Hey Noodly,I'll have a punt here. I was drinking Burtons...

Hey Noodly,

I'll have a punt here. I was drinking Burtons Koolaid for a long time so have done some navel gazing on this too.

I was always sceptical of moving the refinery from Darwin to Peak when Burton had a falling out with NT EPA. This never sounded viable and the hasty move to Peake appeared a knee jerk reaction which triggered my alarm bells.

The complexity of the refinery is massive and to build it in the middle of the dessert would have meant VASTLY increased CAPEX and OPEX costs.

CAPEX increases would have been massive and possibly killed the project on its own but OPEX would have been the real killer, the refinery would have required a huge amount of incredibly skilled and talented people (process engineers and the likes) and to lure them away from their families to a FIFO job would have been incredibly expensive. This is without considering any of the environmental or First Nations hurdles that we would have had to jump.

I'm pretty sure that the CMT will have worked this out pretty quickly after getting access to the team and books and considered all other options.

Looking at Speewah and Peak they are like chalk and cheese. I'm pretty sure that old TNG had done some test work on the Speewah ore from when they were looking to licence TIVAN to them years ago. When putting these two side by side it is clear that the benefits of mining Speewah are huge, let along the sheer size of Speewah completely dwarfs Peake.

The big benefit of Speewah is that the Vanadium concentrate is so much better than Peake. Peake is still a good deposit but it needs TIVAN to monetise it.

Speewah also gives an option to make a saleable concentrate or use it in a typical (simpler) roast process to make vanadium (no saleable byproducts) to give early revenue.

Thats my take anyway. I'm sure Burton and old management knew this and should probably by locked up. This is my bad for not realising this sooner. But that's the past and I've moved past this.

I'm still invested as I really believe that TIVAN can be a (much needed) complete game changer for the pigment feedstock industry. Speewah may have just managed to save this company by enabling early revenue and keep the TIVAN dream alive.