Not disagreeing with you, but just sharing what I have read. The...

Not disagreeing with you, but just sharing what I have read. The Aclara Penco pilot ran two distinct campaigns. The first campaign was dogsh!t, organised by a Chilean university (bunch of lab boffins really) and only had like 40% recovery of what leached into the MREC product (in line with your 6% overall recovery calculation). When the project was bought by Hoschild they cleaned house, got Uni of Toronto to redo most of the work and got 95% downstream recovery which went into their PEA/scoping study.


I strongly recommend anyone interested in this space to read the Aclara Penco PEA, summary below (can't upload the whole beast on HC)
TR_PencoModulePEA pp0-62.pdf
It is a 500 page document available on SEDAR+, was completed by Ausenco (same group doing MEI's scoping study) so its a prequel to MEI's document given they are using the same flowsheet and processing as Penco - OPEX and CAPEX will be very similar IMO.

On your second comment, the IAC in China and Myanmar is incredibly opaque. No one knows head grades, recoveries, processing methods for sure. Would be curious where you have read 90% recovery, as even the Brazilian IAC's are averaging in the 50-60% (of course they get some 90% samples but the average is what counts when processing 5 mtpa).

Key one in IXR's favour - heap leaching is 3x cheaper than tank leaching for capital intensity based on what's been released. IXR is around $30m/mtpa feed ore, whilst Aclara's IAC tank leaching plant works out at a whopping $100m/mtpa feed ore. MEI is gonna get sticker shock when their capex drops if they think it will be anywhere as low as IXR's heap leaching!