Plenty of information provided by HRE as usual, they are one of, if not the best, at providing the most information of these REE clay plays IMO.
Obviously size is up as well as grade, but to be expected given their initial MRE was so small. In my opinion, 5 million tonnes per annum feed will be the goldilocks feed rate for any clay project, which is what IXR are going with, so a project with around 50 Mt of the good stuff is all that is needed. The first 10 years of any project make up the NPV and IRR, anything beyond that doesn't move the needle. So they could pick out the best 1/3rd if it makes sense from a continuity and open pit shell perspective (see my
previous post).
Their geo consultant has provided the average mineralised width (14.6 m) and overburden (12.7 m), which allows strip ratio to be calculated = 0.87. This strip ratio is higher than IXR's of 0.57, so mining costs will be higher per tonne of feed ore. Not sure how this compares with other Aus clay plays as information is sparse.
Next step from here is more met testwork (how continuous is the met response and is cherry picking the responsive stuff valid?), and at least a PEA study to define if it is economic. No Aus clay explorer has done any studies, even AR3 which is a year ahead of the pack, so we have no idea how viable any of them are yet. IXR being the benchmark with a DFS is a good comparison tool for overall grade, strip ratio, acid consumption rate etc, if it is better than IXR across all metrics, then the study outcomes will be better.
