They are ionic. Well the ones they tested. It was just the leach...

They are ionic. Well the ones they tested. It was just the leach results weren't great - meaning only a small portion of the REO existing in ionic phase. They never tried to recover them by screening and using higher acid doses once the first ionic leach test results were pretty average. They did screen, and got the uplift but somewhat pivotted once it wasn't a true ionic clay.

It was postulated to potentially be viable as a kaolin project with REO credits. They decided to let a university continue performing so met test in the background to see if they had any success but decided to strongly pivot focus on the graphite.

Point being, the results are actually better than many others who got 0 to leach under pH4. And those companies have 20-30m MC. I personally don't attribute much value to clay projects even if a small portion is ionic. I guess i'm just indicating the market strangely still is happy to apply 20-30m mc valuation of projects with worse drill intercepts and 0% ionic. Therefore if all ITM had was these REO clay projects we'd be at the same MC as them. It means 0 value is being applied to the graphite projects. Which is extremely odd given it looks like it will be one of the largest and most advanced graphite developments in aus.

There's only a handful which have advanced the met-work to requisite detail of producing CSPG and of those only a couple have got scale for 20-30Y LoM. One is RNU and is a 400M+ MC even with all things considered. Even if ITM was half the size or half as economical. Future state would be 200M MC if at same level of development. That's decent upside when all ITM will need to do is delineate an MRE and underpin a FS. The resource is looking like that's a tick. The feasibility is 6-12months of time and some cash. So we're like what 2 years away from that level of development. Not a bad ROI if that all works out.

In the background i expect graphite prices to hit a bottom and bounce hard sometime in the next 6 months. That tailwind will be a nice one to ride the graphite sector - i'm defining what i think are the best plays within that sector and building positions you can't easily do if you just want to flip 10-20% for small time ROI.

SF2TH