This should be taken to Cobalt thread, but once we're her... Mt...

This should be taken to Cobalt thread, but once we're her...

Mt Cobalt is hard rock, asbolane if I'm right. Cobalt mineralisation appears in veins and/or flakes type of a resource (it's a metal like Ni and those two occur together in a similar way) and isn't softened by erosion. I didn't bother going back to the report, that's how I remember it, so apologies for being incorrect on some details.

As it's contained in a hard rock and can't really be extracted by fossicking, the process is quite expensive. Again similar to Ni. It requires milling and grinding and what is most expensive high pressure acidic leaching which rockets the Capex.

To set up such mine operations costs easily >$500m all inclusive. So, let's go with following figures:

Capex: $500m
Co price: $80,000/t
Co grade: 0.5% (that's very optimistic. Anything above 0.5% is a fantastic grade. Counting this as an average for the whole resource)
Recovery: 70% conservative/lower
OPEX per ton of ore: rough estimate $80/t
Yearly output: 1,000t of Co concentrate. Just guessing, it's not going to be a huge mine. The output will increase following years, I'd assume.

To cover the Capex, they will need to process roughly 2,000,000 tons of ore (exl. Opex). Is that resource even that large?!? Yearly output makes 300,000t of ore processed, that's $25m opex.
If we stick to these figures as being constant, it will take 9 years to pay back.
I highly doubt the resource is big enough to cover these costs. The only way I see it is taking the ore from a hole and processing it elsewhere. Not sure what's around the place but using some Ni facility and paying royalties makes more sense.

Just IMO, I came here for the tin.

MiB