Morning, agree that the met results provide a go/no-go, with the...

Morning, agree that the met results provide a go/no-go, with the next phase all about optimisation - i.e. upside from phase 1. We also will need to do the go/no-go on the downstream process. That is, answer the question "can we make a MREC product that is at specification with high dowsntream rare earth recovery?"

A Tier 1 rare earth company would need three things IMO:
1. Tier 1 location, which is more important for REE because LYC, MP and ILU's upcoming refinery all exist because of government support along the way. Even if the location is a Tier 1 mining location (e.g. Brazil), it needs to be non-BRICs or West aligned to get Western government funding.
2. Scale, nominally the ability to produce 5,000 tpa NdPr equivalent or more. LYC curently produces ~6,000 tpa NdPr
3. Lowest quartile production costs, inclusive of CAPEX. Many hard rock developers have very low cost of production (like ARU) but huge CAPEX. Need to include the amortised CAPEX with the OPEX to get the full picture for cost of production. The REE market is highly volatile, so the project would need to withstand prices of $50 USD/kg NdPr as we are seeing now.

So let's see if we can prove up 2 and 3 above in the coming months.