I've looked into this in the past, and imo, the price was...

I've looked into this in the past, and imo, the price was correctly reflecting probably fatal flaws in the project, including
thin clay mineralisation under thicker cover on average across 'mineable' areas for high strip operation
thin clay orebody means very high mining footprint, meaning high acquisition/capex/opex/rehab etc per tonne
very high acid consumption due to prevalence of calcium carb (lime) in and around the clays (depositional environment)
very low pH = 1 still reported for most recent met work (high acid input) despite improvements in "Al and Fe" acid consumption (ie may have lower acid consumption from alumina-silcates but what about the CaCO3 elephant?)
Unreported acid consumption figures since very early days (if they made step-change improvements then why not report acid consumtoio0n figures??)
Even at pH=1, modest recoveries form low value ore in the 'huge' resource area (NdPrDyTb levels are very low in absolute terms)
very low value insitu ore is very hard to make bank after all the capex/opex is taken account of.... economics matters!
Doesn;t matter how much uneconoomic clay deposits they have... drill out the whole SE Sth Aust and hit a trillion tonnes... for what?

All IMHO of course, could be a new extraction process been discovered only relates to Koppa clays and they're back in the game?

GLATH