves statement and can confirm what we all knew beforehand, that Mt Weld is a monster RE deposit both in resource and grades and a tier 1 asset for LYC and Australia.
It took a bit of work to reconcile the ore reserve statement, which being LYC is typically opaque (why do they quote La & Ce in % and everything else in ppm
, maybe to make the proportions of La & Ce look less and the rest look bigger?) and even though the Dy203 & Tb407 %'s in the Mt Weld basket are pretty low at 0.63% and 0.16% respectively, due to the large ore reserves of 32mt @ 6.42% TREO, you can extrapolate an in-situ tonnage of 12.8kt of Dy2O3 and 3.2kt of Tb4O7, which is more than that of the Browns Range resource currently, and will most probably continue to be after the revision of the Wolverine MRE.
The issue for Mt Weld as I see it is the ratios of LRE's to HRE's. Looking at the Mt Weld ore reserves statement, the % of separated REO products produced at the LAMP (assuming equal recovery %'s, a point I will touch on later...) would be 45.3% Ce, 23.4% La and 23.4% NdPr, (92.9% LREO's) with the balance of 7.9% Medium REO & HREO's falling into the mysterious 'SEG' product bucket, which would include 0.79% of DyTb.
So the ratio of Mt Weld magnet LREO's/HREO's, NdPr/DyTb, is therefore approx 30:1. The ratio of Nd/Dy in a typical UH-EH temp rated EV traction motor is around 25%Nd and 5%Dy, or 5:1...In order to produce enough DyTb for an EV traction motor application, or any application that requires high operating temps, LYC would have to produce 6 times more NdPr than required, so you need to find a market for all that extra NdPr without cratering the price, not to mention producing all the extra Ce & La you're already losing money on.
That is why a HREO weighted project such as Wolverine MAY find a viable market (MAY based on the outcomes of the impending DFS).
So I've responded to a question of yours, how about you do the same for me...
On the issue of LYC's mysterious SEG product (recently re-imagined as SEGH by the LYC marketing team), do we actually know what it is comprised of? Do we actually know what it sells for and to whom? Why has LYC now decided to separate out the Dy & Tb (and by extension the Sm/Eu/Gd as RE's have to be separated in sequence) when Dy is currently quoted at US$238/kg on the SMM and not when it was US$600+ a couple of years ago? Why are they now committed to building HRE separation facilities in both Malaysia and the USA, wouldn't this be an inefficient use of capital? Maybe they are taking a page out of the PRC pricing strategy handbook and trying to render ILU's Eneabba project unviable through threatening overproduction/underpricing.
I've tried following LYC over the years but I always end up at a dead end as they never seem to produce any coherent detail on their existing operations or plans, the proposed LAMP Dy & Tb products being a case in point. They state that the new circuit design capacity will be 1,500 tpa of SEG, but how much Dy & Tb does that equate to? What are the estimated recovery rates given the existing circuit would be optimised for NdPr recoveries? What pricing assumptions for Dy & Tb and the remnant products have they based their business case on against the $25m CAPEX and undisclosed incremental OPEX? If I were a LYC investor I'd be demanding some more detail on the proposal before committing to build a second HRE separation facility at the LAMP, particularly given their ongoing issues with the Malaysians.
Finally, I'll let you DYOR on the question of
"current world requirement's of Dy & Tb" , hopefully someone at LYC has done so as part of the due diligence for their latest proposal.
DYOR & GLTAH!
(20min delay)