race to the finish line, page-41

Stoops,
I’ll take your post point by point and see if I can clarify my reasoning for you.

Let’s take $2/tonne as your mining cost. If I say that we get 25kg of Con at 6.25% TREO at a generous 90% recovery that gives you a feed grade of 0.174% TREO. A bit lower than I’d initially calculated in a previous post. This gives you an in ground resource of 1.74kg of REO at your 18% HRE, 82% LRE mix per tonne of alluvium. You can calculate the in ground value from there if you know the metal distributions. At a stab I’d say around $120-$150/tonne in ground. Not dissimilar to many hard rock gold mines. A plus here is the Zircon, for which I’ve not accounted.

Very, very rough not knowing metal distribution but I’ve called the HRE 60% Y and the LRE 50/50 Ce/La, which gives you about $80/tonne plus the other $40-$70 for the more exotic stuff in the HRE.

Now 6.25% TREO is a very low grade concentrate that would not be saleable as is, and would be too low a grade to go through a refinery economically. This is the point where you can compare costs with a hard rock mine. The cost of digging up and crushing and grinding LYC’s Mt Weld ore at say 8% TREO with the cost of CUX’s output of 6.25% TREO reporting to the concentrating stage after HMS. To get the same amount of REO concentrate LYC, for instance, has moved 40 times less ore.

Now obviously LYC needs to move overburden, waste etc, but probably so does CUX. Who’s trucking fleet is smaller? Who needs a smaller mining crew? Whilst LYC’s cost per tonne mined would be way higher than CUX’s the order of magnitude of the value of the ore per tonne is also way higher in LYC’s case.

CUX HMS con would need further upgrading to be either saleable as is, say better than 30%TREO for argument sake.
The HMS con likewise would need upgrading to reduce the size of an expensive refinery, you don’t build refineries of that type out of mild steel for instance. The joint I work in we can’t even use 316 stainless – we’re several grades over that and it sure isn’t cheap.

The more you have to upgrade your con grade, the lower your recovery to con. Therefore less cash is spitting out the end, and it’s costing you more in power, water, capital equipment cost blah, blah. Yet it still cost you that $2 to dig up – it’s just that you’re getting less and less for it out the other end.

You have now introduced dry plant processing to your discussion. I’m not sure what they would try there, or why for that matter. If you’re producing a heavy media concentrate (Wet Processing), you’d then have to dry that concentrate (And at 6.25% TREO there’d be PLENTY of it) – which is expensive. Presumably the dry processing would be electrostatic – pretty common stuff in mineral sands. This would presumably get the Zircon away from the REO. There are just as many ways to do that staying in a wet plant environment.

Either way you’re starting to get to a fairly complicated and capital heavy plant. And you haven’t yet got individual HRE/LRE elements into their own products, which further dilutes the cash a buyer will pay you.

Those prices I used for Y and Ce and La in the ore calc are for refined 99.99% oxides. You can be damn sure CUX won’t realise anywhere near those prices for their concentrate.

In closing, the grade of the ore is very, very important. You must be able to pay for the plant that you’re going to try building. With the ore grade at 0.174% TREO as above it will take a big HMS plant to produce an output of the same as LYC’s 11000TPA REO. If we take the same generous 90% recovery to a 6.25% REO HMS Con at 0.174% Feed we get 176000T of HMS concentrate, not huge but still needs around a 20T per hour electrostatic plant to upgrade it to your Zr and REO cons. No toy really. To get that 176000T of HMS Con you’ve mined about 6.3 Million T. It appears that I too was mathematically challenged in my previous post - 1 too many zeros, so instead of a HMS plant needing to be 3 times the size of Argyle it only needs to be half the size. Cold comfort indeed but I do apologise for my error.

There is no dry processing in LYC, or at NTU either. It goes in 1 plant as mined and comes out the other end as a 30-40% REO con. CUX, using your wet/dry model goes in 1 plant as mined, comes out at 6.25% con, then goes into another plant and comes out at probably the same grade as the other 2 companies. All 3 companies then have to transport it to a refinery. LYC own their refinery.

This stuff is very hard to explain by typing and very easy to explain verbally. It really is a bit of a limitation of forums but that’s the way it goes. I’ve omitted a lot of tangents for the sake of keeping it as short as possible.
Hope this helps and I’m happy to keep going on this topic if you’ve got more questions.