Where should our processing facility be located?

I feel like we have done to death the topic of voting and merger, so i'm hoping to steer the TMT crowd back to something I think has been our strong suit, solid and objective analysis.

So post merger, an obvious first point is going to be, Processing: Where and how will they choose to do this?

I'm excluding a 'combined' plan for now as we don't know what that will look like, so i'm just starting here with the merits of each existing plan, unmodified for the most part.

I am also make the assumption that we are not having two processing facilities. I don't think anyone will disagree with that?

TMT facility onsite
Positives:
- Permitting is more advanced to the best of our knowledge
- Permitting only required for a single site
- Gas and water supplies already locked up
- Lower transport costs
- Potentially lower construction capex
- FEED study is or close to completion, and using FLSmidth, the export credit of 150mil is potentially still in play.
- Proven flowsheet, and should already be mostly optimized to take advantage of early titanium rich ore.

Negatives:
- Flow sheet most likely excludes a majority of the oxidized ore that AVL have accounted for via patented processing.

AVL Facility Offsite
Positives:
- Can process and recover vanadium pentoxide from the more heavily oxidized ore, including some of TMT's ore that they have excluded.
- Centrally Located so it can potentially be used by future vanadium mines (Selling point for government funding?)
- Patented process could make the facility more universal to process said ore from new vanadium mines in future
- Access to Local work force would lower the need for FIFO staff and larger mine site accomodation.
- Potentially cheaper gas supply?
- EPA permitting submission for this site seems to be getting or requires less scrunity that TMT's onsite submission.
- Shorter distance to ports for export.
- AVL managment will arguably have more say over where/what processing looks like and if they are sold on offsite, they are more commited to making this work
- You could argue that government have already provided a metaphorical tick to this plan in the form of the grant. I would not argue it, but I can see some could.

Negatives
- High transport costs for bulk ore site to facility
- High emmissions from said transport
- Haven't yet proven a saleable titanium product as TMT have done through pilot testing
- Higher construction capex?
- Riskier flow sheet due to it being a patented process that is untested at scale
- EPA permitting considerably further behind than TMT (as far as we can tell)
- I have seen mention that reliable water supply hasn't been locked up yet. I am not sure one way or the other so may not be an issue.
- Not optimized yet to process higher quality ore first for lower early Opex.



That's all I have time for on my lunch break.
Happy for anyone to add to either list or challenge any assumptions I have made. I don't gaurantee accuracy anywhere, just opening the discussion. Also hoping to avoid it turning into putting down one plan or another, but rather objectively looking at potential for either processing site to get up, and let everyone decide for themselves which plan makes the most sense to them.

I would guess we end up with one site, and possibly an altered "optimized" version of one or the other flowsheets.