ntu, page-26

imho,

For NTU to produce a concentrate they have proposed to first magnetically upgrade the ore and then float a concentrate from the magnetic concentrate to produce a final REO concentrate.

The size of the plant is governed by the size of the orebody, no point building a plant capable of treating 5 million tons per year if you only have 10 million tons of ore. The type of plant NTU seek to build is pretty common, off the shelf stuff not requiring anything fancy. Slightly more complex than Mt Weld but easy and cheap enough.

The amount of concentrate produced per unit ore depends on:
1. The feed ( Head ) grade of the ore
2. The final concentrate grade
3. The recovery of the REO

Now if we take NTU's rough numbers of ,say 2% head grade, 90% recovery at 40% conc grade.
The calculation goes thus per tonne of ore to find out how much conc will be produced( All on dry tonnes basis )

1 x 2%(Feed Grade) x 90% (Recovery) x 100/40 (Con Grade)

So for every ton of ore we get 45kg of concentrate. So the ore to concentrate ratio is about 22:1. ie 22 Tonnes of ore gets you 1 Tonne of concentrate containing 40% REO and recovering 90% of the REO from the ore.

The major cost is always a refinery because you seek to produce a pure product to supply to end users. Concentrates are impure but easy to produce. The capital cost to NTU to build a refinery would need a lot of number crunching to see if it's viable.

There is a very good reason why there are a whole lot less refineries, of all metals, in the world than there are concentrators. Refineries are able to purchase concentrate from a variety of sources at a discount to open market meatl prices without having to run mines. Miners are able to sell concentrate to refineries without having major capital costs involved in building a refinery for their little 10 year project.

One really, really good thing LYC has going for it is that it may well be still treating REO concentrate at the LAMP long after CLD and Duncan are mined out.

All that is the short version, hope it helps you.