Dunno about the plant design. Nobody does. WLF was one of those...

Dunno about the plant design. Nobody does. WLF was one of those companies that went from zero to hero overnight. They completed their so-called "Bankable Feasibility Study" on a shoestring. Most serious companies would have spent in the order of $10-$20 million on a detailed feasibility, but WLF seems to have done theirs for less than a couple of million, after looking through the cashflow statements of that time.

The market was shown very little evidence of the designed flowsheet actually having been tested. This circuit has a dense media plant in it which was not demonstrated at pilot scale on large bulk samples. The ore is terribly soft and wolframite is one of those minerals that easily over-grinds and winds up in the tailings dam.

It's also heavily oxidised which means magnetic separation doesn't work well. So they decided to do a thing called a "reduction roast". This is a very unusual thing to do and one that should have been trialled at pilot scale. It seems to have been an act of desperation to draw a reduction roaster in the flowsheet after the bench scale testwork perhaps showed this thing wasn't quite the dripping roast that Humphrey, Downs, the golf umpire and the kids from Todd would want us to believe.

The actual detailed work seems to have started after the implementation of the project, after all the hype and fundraising. No-one would have funded this if they had been confronted with real data. But the deal was sweet for the design and engineer company GRES - they sign off on the feasibility to help fund raising and are guaranteed a lump sum contract, with no process guarantees. All they have to do is erect a plant that functions mechanically, no matter how poorly it performs metallurgically. The pumps work, the crushers crush, the mill rotates- job well done. But it doesn't actually recover much tungsten. I would like to see all the exclusions, disclaimers and carve-outs that GRES put in the contract but the market was never told about.