Hi ttroy, Not sure why you suggest "not sure about bayan obo...

Hi ttroy,

Not sure why you suggest "not sure about bayan obo containing 6% HRE." What suggestions if ever have i insinuated that. The "publications" of 3% you refer to reading is possibly from the table i posted a few days earliier in post 64986613.



Again not exactly sure of your point here.

My point was your argument of 'simply articulating superiority in rare earth production was devised by pure HREO tonnage in a product' is gregarious is innaccurate - but if we were to take such an assumption and apply in linearly then bayan obo would be the world largest HREO supplier.

Let me explain;
Bayan Obo mined rate is around ~5-6mtpa (front end) with ~ 5% TREO (i'll admit these figures aren't accurately published but one can research the detail and see that the degrees to which this outweighs others will prove the point irrespective of semantics of arguable details)
This is = 275,000T of REO in the front end.
HREO tonnage grade is @ 2.6% of that TREO figure.
Therefore this mean that ~ 7150tpa of HREO is coming out the back end of Bayan Obo.

Hmm; quite bizarre that Bayan Obo isn't supplying 7000tpa of HREO via a downstream separation plant given this is the equated tonnage of HREO in it's by-product.

BTW i'm not saying it can't economically be done. Just that if one was simply and arbitrarily to assume raw HREO tonnage out the back end of aprocessing circuit (even as a by-product) was equated to economic viability then Bayan Obo - (the largest rare earth producer on the globe and by far) would already probably be doing so.

The reason (probably) to why they are not trying to by-product process HREO is because the economic viability of doing so is not such that the AISC is cheaper than ionic clay counter part. hence why ionic clays have done and continue to provide 95% of HREO supply globally.

SF2TH