Sydney Mining Club - Leading Edge Series
Leading Edge Series - Cocktails and Canapes with young and upcoming mining companies.
Pole Positions
in the ASX Rare Earth Race
Critica Limited CEO Jacob Deysel showcasing WA’s monster Jupiter discovery, Red Metals’ Rob Rutherford opening up on the Sybella heap leach at Mt Isa, and Jason Beckton showcases Prospech’s cracker-grade hardrock in Finland.
When it comes to extracting the elements we need for new generation high-flux magnets the mortal fear is about the cost of building and operating massive ‘chemistry sets’ – highly complex, large scale hydrometallurgical plants. Each of our two presenters this month sit on multi-billion tonne-scale resources and both have metallurgical shortcuts that could crown them ‘category killer’.
Re-badged, and re-managed $36m Critica Limited (ASX:CRI) is a dark horse entry. Lying just 6 hours drive from Perth in a brilliant infrastructure locale, Jupiter is an in-house discovery by Critica’s scholarly team. Its vast, and offers a brilliant short cut a low cost 800% upgrade in grade over an already firm 1700 ppm TREO. Prospech has high grades on its side at its Finnish Korsnas carbonatite project.
So too has Red Metal (ASX:RDM) discovered a metallurgical wormhole with its Sybella granite-hosted which falls neatly outside the ‘clay-hosted’ and ‘ionic’ tags. This 12km x 3km chunk of granite lies within plain site of the Isa stack and looks for all the world like a mega-heap leach project. Rutherford has visions of annual product similar to Lynas’ even in the case where it must freight acid in.
Like Jupiter, Sybella’s levels of radioactive elements are low meaning permitting and shipping will not trigger special conditions. Both offer breakthrough capex options with low opex metallurgy, with plenty of tonnes. Critica has identified four more targets within a short haul giving it decades of horizon.
Prospech (ASX:PRS) has a quickly expanding 14Mt of open cut ore at Krosnas running at a whacking 1.03% TREO. Occurring as an apatite mineral in carbonatite host this a straightforward crush, grind and float contender also with a strong economic case.
Three stand out stories that will get you thinking about where the Rare Earth business is really headed.
