The costs of mining hard rock REE and the processing is a few times more expensive than cheap near surface clay deposit REE, where the REE washes out and separates in acid simply because essential in suspension from leaching, ionic bonding in clay as a single layer. Also hard rock has to deal with a significant radiation issues from thorium and U as you maybe aware with LYC and its processing plant in Malaysia. The benefaction processing stages before shipping would be expected to almost twice as effective as Lynas type ore if like Chinese samples, ie instead of shipping 30-40% product it would be greater than 60%. I don't know if you remember but Lynas was under extreme pressure from cheaper China ionic deposit production when demand was lower as were the other US producer, which had to shutter back in 2015.
Could be the ionic deposits are several thousand metres long and near surface.... Anyway we are a long way from knowing, havent even got a single drill result on MEU ground.
