Righto Muddy Boy and his army, it's back! Ah, lithium rare earths. Babes, I'm pumped.
Jesus Christ. Got a lot out of this, in fact we recorded it last week and we got so interested in rare earths afterwards that we teed up a follow up with another geo so that's gonna come out, I don't know if it'll come out tomorrow or next week depending on how lazy we are on Friday. I think it'll be Friday, so we're going rare earths Thursday, rare earths Friday, so you'd say it's frequent earths.
What? That's how it's gone. So let's fucking let's just rip it.
Do it. Right-o, money miners. Back by popular demand, our resident geological and exploration and bivvy stock specialist, Ahmed. Welcome, mate.
YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, everyone demanded your return. Thank you for doing the return, mate. No problems. Thank you.
I'll say what I said last time and I'll continue this. You're only as good as your last performance. So when I tank, that'll be the time.
That'll be my last performance. Because we've had some absolute dusters ourselves on days we rock up and we come back and we do it all over again. Reads and repeat. Mate, what is going on?
So ladies and gentlemen, agenda, lithium and rare earths. Am I right? That is the agenda, Matty.
Lithium and rare earths have gone all over the world, different styles, different projects. We are slaying out the question to the money miners. And they gave us companies, commodities, projects they want to talk about, and that's what we're going to deliver.
I mean, do you want to start with? It's surprising that they are the two things. Yeah, because of the relative vogue.
Yeah, if you think of what's captured the attention of the Aussie retail punter, I think lithium is still a bit of an overhang. If we were doing this podcast in Canada, they'd be in your court uranium all the way. Yeah, I think.
But I wonder how much of the lithium stuff is like, I still hold it. Yes, totally, yeah. And then Rare Earths are like, even though like commodity prices in the doldrums, think of the real success that's happened in the Brazilian Rare Earth sort of, you know, retail part of the market in recent history and it's captured people's attention.
Mate, Ahmed, give the punters some validation on whether their stocks are going to return to what they bought them for. Right, later on. Where do we want to start, Ahmed? Rare Earths or lithium? Let's do lithium, I guess.
Let's just start with that because we've got enough comments about that. And like... The exploration context of lithium has evolved a lot as the commodities obviously become a lot more popular and in demand.
But when you think of like the fundamentals geologically to a generalist that, you know, you should kind of be across, what should someone like me who knows very little about geology kind of just be looking out for or be aware of when it comes to sort of, you know, making sense of the geology when it comes to lithium? Yeah, so I think that's a good point to start on in that I'm Yeah, lithium, even from a technical understanding of what the deposit should look like and the mine should look like, is very young. You know, like we don't have, you know, one of the things I tell people is that, you know, like we still have very little idea on what a good lithium mine and not so good lithium mine actually looks like.
You know, like what type of deposit or resource or things do you need for it to become a lithium mine? And that's like, if you look at... the Australian examples, you know, a lot of the things like green bushes, like Pilgrim Gora, you know, they were tin and tantalum mines, you know, and then they became kind of lithium mines on the back of it.
So, yeah, so they, you know, like they were mined obviously as a tin thing and a tantalum thing for a while. Any tin still there? Yeah, yeah, there's still, like often these pegmatites have... There's a tantalum circuit at green bushes, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So they like often these pegmatites are like you'll often see this thing called LCT. So it's like, you know, lithium, cesium and tantalum. Yeah, that's that's kind of the pegmatite. So some people are mining for cesium, which is not a lot of uses for it.
Tantalum, there's like slightly more and obviously tin, you know, like tin. Tins are very kind of up and down commodities. Sometimes it really catches you.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that's right. That's very up. Easy, un-easy. I'm talking about lithium here.
Don't worry about metals, X. Maybe green bushes is the next tin morn. That's right. So we've heard from Mr. Joe Lowry that we should view lithium as a specialty chemical. What's your sort of view on specialty chemical, bulk?
Naish Meadow, how do you think about lithium in that sort of regard? Good question. I think, yeah, in reality, if...
If the projections of how much lithium we're really going to use are true, then I think it would have to become a bulk commodity to some degree. It'll have to have the economics of a bulk commodity. If the use cases of lithium in the market space constrain down to some high-end uses and any other things that we're going to use it for, then I think it will probably end up becoming a specialty kind of product.
So I think that market space is still trying to figure out how that's going to play itself. And that's largely because when you produce lithium, you can produce lithium in a lot of different ways. If it comes from spodumene, you could just probably produce just a simple Li2O concentrate.
If it's a different type of lithium mineral, then you can produce it in a different type of concentrate. You can produce a spodumene concentrate, so you don't do any concentrating really in that sense. You're just sending the mineral.
So I think all of that stuff is still trying to be worked out in the market space and how is it actually going to be absorbed in that sense. And sometimes people question why that is, but you also have to think about certain elements that we use. We've used them since antiquity, right? We have significant use cases. We know exactly how they should be.
The market understands. The refineries understand. So we're still trying to, I think, work that stuff out in lithium.
But my general sense is that, yeah, if you're going to use lithium the way that we say we're going to use it, like we're almost washing our face with it and everything, then I think it will have to go down the path of almost becoming a bulk commodity to some degree. And how do you think about metallurgy? That's downstream from the mine, essentially, there has been a lot of problems in Australia, hydroxide, these sorts of things. How do you think about that more broadly when you're stacking up the merits of projects?
I think, yeah, like I think as a general rule, the less complexity you have in a mine, the better. And it's kind of different, right? Geologically speaking, the more complexity you have, the more likely the chance you're going to have a big deposit. In a mining sense, the less complexity you have, the more chance you're actually going to have a profitable mine.
So I think as soon as you start seeing... There's some lithium projects where the lithium is hosted in a number of different mineral species and people often talk about that as a positive. I would question that that would be a challenging thing from a mining aspect.
How do you actually separate those minerals out? What type of recoveries are you going to get? All of those type of things. So as a general rule, the less complexity you have in your body, the easier it is to actually mine and make it an economic mine in that sense.
That sort of makes sense. So with the table kind of set there, one of the big questions we had is Quebec lithium, Canadian lithium. Why don't we start there? There's a bunch of ASX listed projects that are sitting over there.
A lot of them came here because of our capital markets, despite the project being over there. But James Bay is also a sort of region that comes to mind if you want to start there. Let's tackle Canadian lithium. Yeah. So I think we obviously had a lithium rush in.
in Australia, where people went. And as I mentioned, a lot of that initial wave was people targeting existing tin tantalum mines. In James Bay, I think it worked a little bit differently in the sense that James Bay is obviously in Quebec, and one of the major, I guess, proponents of rural development in Quebec is Quebec Hydro, which is the energy producer.
And so if you look at James Bay, James Bay is For people that know in Australia, that's the snowy hydro area. That's where a lot of hydro gets produced. And Quebec being Quebec sells none of that to the rest of Canada, and they sell it all to the eastern states of the United States. So like New York, Vermont, all of these places get a lot of their energy from Quebec.
And so why Quebec Hydro is important is that a lot of the infrastructure that was initially set up in in James Bay was actually set up by Quebec Hydro. And, you know, one of the things that I kind of noticed, and I have to give a shout out to a colleague of mine named Jamil Seder, who I affectionately call Darth Seder. And he kind of highlighted this, that if you look at a lot of the development of projects in James Bay, they're all really basically following the existing roads that are in that area right now. And all of those roads and that infrastructure is... built thanks to Quebec Hydro.
And so I think James Bay became an area where a lot of people focused or went is because A, it was easy to access because all of that existing infrastructure existed. B, the pegmatites form our geological or topographic features in the area. They form the top of hills. They're easy to see.
There's not a lot of forest in that part of Quebec. So you can see all these white rocks sticking out all over the place. It's all been, is it all the glacier water is just weathered, taking all the weathering away? That's right. Yeah.
So like, you know, in Canada, you know, we don't have the problem in. in Canada that you have in Australia, you know, like there is no, none of this like couple of hundred metres of dirt sitting on top because in Canada the glaciers have scraped all of this shit away for geologically speaking anyways. So, yeah, so you don't have any of those problems.
And the glaciers also like sandpaper a lot of these hills nicely so you can kind of like, you know, they're all nice and smooth. Got to make something easy over there. Yeah, that's what I heard. Everything else is fucking hard. Yeah, that's right.
So, yeah, so a lot of companies went to James Bay because Yeah, it was easy to spot pegmatites. There's a couple of existing gold mines which have geologically quite well figured out the relationship between gold mineralization and intrusions and pegmatites. And it was known that they had all lithium existing in those pegmatites. So long story short, the reason why James Bay highlighted as an area is it's Quebec, it's quite a friendly jurisdiction to work in. There's infrastructure there.
And geologically, people knew where there were pegmatites already. So the question of it was really just to go and drill a lot of these things to see what the grade of the lithium was going to be in them. And then that's why a lot of, I think, companies kind of went there. It was kind of like the easiest kill you could have if you really wanted to go find pegmatites in Canada. There were two, well, multiple kind of exploration success stories of the last lithium boom.
And while the shareholders would be on a relative basis upset at the moment given the... the cycle. You know, the ones that kind of have, I guess, you know, the largest kind of base of shareholders that might have had the most prosperity in the exploration domain would be, you know, Patriot and Winsome.
And both have different merits, fierce shareholders on both sides. So whatever you say now, I'm sure someone's going to get offended in some way, shape or form, but that's... That's without fail.
It comes part and parcel with it all. When you kind of look at the two... two companies, two resources, two propositions? You know, what are your initial impressions?
I mean, I think, yeah, like Patriot, I think, did a really good job because they were the first, like, you know, first company that really went out there and found significant amount of pegmatite and had decent grade, you know. So the Corvette or Corvée, you know, depending if you're French or English, you know, like that was really the one where, you know, like that was the first major kind of drilling campaign really in that part of the world. and it returned significant results. You were returning 100 or more than 100 meter intersections of pegmatites at 1 to 1.5% lithium. And that's also a general rule.
Lithium is sometimes a little bit hard to understand. What does 100 meters at 1% lithium mean? So as a general rule, if you get somewhere between 125 to 150 meter intersection at 1% lithium, that's the equivalent of getting, say, 100 meters at 1 gram. per ton gold, around that kind of level. So they were the first company that went out and had several of these intersections.
They put a resource together. And I think that reflected in their share price early. You look at what Corvée is, it's not very far away from infrastructure.
It's about, it would be the first, you pull over on the side of the road and you could probably go explore. And that's what they did. And then they found it.
And I'm not completely au fait with the history of the project, but I think... the Pygmatites were known in that part of the world and Patriot picked up that project from someone else because they actually went in that area exploring for gold. That's what they were doing.
And then this kind of happened to fall in their lap when the lithium boom kind of took off. So it's inevitable that they all get compared to Patriot in that sense. But there's one, in the show notes, I have this kind of lithium graph that I've put up. And I actually think this is one of the graphs that explains that dichotomy between lithium projects really, really nicely. And when you put this up as part of the video, you'll see that there'll be a few mines that'll be on the right-hand side of the graph.
So in essence, the graph is just the size of the deposit on the bottom and then the grade on the left-hand side. And so you can see that you have Monono, Greenbushes, and... Pilgungora on the right-hand side.
They've had to pull Monono in as well. So you're down the bottom on the scale. That's right, yeah, because it's like, you know, orders of magnitude bigger than that or one order of magnitude probably bigger than that. And so, yeah, so those are all existing mines and they're all several hundred million tonnes resource at roughly the same grade. So that's an interesting thing, right?
So the grade of these deposits tends to be very, you know, like between 1 and kind of 1.5, 1.6. uh but the size of them differs and you know example if you look at iocg deposits they often have the same kind of distribution that the grade of iocg deposits tends to be very similar but the size of them tends to be quite variable right like that's really interesting right because it's like it makes the special mind so much more special when you know they're in a league of their own and In this case, I guess it's the scale, the cost advantages when mining it. And you don't. We haven't even got a Zura on there yet.
We haven't even got a mineral resource yet. Expiration target. Coming.
That's coming. 1 to 240, something like that. So, you know, so there's like some commodities where you can kind of see that, you know, like maybe the economics of whether a project becomes a mine or not is dependent on size.
And so, you know, so in this case it might be size that, you know, like if you can get it to be a couple of hundred million ton resource, you know, irrespective of the grade. you're probably going to get an economic kind of mind out of it. Yeah, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, to a lot of the North American ones have got bigger spodumene crystals, which are going to be, they're more not like a fine-grained Linetown or possibly Andover. There's a lot bigger over there, more amenable to possibly DMS only. Yes, that's right.
Yeah, so a lot of this like spodumene concentrate production, like, you know, for them. Yeah, once they crush up the rock, you know, they can just kind of send it out, like you said, as a DSO product. Oh, no, but like the process and they don't have to, not a DSO, but like they won't have to put floatation in. No, that's right. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, mate, if they do bloody need float over there, good water apparently. Fresh as a daisy. You can just drink it.
No salt. Yeah. You give it to your grandmother. They bloody love it.
Yeah, true story. I believe you. It looks fresh.
It's a beautiful scenery. Especially bloody Nathan Stoitus'little side gig would be good for fuck all over there. No membrane filters needed.
Yeah. But as a result, like, you know, there's like the permitting timelines in Canada are so much more elongated than what we might be accustomed to in Western Australia, a more established kind of. Oh, the Cree, getting the Cree on side, like just the community. Yeah, because as you look at it, it's just as you say, J.D., Stunning.
Stunning, mate. Stunning. But this is where-A hole in stunning ain't easy sometimes. Doesn't look so stunning anymore.
Boys, as you know, I'm not short of creating new potential insurance derivatives for our industry. But do you reckon CRE insurance could offer permitting insurance? Now, I reckon there's a market for it. So you-North America. You want to be insured against the potential that the-Permitting takes fucking 10 years.
the knob jobs at the bloody permitting place don't give you a permit. Yeah, or they just don't look at the permit for five years or, yeah. If it's doable, Matty, I think I know one mob that could do it. I think, well, consider and CRE has pretty much taken over African mining insurance and, you know, getting into Australia is going to be a piece of piss with their rap sheet, but possibly North American permitting insurance.
Mate, you imagine if a bit of the next-gen money was allocated towards permitting insurance instead of F1 teams. It's almost like what you're describing is international arbitration. Yeah. Is that it?
It's also a bit of a turnkey solution. It is a turnkey. So I was speaking with the team last night, actually. Were you? Yeah.
Essentially what they said is there is not a risk out there that they can't look after. Look after. Yeah.
Just look after. They will look after. You've got a risk.
Go speak with the team at CRE Insurance. They will just you speak straight with the the head honchos there and they'll just look after you. There you go.
Anything mining insurance, whether the insurance exists or not, CRA Insurance is the only mining insurance brand you need tonight. Permitting insurance. Sounds good. Go CRA. Go Australia.
But this is where I think this part of Quebec, I think, matters, is that, you know, like Quebec, because, you know, like you've already had infrastructure development here, you know, like people are accustomed to. There's nearly been probably 50, 60 years of infrastructure development, largely from Quebec Hydro. There's also mines there.
There's the Eleanor Mine, which is Newmont, I think. Yeah, that's existing. There's a number of gold. There's even the diamond mine there, which Vincent wants to incorporate in there.
Yeah, that's right, which is kind of closed up now. But yeah, so there's a bit of history here. So this is probably not the worst part of Canada to develop things in.
So that Quebec Hydra, it says here it's got 37.2 gigawatts of power capacity. Yeah. It's fucking huge. It's like 37 nuclear reactors.
Matty's just everything's energy. I know. I might have been bloody. I think I did an episode last week. I think I said Snowy Hydro wouldn't have pumped out as much as nuclear, but I'm probably wrong there.
But you'd be right. I'll sort that out when I get to Canberra. Anyway, continue. So, yeah, so I think I guess a major thing is like, you know, you look at.
like Corvette, you look at James Bay, you know, like a number of these other ones that sit here, like, um, uh wobbushy like you know all of the they're all kind of like that 75 to 100 million ton you know like size uh and the grade is you know between 1.2 1.3 1.5 something like that um so it's kind of it's kind of interesting to me that there were a couple that became mines in that after that first sort of during that first lithium price wave sort of 17 18 really into 19 and they haven't proved to be very profitable mines in in quite a bit of hardship and often the the projects that come to be mined first are the best assets they're just found because they're closer to surface but that doesn't actually seem to be the case here it does seem like some of these later deposits are better than the ones that became mines before them yeah that and that's true i think in that and i think that's a function of i guess a fast moving market right that yeah like now um Like I said, how the market receives the product is still maturing. So on that side, until the market figures that out, I guess the more the market figures that out, the more you are able to create a better product that fits the market. Hence, you're going to be more economic.
So I don't doubt that this part of Quebec, I think, will end up seeing quite a bit of lithium development, like mine development, if it goes down that path. And that's just because lithium mining, especially if you're having to crush, lithium, like pigmentite, tend to be really hard. So the main cost of them is really like the crushing of the rock. Like here, you've got tons of cheap electricity that's available around the corner.
It's also green, so it also passes that kind of aspect. So I think the economics of them will be heavily subsidized by what the state has already kind of done or the province has already done in that part of the world. Where's Arcadium's James Bay project up to? Is that still bloody being, is that being under development or I've bloody lost track of that one?
Somewhere in there. I think it's approved, yeah. So that's, Arcadium is now Alchem. Alchem, yeah.
That's right. Yeah, and I think that's been 10 years in its approvals process or thereabouts. It's approved. Yeah, I listened to it. But not being developed yet, is it?
I don't know, mate. I'm not sure if they pushed the button, but I think, yeah, they're along the path somewhere to go about it. Yeah, and that's, as you said, bloody decade worth of trying to get the fucking thing going. But there's also like Wabashi, which is in the Masca, Lithium, which is a private company. But, you know, the province of Quebec has some involvement in it, which is something they often do, is that they put money into projects.
And then that assists them going through the permitting cycle and things like that. And then the province then takes their money out at some point. Yeah, so those two will probably get developed.
along the way. And then it'll just become a question of how like Patriot and Winsome and these guys, how they fit into that ecosystem of assets that are getting developed. That Namaska one was the mine that had gone bankrupt, right?
That's right. That they'd stripped up, yeah. And now it's privately held, I think. And what do you think is going to be like, do you think lithium is going to have to have a bit more pain before something, there's a bit of a catalyst for someone like a Patriot, like someone to actually. try and buy them?
Or do you think there's going to have to be a bit more confidence in a lithium rebound? Like, what do you, when do you think it's actually the ball's going to get rolling? I think, yeah, I think like currently the market, I think suffers from just a lack of confidence, right? Like people don't, don't know. I mean, if you follow like some projections of lithium, right?
Like, you know, we're going to need, you know, like 10 times the number of lithium mines we have, you know, other people seem to think that we're not going to have that. you know like that demand so i think that has to kind of shore up because because right now like you know if you're winsome you know the only way you're gonna you're gonna raise the money to build a mine is if you know that your product is gonna display something else in the marketplace so until that happens you know you're gonna wait around yeah and because it's a well it's i don't know if you call it an immature market or whatnot but there's also the uncertainty about um the other types of extraction of lithium and where in the cost curve they'll fit if they come to market and what timeline so you take like a big capital bet on an acquisition and some companies will do that but there's always you know there's always the overhang of of the other mechanisms of extraction. That's right.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's also things like, you know, like Quebec's talking about building a lithium processing kind of center, you know, like, like focusing in, you know, they have, you know, they have a quite a number of deposits, which are not small, you know, they're not piddly small things, but they're not big either. But so if you can make it a more of a hub and spoke kind of model where, you know, the government processes it, but you just the miner and that provide the product and then the government, you know, It makes sense, right? Like you're an energy provider, then you can also become an energy storage.
You know, like maybe that's the avenue that they want to go down. And if that happens, then it fundamentally changes the economics of all of these deposits. You know, like the...
So, you know, so that can happen as well, that government intervention. Especially if they can get some Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, you know, on the Alpex, on the CapEx, and these sorts of things to help them in the earlier years. That's right. So to swing the conversation a bit closer to home, another one we've been asked about is... Wildcat, Tabataba, again, like Azure, no resource yet, but what do you make of the deposit, how it's coming together, the exploration technique and how they've gone about discovering it and so on?
Yeah, I mean, I guess from an exploration technique point of view, yeah, like they're probably, it's a pretty simple story in that, you know, like people had known about these pegmatites because, again, they had a tin and tantalum kind of association with them. all credit to Wildcat that they went and did the deal. I'm not sure exactly how much they paid, but it was like somewhere between five to 10 million, some order of that amount of money that they paid.
Yeah, like, and they've got this ground. The pegmatites were mapped. They knew they were sitting there. And now the question for Wildcat really is like, how can they tie all of them together into a resource?
And what does that resource look like? Yeah, and I think that's like probably true for a lot of lithium projects. Like, you know, we're talking about James Bay.
You know, like James Bay, I think. has gone through that evolution where a lot of projects have gone into resource and now you know the resource now you can worry about the economics for those resource whereas azure and wildcat still sit at the stage now where they're just doing that that amount of resource drilling to figure out well what does our resource actually look like and then we can worry about the economics on the other side it was remarkable that what did they raise a hundred i think it was a hundred million at the time and that still had a bit and it was a 70 or 80 cents Yeah, something like that. Raised it at a good time and then in the 30s it up.
And this is once lithium had already started peeling right off. It was the last, I remember it specifically, it was like one of the last raises before it shit itself. They stopped raising, yeah.
Like lithium really declined and it was, yeah. And now they're sitting pretty with 80 plus bucks in the bank. Yeah. And they can continue to.
Mate, I think if we could find a snippet of when I said this is the end of WA. Yeah, I remember that. It was when Wildcat put out.
Yeah, drill results. They put out some drill results and they didn't go up. And you said, you were like, Matty's like, this is the top. You're right.
I just like to keep it simple, boys. But that could be enough to see them through to better days, right? Oh, shit, yeah. It's a phenomenal amount of money.
Yeah, and I think they have plans. I mean, they're going to do a pretty big drilling program. 100 kilometres, I think.
Yeah, so they are going to chew into it quite a bit. Because Min Rez on the, they're 20, I think they're 20. 19.9, aren't they? Yeah, they're 19.9 of Wildcat. I can't remember. They're definitely 15 at least.
15 to 20. So they're the yeah, I'm just interested to see what their what your thoughts are. What do you think they're going to do you think they might wait for a bit more pain and act on that? Because that's why you think of all the standout ones in Australia at the moment that are on the table is, you know, Andover and Wildcat are bloody you would say the top two to be developed, like anything else springing to mind?
Not really of scale and thickness. Just brownfield sort of expansion would be the actual greenfields. But, yeah, new projects that could get developed lithium-wise, yeah, I think they would probably be like ahead of most other projects right now. Yeah.
When you think Minres, you know, it's like they've got one of their three trains turned off at Wojnar. I think they've copped so much heat, the D-Gen sort of FOMOing into lithium in the boom. Yeah, and where's the balance sheet capacity to enable it as well?
Yeah, and I suppose it's a lever to pull when they need to pull it. Maybe they do a script offer just to get the cash and bolster their balance sheet, mate. Yeah, true.
Take a free advisor fee there from Travis Ricciardo. Yeah. But I think that's one of maybe the challenges as well is that when...
When like, you know, Wildcat would have raised the money and things like, you know, like it would have been really hard to take these guys out at that time, you know, just because of what their capitalization was at that point. Now that it's kind of come down, now it's really, you know, if you're a minres, yeah, it's really what do you think? the outlook would be for lithium in your business.
And do you take the punt now? Because you could probably buy them for half the price you could a couple of years ago. Yeah, and you think of like say they've got $80 million and they drill it out and they don't really, you know, the story's not going to really change. We sort of know what's there and it's probably going to get proved up and infilled. If Tabataba proves up, do you think they're going to have enough water?
Have we got any insight on water there? It's going to be a big operation, I reckon. Whoa. Boys, you know where I'm going.
Do they need get wet bladders eventually? Here's the thing. I know under the Pilbara there is a metric shit ton of water, Matty. So you want that stored up just like a tap above.
And I know get wet, they will look after it. They'll come out, they'll install it, they'll do everything for you. They'll have it sorted.
It's not just a bladder solution, is it, J.D.? Because they can set up the bores and pump it out into the bladder or just directly into the mill or whatever the fuck you want. Mate, we haven't even mentioned the guarantees, the warranties. There is nothing to worry about. Do you know they've got a 10-year warranty?
That's amazing. And a 20-year life. So based on tabataba, 10 million ton, 200 million ton resource, probably won't be 10 million ton a year, but fuck, that's one get wet bladder. The bladder will last longer than the mine. Yeah.
Phenomenal. That's just a guarantee. It probably goes longer than that. Have you ever seen a hard site like the old school hard sited tanks get a puncher in them? Pretty much go off like a fucking bomb.
Like just water pissing everywhere. It's like a goon bag. Not a get wet bladder.
Mate, if you get a hole in it, you just chuck a patch on it, fixed in minutes. Doesn't rupture, doesn't anything. It's just a little leak. Phenomenal. Put a patch.
Fix, they have them in fucking blast signs. Mate, you could get a bit of space rock fall on it and you'd have it fixed in two minutes. Yeah. This is worst case scenario, by the way, man.
I saw you go at it with a jumbo and you couldn't fucking put a hole in it. Yeah, mate. That's fucking good.
I couldn't bore all underground. Let alone in a get wet bladder. Mate, if there's any misconceptions out there with a get wet bladder's bloody integrity, get rid of them because Holy snap and duck shit there, solid as anything.
And tough as hell. And nothing that a bloody patch can't fix. So, mate, have you ever seen anyone patch a hard-sided tank? No is the answer, by the way. No.
No. And you never will. You can't.
Never will. Structural advantages to a fucking bladder. Call Matty and get wet.
Just go Australia. It's not exactly clear to me why if all these things are outcropping, which I understand is pretty common in the area, at least the known bits are fairly common. Why all these weren't snapped up in 2018? Yeah, that's a good question. For Tava Tava, I think it was held by a Tantalum producer, private Tantalum producer.
That makes sense, but Azure as well. Yeah, so Azure is a good question. That was a nickel. That was going to be the next big nickel thing. Yeah, well, that had a phenomenal run in 2020. They needed heritage to be allowed to drill there.
Which I think is something that is going to determine what type of mine it is, whether it's an underground or an open pit, I would assume. Pegmatites are not a sacred site to the traditional owners. The outcropping areas are, as far as I understand, not special places. Yeah.
So tough to leave them there in an open pit. unless you hold it with a crane or something but yeah it doesn't work like that no that's so yeah so i think they um yeah so so most of these reasons were held back for either either an ownership or a land access reason i would say yeah um but yeah like i said a fair amount of them were i mean like you know like in james bay you can map these things from a satellite photo right like yeah they're there they're at that level so yeah so they were known well and truly for a while and red flags you know in lithium news. I remember when we started the podcast, it was like every day there was some rock chip sample pump and dump going on, like someone spruiking big lithium grades, but it was petalite. All this stuff was going on, right?
What are the red flags to look out for for the punters dabbling in lithium stocks? Yeah, definitely don't just do it on rock chips. That would be the one.
I mean, that's just like... I say that half in jest, but I genuinely say that pegmatites, they're not hard to find. The problem is not finding a pegmatite. The problem is finding a lithium mine, and they're two fundamentally different problems. I can only talk about my experience.
When I went to Greenbushes and you go and look at the pit floor, you see the proportion of the pit floor that is actually pegmatites. You understand why that's a lithium mine and other places aren't. But, you know, like there's a...
there's a certain concentration of pegmatite that you need for it to become a viable lithium mine, economic lithium mine, that I'm not sure if picking up rock chips from one pegmatite, no matter how continuous and how wide it is, that's not really going to make a lithium mine. And to your comment, I think there was a lot of that. Because people were just looking at the grade number, but maybe they weren't understanding the context of, you know, it's one pegmatite, you know, anastomosis, and it's quite wavy in the geological kind of map. So, you know, I'm not sure that's going to make it for you in that sense.
Yeah, and I think it's a bit more difficult in Australia, isn't it? Especially down in, you know, the goldfields region where you've got that top weathered zone. where a lot of the lithium has been dissolved.
So you've got to actually, you know, get through it to see if there's actually got the concentration allowed. But as in contrast to Canada, I think it sounds a bit easier to determine if it's there. Yeah, yeah.
Is that the same principle up north in the Pilbara, like where Tabataba and all that are? Yeah, so in the Pilbara you get like it's a lot better exposure than it is in, say, the gold fields. Yeah, and that's just because the gold More wind and shit up there, just fucking destroyed it over the years.
That's right. Yeah, like it's just like just fundamentally, you know, like, yeah, a lot of it also has to do with like, you know, for example, in Canada, the reason why like, you know, pegmatites form these ridges is because the surrounding rock to the pegmatites is actually quite friable. Like, you know, it breaks apart quite easily.
So, you know, so they preferentially stay together and the stuff around them falls apart. And so in the Pilbara, it's a little bit like that as well. And that, you know, there's a lot of weathering, but it's just that, the pegmatized preferentially weather slower than the stuff that's surrounding them, which goes faster. So they become more prominent kind of features to see.
And what about the sort of the width of the intercepts? I see some coming out and they're 15 metres versus some of the 100 plus, 125 that we talk about, especially when you think about Liontown and how they speak about how they're keeping that thick border because they don't want any, you know, dilution with the outer, you know, they want a... good margin of safety. Get the iron out of it.
Exactly. And then you see things like MANA, their global lithium project, and Delta Lithium today, and you're talking about 15-meter-wide things. And, you know, the sort of dikes stacked on top of each other.
But thinking downstream to the processing, you just think, oh, that could be pretty hard. Do you think like that as well? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think one of the, you know, like when the first wave of kind of like lithium results came out, you know, these kind of like you know, whatever, 75, 100, 125 meter intersections.
You know, like I often like went and checked those intersections afterwards when they had more drilling in that area. And often what you found is that, you know, like a lot of them were either, you know, like what we call stacked. Like, you know, they were like, you know, several intrusions and you stack them together into one. And they're not necessarily reporting the internal kind of dilution. Yeah.
You sort of shmear them across. Yeah. So, yeah, like, so maybe, you know, over 100 meters you. you hit pegmatized but you know maybe they were all like five ten meter thick and in between there was a lot of other stuff um i think i think the though the big thing that's changed since we were probably covering it shit loads is the awesome technology yeah which is getting like employed at pilgrim gora now because i think from my knowledge pilgrim gora has got a metric fuck ton of like material sitting there that is highly contaminated with waste that they haven't processed that's all right yeah Yeah, and I mean, if you think of the perfect application of ore sorting, this would probably be it, right?
Like a highly reflective white rock compared to a rock that's not very reflective and usually dark or something. Yeah, that's about as big a contrast as you can get. So if you can't make that shit work here, I'm not sure you can make it work anywhere. No, it sounds like, would you say that the Australian lithium development pipeline is probably pretty established now with what we have because look how long line towns like the effort and time that even though it's like the how long they've been developing and constructing kathleen valley for and we're still we're still yet to as you said see the bloody lie detector come out when they actually start going so there's a lot to go through there um and you've got you've got wildcat and andover sort of you sitting there but everything else below that is just really small yeah like small scale so you're like you can't see much bloody happening there like mount ida has been around that's been sort of proven up ready for ages but it's only what 14 million ton i think yeah yeah yeah and i think that's the i guess that's the point i make about the market like like you know you really need the market to grow to a point where something beyond Yeah, Tabataba or Andover can really come into the pipeline. So, you know, like what if, in that graph, like, you know, that I have, what if a 50 million ton project can actually supply the lithium into the market and still be viable?
So, you know, so if you're the best, you know, 50 million ton lithium resource and you can make that. economic then you know like there's a place in the marketplace for you like right now i'm not sure there is because you know green bushes could probably change their mine plan and fill that void right now like you know the market hasn't grown enough to to that point now anyways man look at little pill gangora chucking an extra what 320 000 ton on to get exactly 1000 yeah so it's and you know to make a 320 000 ton spot operation that's a pretty friggin big mine well it's half a kathleen valley or a bit over half. So, yeah, it's not an easy feat. No, no, that's fine.
I think they'll be waiting to see how this Linetown do you reckon that Linetown ramp-up's a bit of a litmus test for these other ones? I think everyone will be watching, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right, all this Luthien talk's making me a bit sad, guys. Let's talk about Rare Earths. Is that going to cheer you up, JD? It might cheer some of the listeners up because they think, you know, they're coming in at the bottom.
There's been a lot of cheer about Brazilian Rare Earths, both the company and rare earths in brazil the company just raised 65 got upscaled to 80 i think so they've raised a fair bit so set the table for us how do you think about rare earths the different types of projects we see you know the different types of rare earths and whatnot and let's get into it um sure so yeah so i think um you know like i said that you know it took us a while like even technically or even economically to understand lithium you I think it's probably going to take us longer to understand the rare earths, particularly technically, I think. And I say this, you know, with all honesty in the sense that it took me a while to understand rare earths as well because it's not geologically one of the easiest things to understand. It took you a while. We're all bugged. Yeah.
Wow. Maybe not, right? Like that's kind of the idea. And I think, you know, like, you know, so rare earths, you know, like market-wise, I think the... fundamentally different in how they kind of operate.
And that's largely because of the influence that the Chinese have on it. You know, like there's some, you know, like rare earths that basically China is the primary producer and is the primary consumer, you know, like nearly 100% of producer and consumer in some rare earths. So, you know, so that stuff just doesn't leave China in that sense at all. Um, and so, you know, so I think like understanding rare earths, um, yeah like one of the reasons i think brazil is really kind of caught caught kind of the attention is that probably the the the only tier one or one of the largest ionic clay rare earth deposits is being developed in brazil which is a sera verde yeah and stand like stand out like for the for the grades and the acid consumption required yeah for it compared to the you know the ionic clay's in his down in aspirants It's just that Meteoric was that first standout. Now you've obviously got VMM and Brazil, BRE, is that?
Yeah, Brazil Rare Earths. Ionic as well? They've got both, I believe. Yeah.
And so that's, I think, one of the things to understand in Rare Earths is that there's actually probably three different types of Rare Earths sources. So in layman's terms, you can either get Rare Earths out of the original rock. So that's hard rock Rare Earths in that sense. There's another one that you can get out of it, which is essentially sands. So they're called monazite sands usually.
Which is what our funerary is. Is it? That's a monazite.
Oh, is it? Okay, I don't know. I'm pretty sure.
Okay. And so, yeah, so like the different here we go. You can do a fact check while I Monazite is more like so I understand it's like one of the waste streams of the mineral sands and then that's why.
like luke is going to have any other refinery because they can that's right yeah yeah so yeah so like um uh luca does uh heavy mineral sense or ilmanite and things like that uh one of the major uh byproducts of that is monazite that comes out of it yeah and so yeah like right now they've probably been throwing that stuff away and they could probably process it yeah it's a it's a appetite monazite and alanite there you go there you go why why like when i think of like rare breaths there's all of these Rare earths, barely any of them are really like saleable. You've got neodymium, praise dim. Those have the largest market, but they're not the most, the ones with the highest price, that's the DYTV. Turb, it disposes of the turb.
Yeah, but the market size is pretty fucking small. So you need to have, and the rest like, you know, cerium, whatever, maybe, I don't know, but just ignore the rest in terms of like your basket. like when whenever you see rare earth resources there is just there's just so much there and there's often there's often so much um like obviously all of the all of the rare earths are listed and you but there's also uranium thorium like it seems that they're often mineralized with these nasties at the same time too yeah yeah and i think this is something that you're like yeah like when you're looking at these projects you can kind of pick them up you know like they often use term in the industry is the treo like you know total rare earth oxide yeah which is a complete bullshit term because half of the rare are not economic anyways. So when you look at that, you should always go look at what they have shoehorned into that number because people just inflate it to make it look as good as possible.
And what was it? Was it Hastings, I think? Their big differentiator was their percent NDPR of the trio.
I think that was it. That's right. So they use a thing called it's like. M-R-E-O, I think it's like mineable rare earth oxide, something like that.
Yeah, some like measure. And so the higher the ratio of M-R-E-O to T-R-E-O, like M-R-E is the stuff that you can actually make money out of, the rest of it is just junk. There's always a good way you can spin it at a conference on the graph.
You've got to slice it out of some way to make you number one on the comps chart. That's why I have that metric. And if you're not. you make up a metric that you are number one at. Totally, yeah.
That's right. And so to your question about like uranium and thorium, so again, like ideally uranium is often associated with these things and sometimes you don't want it to be because, you know, there's some rare earth mines that have been stopped because of the fact that they have uranium attached to them. You know, like Kavanaugh Feld is one in Greenland which is going through a problem right now because it has quite a lot of uranium and the country doesn't want, you can't mine above a certain threshold of uranium. So that... so that project stuck.
And thorium is something you probably don't want in your project at all because there's no market for thorium really. And to process it out usually is a cost. And you can often can't leave it in tailings to a certain degree either.
So yes, you have to end up doing something with it. So the higher the thorium that sits in these things, the more likely you're not going to be on the economic curve in that sense either. But yeah, to your point that, you know, like the... The rare earth kind of elements of interest, there's what are called the light rare earths, which is neodymium and praseodymium. Those are the two.
And then the heavy ones. I'm saying that so wrong. for so long. No, you're a guy. You know, I've been saying praise to you, I'm not praising you.
And so you can just say like-I know what you meant. And you can just say like NDPR, those are the lights. Daddy's my coach. And like DYTB are the heavy ones.
Yes, daddy's, I can do that. Yeah, and I think that's, to be honest, most people will go down that path as well. And so the other thing to know is that actually the world has lots of light rare elements, you know, like they, like, you know, most rare earths. Like, yeah, they're not very rare in that sense, in the rare earth kind of bucket.
Rarely mined. That's right. Yeah.
And so it's more the heavies that you really need. And they tend to be very, very rare. And the only place that really produces them is China.
Like, you know, the stuff that comes out of China, that really produces that. So, yeah. So what do you want to look for in a project? You know, you don't want to look for a lot of uranium or thorium, if you can help it. Ideally, it depends how you want to look at it.
You know. If it ends up being hard rock, then it's got to be at least a couple of percent TRO, TREO. If it's not a couple of percent, then you're not going to make money on 1,000 ppm or something like that.
Yeah, I think because you look at Mount Weld, I think it's about 4 and a bit percent. Yeah. It goes up to like 7 or 8. Yeah, Nolans, the Arafura one is 2.5, and then there's a big gap down to the next ones on the hard rock. Yeah, for the hard rock. Clays are obviously in the 1,000, I think Meteoric's 2,000-odd ppm, which is a standout.
So 2,000 ppm is 0.204%. But there's advantages in processing the ionic clays. Yeah, again, you need a shovel. In mining it because it's all free dig. So it's no drill and blast.
You just fuck. But don't you skip a step on the processing as well? You can for some of them. Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to crush it or anything, but then it's obviously a shitload of acid and everything to leach it out.
Yeah. Not too up on it. Don't ask me too many questions. Amit, you made the point there that the heavies are produced out of China and I can't imagine that's purely from the perspective of mineral endowment in China. What is the key advantage?
Is it more lax on environmental standards from mining through to processing? Is it IP in the processing part? Why is it that that happens predominantly in China? A little bit of both, but more, I think, the latter, in that they hold the IP to process a lot of rare earths. Yeah.
You know, like rare earths can be quite complicated. And China is like light years ahead of everyone else in understanding how you can process these, like what reagents you need, what type of processing temperatures you need, what type of leach you need to set up, all of those type of things. They are way ahead of everyone else.
And now the Department of Defence, I think the Department of Defence or maybe the Department of Energy in the States has given MP Materials and I think Linus as well a couple hundred million dollars to build a heavy rare earth processing facility I think in Texas. Yep. Does that sound right? Fort Worth I think.
Yeah. And what's the plans with them? I'm not sure if you have insight in this on getting up to speed with the actual technical know-how of.
executing that and making sure that the taxpayer money is well spent? I mean, I think the way they're doing it is I think they're doing it more specific to, I think, Linus's assets. So they will process the heavies out of the stuff that Linus owns.
I guess where the Chinese have the dominant edge in the market is because they've been processing so many different ore types for so long, they can kind of handle the wide selection of ore types that are sent to them. For example, there's a rare earth mine in California, which was funded by Department of Defense. But because of the ore that they produce, they actually had to send it to China to process the concentrate because no other place could actually process it.
Is it Mountain Pass? Is it Mountain Pass? Yeah.
I think it's Mountain Pass. Yeah, that's the big sucker. Yeah.
So there's all these complications in that. But you can produce the— the concentrate but in order to actually extract the metal out to to put it into the like kind of the end use product um you know like the the only place that really knows it is it's kind of like you know a few labs in china so i was listening to the mp materials one of the bloody prezzo investicles the other night and it was so funny when they talk about mountain pass and how it's the greatest thing in the world not one mention of mount world or linus linus It's just like they-America is the world. Gets me thinking.
They just said Mountain Pass and then China. Not one mention of Mount World. Interesting. Fascinating. Very interesting.
Are they up to something? They already think of themselves as the same company. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe Gina wrote the script for them. Who knows? Yeah. And then on the Ionic Clays, this is I think where there's Certainly, you know, Aussie punter enthusiasm and also exploration success, right?
So like Meteoric was probably first out the gate kind of capturing the attention of people. VMM sort of popped up and, you know, Simly has like a lot of eyes and a lot of people pretty damn interested in what they've got. There might be some like, you know, complications.
It's Brazil. It's, you know, beautiful. There's protected areas, all that sort of stuff.
But when you think of... the ionic um the ionic clays like what are the what are the pros like what are the advantages of of you know of ultimately mining this sort of stuff which is like the lower lower percentage how do you actually get those cost advantages producing them yeah so they um yeah so the ionic clays give you the benefit in that uh it's easier to mine you know like it's relatively easier to mine you don't have to worry about you know like kind of conventional mining you don't have to blast anything you don't have to crush anything you know it's all kind of there uh but But where you pay the price is that it's lower grade. And it's probably like, you know, as a person that would like to see more environmentally friendly mining, it's probably not the most environmentally friendly way of mining, right? Because it's like a shitload but it's thin.
So the frigging surface area of it is huge. Yeah, the footprint of mining, you know, would be quite high. And how it had been mined and processed in China.
their style of deposits was horrific. Yeah, pretty much the same. Yeah, so they-Didn't they just pour acid over the fucking mountain and just leach it through there? That's the word on the day line. Yeah, yeah.
So they, I mean, like, you know, like a lot of the ionic clay, I think outside of Brazil and a few other places, most of them are all in places like Myanmar, you know, kind of like the tropics, like in China, Vietnam, places like that. And they, you know, like they historically produced them to- supply the rare earth market. And now people have looked back and said, it's probably not the best way. kind of going and grabbing rare earths.
It's something about just dosing the environment with acid in a place that gets a lot of rainfall. It doesn't sound too kosher to me. Acid will sort anything out.
Remember bloody, like on Breaking Bad, damage that caused there. Because is there one clay rare earth thing in operation in Brazil already? It's just come online now.
Yeah, yeah. And it's called Cerro Verde. So I think it's... I think they've developed one and the other one should come online. I think it's either this year or next year or something like that.
And you made comments earlier about the size of these projects and how on a global sort of basis, they're not very significant, right? No, and I think, I mean, one of the things I guess I found about the rare earth market is that, you know, it's not a huge market in that sense. I mean, I understand the story of that, you know, we're all using more technology and more kind of devices. And... So there will be an uptick in the rare earth market, but I'm not sure you're going to see the market double in size or triple in size anytime soon.
It's going to be a steady kind of growth, not opposed to something like copper, where the human consumption of copper over the next decade or so will be fundamentally different than what it was for the last decade in that sense. And so I think if you have a large rare earth project, you could supply... a significant percentage of the world's rare earth in that sense.
So with the number of rare earth projects I see, again, I'm not quite sure that that's really going to fit into the market space of how much rare earths do we actually need in that sense. And the other thing is also from a use point of view, one of the major uses of these rare earths is that they're used for magnets. And they're used in cars, largely, or...
wind turbines. Yeah, like any type of machinery where they can either be used as a generator or as a motor, you can use magnets for both. And so when it becomes a crunch on these elements, people can actually engineer them out. So for example, Volkswagen has created a car where they don't use any rare earth magnets. So if push comes to shove, they could actually create more of those cars and hence then the support.
Like the demand kind of disappears in that sense. That's one of the big knocks we'd heard. I think the price right now floats around 50-ish.
Nah, 40, 43, 44. A bit below 50. But I think they said if it gets to 90. Yeah, 90 was the number where it's gone. Shout out Dylan Kelly. Yeah. So you have kind of like a ceiling price or like a ceiling kind of price or until people go, well, if it's more than that, then I'm not using. And it kind of makes sense, right?
Like, you know, like if the If the motor in your car ended up being $50,000, people aren't probably going to be buying too many cars at that point, right? Because the rest of the car still has to be worth $50,000. So there's always a ceiling price to a lot of these components where they'll just get replaced out and people will just use something else if they need to. I always remember that. The quote from, I think it was Luka G. Kivasi, and he was talking about Rare Earth and he's like, they're just like...
pixie dust, the closest thing to pixie dust you can find. They just make everything a little bit better. Everything better. That's that.
So to hone into a couple of the companies a bit more, Brazilian Rare Earths, I'm not sure how deep you've dug on this one, but it is catching a bit of attention. Listed in December, just raised capital again. They've got Whitehaven, of all people, on the register, as well as Gina there as well. So how closely have you looked at the project?
Have you got? This is the Brazilian Rayoerts? Yeah, BR-E, yeah. I mean, yeah, I've looked at them in the sense that I think if you're going to look for a project, you know, these guys have a lot going for them, right? They have a huge tournament package.
You know, like the deposit that they picked up was previously explored by RIA as a box site deposit. You know, they didn't crack the kind of the limit for them for box site, but they never analyzed for Rayoerts in that sense. And they've inherited.
all of the drilling that Rio did from the box art. Yeah, that's right. And so as a project that's going to probably go the quickest from inception or creation to a resource, I think these guys are probably going to be the quickest thing that's going to get there because they're going to inherit since like 50,000, 60,000 kilometers of drilling, which they're now assaying for railroads. They've done their own drilling, and it's only on quite a small part of the tenement package that they've currently worked on. And that's, I think, one of the things that, like, I think that's maybe appeals to people in the Brazilian, like in Brazil, particularly for clay-hosted railroads, is that a lot of these things aren't hard to find.
You know, they're often associated with box-side deposits, which... you know like there's not going to be any new bauxite deposits discovered in the world they'll just be better versions of existing ones right because we know exactly where they are they're between the two tropics you know they're in tropical zones they have a certain look all of that stuff right so i'm so a lot of these brazilian deposits were originally bauxite deposits and now people have gone and and analyze them for rare earths and realize that there's rare earths there um could be could be the next up and coming district i've heard some parts of brazil a lot very pro mining cheap labor shitloads of power i can tick tick tick just got enough there's water yeah and so and i think so the brazil i think space is also kicking up because they you know like europe and north american demand is kind of positioning brazil as a supplier to them um so they can you know reduce their reliance on chinese demand um so that's why i think now that sarah verde is up and running you know like there will probably be more impetus to you create more rare earth kind of projects in Brazil. So, um, so yes, I think Brazilian rare earth is really well placed for that. Uh, Meteoric obviously was one of the first ones out, um, you know, like, and they're kind of chugging along with their project. They're obviously not at the scale that Cerro Verde is at.
So, so, you know, so they're going to maybe have a longer development timeline. Uh, and then VMM, I think is, you know, like maybe a step below that, where they're, uh, they're probably still coming up and kind of filling that space as well. Isn't it interesting, Bart, if you talk about Brazil and Thai and rare earths and lithium together, it would be interesting to see what between Sigma lithium and potentially Latin as well, what actually happens there. Because as we know, Sigma's pretty much up for sale and then you would assume Latin would tie in with that. At the right price.
At the right price. Yeah. Yeah, so mate, Brazil could be the next Namibia.
Yeah. Do you know? I mean you're up in the exploration world, you know the people. Do you know Joanna from Equivest? Yes, yeah.
Yeah, I want to interview her one day. I know she's pretty interested in VMM and I mean she was like pretty loud and early on WA1 as well and now doing BHP Explore. So I reckon she'd have some interesting exploration insights.
Must be rich. Oh, this is a great That's what you comment to everyone. Must be rich.
Must be rich if you got on that early. We should show this cross section of the caldera that you've got here. It's a great way for me to picture the bauxite sitting on top with the clay and the rare earths beneath it.
It's a good one. Yeah, so I think, you know, so essentially, you know, like bauxites and clay-hosted rare earths will form in the same setting is that if they become really weathered, you'll probably get a a bauxite. And that's kind of what I was talking about.
When you talk about rare earths, you have the source rock, the hard rock that has rare earths. And then if you talk about the monazite sands, that's basically that same rock where it's eroded, but not necessarily weathered. Eroded just meaning that you've just broken up the rock into smaller pieces and that's gone there. And then the clay is where you've taken that rock and you weathered it.
So you've taken away everything else and the rare earths aren't very chemically active, so they don't move as easily. And so they slowly build up. And then that's essentially what you kind of get.
So we do see a bit of rare earth exploration right up in far, far North Queensland, where all the balksite mines kind of sit. I wonder if we'll see some of the explorers go up there and have a poke around. Yeah, so a lot of that will be...
Let's get a shell. We should. Yeah. Mark it out.
There you go. I mean, yeah. Done.
Give you some seed. Yeah, all right. Done.
Yeah, I'll go scope it out. I'll go figure out the chemistry. You are the seed.
That's right. But, yeah, and the other one, like, yeah, you can flash this kind of graphic up as well, which is the mining processing kind of like how the market looks for rare earths. Yeah. And you can see, like, yeah, the dominant position kind of China plays in that sense. Yeah, so they.
I mean, even in China, you know, like rare earths is not a huge percentage of their domestic kind of metal market. Yeah, like it's a small fraction of it. Yes, it's just like on a global scale, like, yeah, you could go find a rare earth. But what do you actually kind of gain out of it from a real economic kind of value?
I'm not sure. It's just more strategic value and whether you want rare earths as part of a domestic supply chain or not. Really, that's really kind of the question. Beautiful, Ahmed. Ray Ruth's very much remain in the too hard basket for me after this chat, just like they did after the DK chat.
Stick with the incumbents, he reckons. Yep. Yeah, and I think that's probably a pretty good advice in that, you know, the companies like Linus and even Aluka and things like that, you know, like their ability to operate on a scale is so different to someone else trying to come in and trying to work these things out.
I think, yeah, you know, like their supply can well and truly meet any demand that we're going to have for a while, I think. It's probably fucking true with lithium as well. Like if you're going to put a bet on lithium, would you bet on a… A Linetown in development or an Andover not in development or Pilbara Minerals? Pilbara P3000, mate. P3000.
Once Rio gets in there. Just get the costs right down. Mate, Rio.
Keep your eyes out, J.D. You called that one, mate. They're doing Serbia now.
Do you think it's just Serbia traffic? We didn't even talk about the Jada rate mineral. That's right.
Yeah. Next time, mate, next time. Yeah, yeah.
Another reel has got the project back. Yeah, they're going to actually do something with it. Yeah, very excited to see what goes on there. Yeah. Nah, beautiful, Ahmed.
Bloody love it, mate. Hunters, if you're listening, keep feeding Ahmed and he will feed you with info. We'll get you in bloody a bit of a fortnight, shall we, isn't it?
Yeah, I think so, yeah. Depending on how many comments we get. Yes. A couple of partners to thank, Matty.
Oh, fucking who we got, J.D.? Wow. Same as yesty?
I don't know where to go with that one mate. I was shooting there yesterday, same 8, same 9. Verify, Get Wet Solutions, DSI Underground, Silverstone, CRE Insurance, WA Water Boars, Brooks Airways, K-Drill and... Our good Spark.
Spark. Hoodaroo. Hoodaroo.
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