Just going back to correct a couple of errors that seem to have crept in, with the working out of turning our mineralisation into ferro niobium...
Firstly assuming they get up to a 60% concentrate with 60% recovery, just for ease of numbers...
Take our resource of 2Mt of Nb2O5 but after recovery (60%) we have 1.2M of Nb2O5 in the concentrate. The concentrate total though weighs 2Mt (60% Nb2O5 and 40% waste). We use this concentrate in the formula of 18,000 kg of Niobium concentrate to make 11,000 kg of ferro niobium.
Using 18 tonnes of concentrate per 'batch' means we get a total of 111,111.11 batches from our 2Mt of concentrate. Each batch makes 11 tonnes of Ferro niobium as per @Wurlich formula.....
Therefore we get 111,111 X 11 = 1,222,222 tonnes of ferro niobium out of our original MRE, which is currently worth $US31,052 before VAT added on Shanghai Markets, roughly $US38B or $A56B..
Of course it excludes all the byproduct credits from the phosphate which would add another few billion dollars.
In gold equivalent terms you would need 14.5M oz recovered or a resource of 16.2M oz to allow for the 90% recovery of gold (at current price of ~$A3850/oz).
Instead compared directly to De Grey who claim a 93.5% recovery, they would need to be 15.5M oz (currently smaller) and at a grade of 2.5g/t with only 200Mt of 'ore'. Their current grade of resources is 1.3g/t in 296Mt of 'mineralisation'.
Their high grade resource (not reserve!!) that they are planning to start mining on is 122Mt at 1.5g/t gold which comes out at only 5.5M oz of gold.
De Grey's current Mcap for about 33% of the value of our initial MRE is currently $A3.21B
Long story short, De Grey is about 1/3rd the value of our niobium turned into ferro niobium, but currently 3 times the Mcap. Their processing plant also has to be massive compared to ours being a 10mt/a plant.
Assuming we high grade our plant it will likely be 1Mt/a, or a lot less, so large cap expenses savings anyway.. Running all the expenses on a 10Mt/a plant is likely to be a lot higher than our 1Mt/a (or smaller).
I've taken to assume we will start on high grade ore, possibly as high as 4% of which we will have a core of 5-20Mt, so can last for a lot more than a decade, then expand from cashflow.
To put another perspective on the lot, (AFTER allowing for recovery percentages) De Grey has an inground value of $A150/tonne of mineralisation at their total of 1.3g/t, while our low grade (1%) total has an IGV of $A273/t (at the current ferro niobium and gold prices). De Grey are going to high grade the mine by using 1.5g/t ore, which only has an IGV of $A174/t.
I suspect we will do likewise (like most mines) and even if we were to use 2.5% ore would have an IGV of $A684/t after allowing for recovery.
De Grey's open pit will be up to 400m deep, while most of our mineralisation is less than 150m deep, and most of the highest grade much shallower than that. They have a pre production capital spend of $1.345B, because of the 10mt/a plant and large deep open pit with a strip ratio of 6.6. Their starter pits (plural) are spread over 7km2, ours are likely to be only 2-3 km2 to start with.
The current Mcap of the 2 is way out of whack as WA1 should be multiples of De Grey, the only reasoning for the current difference is that Gold is an easier market to sell into, but something like Luni has not come along in decades...
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