General discussion (MEI), page-4208

Unfortunately I can't spot the error. The Carina PEA was definitely a lot rougher than the Ausenco PEA for Penco, a lot of information glossed over and metallurgy section only a couple pages long for Carina. As I said, appears they made assumptions about downstream reagent consumptions, even acid consumptions without any data. That puts their PEA OPEX at +100/-10% accuracy IMO as Penco/Chile clay was incredibly unreactive (1 kg/t acid consumption rate). Good thing MEI are using a Tier 1 in Ausenco, it will be very thorough. Plus ANSTO doing downstream work now so they will have the data to feed into the study (and hopefully to report to market shortly).

I think the main difference between our approaches is your MEI extractions aren't the average all clay numbers in the recent met announcement, and you assumed 100% downstream recovery. Other than that we are very close. Should all become clear with MEI's scoping study coming out this quarter.

In any case MEI looking the best of the bunch and much more robust with lower REE prices. I did see a broker noted MEI break even is approx. $50 USD/kg Nd2O3 (and equivalent prices for the other REE), is this what you are calculating? REE prices can't go much lower than here, if MEI would be at break even than surely the artisanal low grade miners in Myanmar would be underwater.