Substantial increase to Makuutu resource to over 500 million...

Substantial increase to Makuutu resource to over 500 million tonnes

Mineral Resource Estimate increased to 532 million tonnes at 640 ppm TREO, maintaining a cut-off grade of 200 parts per million (ppm) Total Rare Earth Oxide minus CeO2 (TREO-CeO2)

All is indicated and inferred, nothing is measured/proved.

640 ppm = 0.064% TREO. We still need to see, how they can get the value-carrying contents commercially viable and environmentally benign out of the ground. That is the crux.

If you excavate and move this regolith/saprolite/clay for heap-leaching, like you would do with low content gold resources, in this case 100% of the cost would apply to the 0.064% of value-carrying contents.

Visualise this: A truckload of 40 t of regolith/saprolite/clay contains 26 kgs of rare earths. If the cost of excavation and trucking to the heap should be US$10/t regolith/saprolite/clay, that cost is US$15/kg of rare earth content. To add insult to injury, that is before processing and separation cost.

Rare earths are not valued like gold at US$60,000/kg, in case of the composition of Ionic Rare Earth’s Makutuu we see it rather at ~US$40/kg, cleared for recovery losses.

In fact, even after the breath-taking rise of rare earth prices, for Makuutu and also for other rare earth deposits, rare earth prices are still too low.