Thanks for the tag! When I first came across Sybella (well after the Sybella discovery pump), by luck since this thing never appears on the most discussed list or anywhere online really, I figured due to cash position a cap raise was on the way. But damn I also got fomo doing the same research you are and waiting for that cap raise to come.
What are you missing? Good question. I know the market knows all, everything is priced in etc, but I cannot help but think it is flying under the radar. I have read nearly every REE announcement front to back from every ASX listed REE clay co and whatever I can find online from Aclara or Serra Verde (not much) since getting excited about rare earth clays back in early 2023. So I was very surprised when I came across RDM a whole month after they released their discovery, I completely missed it. So I figure many others are too. If Sybella continues to shape up the way we both think it will, it needs good marketing.
To be honest, the hard rock stuff like ARU doesn't interest me. There are 5+ huge hard rock projects at FID waiting on funding and the REE price boom in 2021-22 didn't even get them over the line. The CAPEX is huge (e.g. ARU), the payabilities or even finding offtake without including downstream refining is terrible, you have a radioactive waste problem, and production is heavily skewed to NdPr with little to no DyTb (exception being Browns Range). There is a reason the vast majority of REE produced globally come from leachable clays and MEI have a market cap well in excess of every hard rock project waiting on funding and they haven't even got a scoping study out.
Flowsheet. Sybella at surface looks to be in the "clay" basket not the hard rock, despite the fact it is granite hosted. If you look at the geology of MEI, it is a very weathered granite source that has become clay with REE hosted in fluorocarbonates. So Sybella has the REE fraction somehow weathered to be leachable fluorocarbonate minerals as well but the host rock is intact. Only project I am aware of like it. So no acid baking based on ANSTO (surface) work to date, or any cracking. The flowsheet will go one of two ways based on what everyone else is doing in this clay space:
1. Tank leaching: Mine, [unique to Sybella - crush, grind (?)], tank leach followed by filtration then the standard downstream impurity removal and MREC production for sale with 70-90% payables on REO benchmark pricing. Aclara (and MEI, AR3, most others) are pursuing this route as heap leaching clay is very difficult. Aclara have completed a 2021 PEA with Ausenco, well worth a read -
TR_PencoModulePEA pp0-62.pdfTank Leaching CAPEX - Aclara's capex was $119m USD for a 1.7 mtpa plant, or $70m USD/mtpa capital intensity. MEI capex for a 5 mtpa plant at this capital intensity would be in the order of $350m USD (less some scale efficiency, but then add 2021 to 2024 inflation!).
2. Heap leaching: Mine, [unique to Sybella - crush], heap leach, then standard downstream. This flowsheet won't work if they need to grind like how they pulverised the samples in the ANSTO work they have shared, grinding makes the ore too fine to be competent for heap leaching.
Heap Leaching CAPEX - IXR have completed a 2023 DFS on their heap leach, capex was $121m USD for a 5 mtpa plant, or $24m USD/mtpa capital intensity.
Both capex costs are an order of magnitude below ARU at $1.6b AUD, hence why I am not keen on hard rock. If they can go down the heap leach route, crushing doesn't add a lot of opex or capex to IXR's numbers.. it's the grinding part that would bring up the opex and capex for Sybella specifically, so again, pulverised sample in the initial work needs to be answered. Being granite and not clay, they have the chance here to go down the heap leach route, and at nearly 1/3rd the capital intensity of tank leaching a massive opportunity to produce unheard of IRR and NPV numbers for a REE project.
Keep up the research, but fomo will start kicking in hard shortly lol.
(20min delay)
