molycorp jannounces start up, page-7

rru2s,

You said,

"The SX and IEX processes don't lend themselves to any size runs. They have minimum thresholds."

Not true, in fact a tiny little plant producing maybe 2 or 3 tonnes a year will have a way lower unit cost/kg because it is much cheaper to build, run and maintain than a 500 or 1000TPA plant. The equipment in a smaller plant is throw away due to the small size and doesn't require the durability and specialist maintenance/equipment that larger plants require. It is also much easier to recover from process upsets to produce on-spec product and clearly has the capability for very large surge capacity between recovery units for the various metals, and thus can be run as a batch process.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not a huge fan of MCP's story but it may well be that it's not hard for them to build a tiny little HRE recovery process. Whether there's a buck in it for them or not remains to be seen.