righto money bers I'm head back uh lithium rare pum very Jesus Christ got a lot out of this in fact we recorded it last week and we got so interested in in rare earth afterwards that we teed up a followup with another GEOS that's going to come out I don't know if it'll come out tomorrow or next week depending how lazy we are on Friday but I think it'll be it'll be Friday so we're going Rare Earth Thursday Rare Earth Friday so you'd say it's frequent Earths what that's that's that's how it's gone so um let's fucking let's just rip it righto money miners back by popular demand our resident geological and exploration and bivy stock specialist ahed welcome mate YouTube Twitter LinkedIn everyone demanded your return thank you for doing the return mate no problems um I'll say what I said last time and I'll continue this you're only as good as your last performance so when when tank that'll be the time last say cuz we've had some absolute dusters ourselves some days we rock up and we come back and we do it all over again rinse and repeat mate what is going on so ladies and gentlemen agenda lithium and rare earth am I right that is the agenda Maddie lithium and rare earth gone all over the world different styles different projects we uh slung at 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 start with 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's still a bit of an overhang if if we were doing this podcast in Canada they'd be in your court uranium all the way yeah I think I think but it's I wonder how much of the lithium stuff is like are still hold totally yeah and then to get back up even though like commodity prices in the Dos think of there's the real success that's happened in the Brazilian Rare Earth sort of you know retail part of the market um in recent history and it's captured people's attention right armid give the pun some validation on whether their stocks are going to return to what they bought him for right later Rd W where do we want to start IID rare s or lithium uh list to lithium I guess let's start with that because we got enough comments about that with like the the exploration context of of lithium is evolved a lot as the Commodities obviously become a lot more popular and in demand but when you think of like the fundamental geologically to a to a generalist that you know you should kind of be across um what should like what should someone like me who knows very little about geology kind of just be looking out for be aware of when it comes to sort of you know making sense of of um the geology when it comes to lithium yeah so I think um I think that's a good point to start on in that um you know lithium even from a technical understanding of what the deposit should look like and the mind should look like is very young you know like we we don't have um you one of the things I tell people is that you know like we we still have very little idea on what a good lithium mine and and not so good lithium mine actually looks like you like what what type of deposit or resource or things do you need for it to become a a lithium mine and and that's like if you look at the Australian examples you know a lot of the things like green bushes like Pilan Gora you know you know they were tin and tantalum mines you and then they became kind of lithium mines on the back of it so um yeah so they yeah like they were mined obviously as a tin thing and a tantalum thing for a while and Tin still there yeah yeah they're still um like of often these pegmatites have tantum circuit at GRE bushes yeah yeah yeah so they like often these pegmatites are you'll often see this thing called LCT so it's like you know lithium cesium and tantalum you know that's that's kind of the the pegm ti so some people are minding for cesium which is not a lot of uses for it tantalum is like slightly more and obviously yeah like Tin Tin is a very kind of you know up and down commodity sometimes it easy worry about Metal's a may maybe grein bushes is the next 10 m that's so we we we've heard from uh Mr Joe Larry that we should view lithium as a specialty chemical what's your sort of view on specialty chemical bulk n me how how do you think about lithium in that sort of regard good question um 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 you know it'll have to have the economics of a bulk commodity um if it yeah know like if the use cases of of lithium in the market space constrain down to some you know some high-end uses and you know the things that we're going to use it for then I I think it will probably end up becoming a specialty kind of kind of product so I think that market space is still trying to figure out how that that's going to play itself and that's largely because you like when you produce lithium you can produce lithium in a lot of different ways like yeah if it comes from spyine you you can just probably produce uh just like a simple li2o kind of concentrate you know like if it's um if it's a different type of lithium mineral then you can produce it in a different kind of uh type of concentrate you can produce aamine concentrate so you don't do any kind of concentrating really in that sense you're just kind of sending the mineral so I think all of that stuff is still trying to be worked out in the market space and how how is it actually going to be absorbed in that sense and yeah and sometimes like you know people question why that is but you also have to think about you know certain elements that we use you know we've used them since Antiquity right like you know we have significant use cases we know exactly how they should be you know the market understands the refineries understand uh so we're still trying to I think work that stuff out in in lithium U but my general sense is yeah if you're going to use lithium the way that we say we going to use it like we were almost washing our face with it and everything then I think it will have to go down the path of almost becoming a a bulk commodity to some degree and and how do you think about Metallurgy that's you know Downstream from 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 you're stacking up the merits of projects um I think yeah like I think the as a general rule the less complexity you have in um in a mind the better you know the more and it's kind of different right in geologically speaking the more complexity you have the more likely the chance you're going to have a big deposit uh in a mining sense the less complexity you have the more chance you're actually going to have a profitable mind right so um so I think as soon as you start seeing you know like there's some lithium projects where the lithium is hosted in a number of different Minal species and and people often talk about that as a positive and yeah like I would question that that would be a challenging thing from a mining aspect you like how do you actually separate those minerals out and you know like what type of recoveries are you going to get you know all of those type of things so um so yeah so as a general rule the the less complexity you have in your over body the easier it is to actually mine and make it an economic mine in that sense that sort of makes sense so with with the table kind of set there one of the big questions we had is Quebec lithium Canadian lithium why don't why don't we start there there's a bunch of a ASX listed projects that uh you know they're sitting over there A lot of them came here because of our Capital markets despite the 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 um you know like we obviously had a lithium rush in in Australia you know where where people went and and as I mentioned that you know a lot of that initial way was people targeting you know existing tin tantalum mines uh in James Bay I think it worked a little bit differently in the sense that uh you know so James Bay is obviously in Quebec and and one of the major I guess uh proponents of rural development in Quebec is uh Quebec Hydro you know which is kind of the energy producer and so if you look at James Bay you know James Bay is uh for for people that know in Australia you that's their snowy Hydro kind of kind of area you know that's where a lot of hydro gets produced um and Quebec being Quebec sells none of that to the rest of Canada and they sell it all to the eastern states uh of the United States so so like New York um Vermont all of these places get a lot of their energy from from Quebec um and so why Quebec Hydro is important is that a lot of the infrastructure that was initially set up in in James was actually set up by Quebec hydro and and you know one of the the the things that I kind of noticed and and I have to give a shout out to a colleague of mine named Jam seder who I affectionately called dader um and he 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 have that are in that area right now and and then all of those roads and that infrastructure is built thanks to Quebec hydro and um 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 uh the pegmatites form are are are 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 being all the is it all the glacia waters just weathered taken all the weathering away that's right yeah so like you know in Canada you know we don't have the problem in uh in Canada that you have in Australia you know like there there is no none of this like couple hundred meters of dirt sitting on top because in Canada the glaciers have scraped all of this shit away for uh geologically speaking anyways um so yeah so you don't have any of those problems and so and and the glacier also like sandpaper a lot of these Hills nicely so you can kind of like you know they're all nice and smooth and got make got to make something easy over there yeah that's what I everything else is fucking hard yeah that's why um so yeah so a lot of companies went to James Bay because you know like it was easy to spot pegmatites um yeah there's a couple of existing gold mines which which have uh geologically quite well figured out the relationship between gold mineralization and intrusions and pegmatites um and yeah it was known that they had all lithium kind of existing in those pegmatites so long story short the reason why James Bay kind of highlighted as an area is um yeah it's Quebec it's it's quite a friendly jurisdiction to work in you know there's infrastructure there and geologically people knew where there were pegmatites already the question of it was really just to go and and drill a lot of these things to see what the grade of the lithium was going to be in them you know 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 um lithium boom and while the you know the shareholders would you know be on a relative basis upset at the moment given the the the cycle um you know the ones that kind of have have I guess you know the largest kind of base of of shareholders that might have had the most prosperity in the in the exploration domain would be you know Patriot and Winsome um you know and and both have have different merits Fierce shareholders on both sides y um so whatever you say now I'm sure someone's going to get offended in some shape or form but that's um that's without fail comes part and parcel with it all when when you kind of look at the two uh two companies two resources two two propositions you know what are your 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 and found significant amount of pegmatite and had decent grade you know so um so the Corvette or cor you know depending if you're French or English um yeah know like that was really the one where yeah like that was the first major kind of drilling campaign really in that part of the world and it returned significant results like you know you were returning you know like 100 or more than 100 meter kind of intersections of pegmatites at you know 1 to one and a half% lithium um and that's also a general rule like you lithium is sometimes a little bit hard to understand like what does 100 m at 1% lithium mean um you 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 m at 1 gram per ton gold you know around that kind of level um so they were the first company that went out and had several of these intersection you know they put a resource together and I think that reflected in their you in their share price early um you know you look at what corve is you know it's not very far away from infrastructure yeah it's about you know like it would be the first you you pull over on the side of the road and you could probably go explore and that's what they did and then they they found it and I'm not completely ofair with the history of the project but I think the pegmatites were known in that part of the world and Patriot picked up that project from somewhere someone else um because they were actually went in that area exploring for gold you know like that's 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 um so it's inevitable that they all get compared to uh to Patriot in that sense um but there's one like you know in the show notes I have this kind of uh lithium uh you know like kind of graph that I've put up and I actually think you know this is one of the the the graphs that explains that like dichotomy between Lithium project really really nicely in that yeah like and when you put this up on the as part of the video you'll see should be in there brother that there'll be a few mines that'll be like you know on the right hand side of the graph so yeah in that sense 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 manono green bushes and pilora on the right hand side they've had to pull manono in as well and see down the bottom on the scale that's right yeah cuz it's like you orders of magnitude bigger than that or or one order of magnitude probably bigger than that um and so yeah so those are all existing binds and they're all several hundred million tons resource yeah at roughly the same grade um so that's so that's an interesting thing right so the grade of these deposits tends to be very you know like between one 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 icg deposits tends to be very similar but the size of the them tends to be quite variable right like that's really interesting right cuz 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 um the the scale our cost advantages when mining it and you don't we haven't even got a zor on there yet they haven't even got a mineral resource yet expiration Target common one to two for something like that so you know so there's like some some Commodities where you can kind of see that you know like maybe the economics of whether a project becomes a m or not is dependent on size and so you know say 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 respective of the grade you probably going to get an economic kind of mine out of it yeah I think and I think correct me if I'm wrong to a lot of the North American ones have got bigger spaman crystals which are going to be they're more not like a a fine grained line town or possibly and over there's lot bigger over there more amendable to possibly DMs finally yes that's right yeah so they um so a lot of this like spim me concentrate production like you know for them you know once they crush up the rock you know they can just kind of send it out like you said as a DSO product um oh no but like the processing they don't have to not a DSO but like a they won't have to put flation in no that's right yeah yeah oh mate if they do blood you need flight over there good water apparently fresh fresh as a daisy fcking no no salt yeah you give it to your grandmother well they bloody love it yeah true story I believe you it looks fresh it's beautiful scenery fresh bloody Nathan stus is little side gig would be good for fuck all over there no no membrane filters needed yeah but as a like you know if there's um like the permitting timelines in Canada are so much more elongated than what we might be accustomed to in in Western Australia a more established the the cre getting the cre on side like just the community um yeah cuz as you look at it it's just as you as you say JD stunning stunning man 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 you reckon C Insurance could offer permitting insurance now I reckon there's a market for it so you am you want to be insured against the potential that the the permitting takes fucking 10 years the knob jobs at the bloody permitting place don't give you permit yeah or they just don't look at the permit for 5 years or if if it's doable Maddie I know I think I know one mob that could do it I think well considering s's pretty much taken over African mining insurance and you know they getting into Australia is going to be a piece of piss with their rap sheet uh but possibly North American permitting Insurance mate you imagine if a bit of the nextg money was allocated towards permitting insurance instead of I kind of feel like what you're describing one teams it's almost like what you're describing is international arbitration yeah is that it I think well it's also a bit of a turnkey solution it is a turn So speaking with the team last night actually and yeah essentially what they said is there is not a risk out there that they can't look after look look after yeah just look they will look after you've got a risk go speak with a team at C insurance and just you speak straight with the the head honchos there and they'll just look after you there you go any anything mining Insurance whether the insurance exists or not C insurance is the only mining Insurance brand you need tonight permitting Insurance sounds good go c g but this is where I think this this part of Quebec I think matters um is that you know like Quebec because yeah like you've already had infrastructure development here um you like people are accustomed to like there's nearly been probably 50 60 years of infrastructure development largely from Quebec Hydro uh there's also mines here you know there the Elenor mine which is Newmont I think um yeah like that's existing there's a number of gold so yes even the diamond mine there which wants to incorporate in there yeah that's right um yeah like which is kind of closed up now but um but yeah so there's a bit of History here um see so this is probably not the worst part of Canada to develop things in um so that that Quebec Hydro it says here it's got 37.2 gaw of power capacity yeah fucking huge like 37 nuclear reactors M's M's just everything's energy been bloody I think I think I said snowy audro was wouldn't have pumped out as much as nuclear but I'm probably wrong there but uh she be right I'll sort that out when I get to ca yeah anyway continue um so yeah so I think I guess the major thing is like you know you look at um like Corvette you look at James Bay you know like a number of these other uh ones that sit here like um wushi like you know all of the they're all kind of like that 75 to 100 million ton you 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 Minds in that after that first sort of during that first lithium price wave and they Haven proved to be veryit in quite a bit of hardship and often the the projects that come to be mind first are the best assets they're just found because they're closer to surface or yada yada yada 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 Minds before them yeah that and that's true I think in that and I think that's a function of I guess a f fast moving market right that yeah like now um yeah like like I said you know the the how the market receives the the product is still maturing so so on that side until the market figures that out you know like 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 um so I I like I don't doubt that you know like this part of Quebec I think we'll end up seeing quite a bit of uh lithium development like you mind development if it goes down that path um and that's just because yeah like lithium mining like especially if you're having to crush like you know like lithium like pment tend to be really hard you know so so the main cost of them is really like the the crushing of the rock you know like here you know you got tons of cheap electricity that's that's available around the corner you know it's also green so so it Al also passes that kind of aspect um see so I think that like the economics of them will be like heavily subsidized by what the state has already kind of done of province has already done in that part of the world um where where's um Arcadium 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 yes so that's arum is now yeah that's right yeah and I think that that's spent 10 years in its uh approvals process or there there about it's proved it yeah I listen to it but not being developed yet is it I don't know m I'm not sure if they push the button but I think yeah they're along the path somewhere to go about it and that's as you said bloody decade worth of yeah but there's also like wabashi which is a namaska lithium which is a private company but you know the the province of Quebec has some involvement in it which is which is something they often do is that they put money into into projects and then that that assists them going through the permitting cycle and things like that and then the province then takes their money out at some point um you so those those two will probably get developed you know like along the way um and then it'll just become a question of how like Patriot and uh winom and these guys you know how they fit into that ecosystem of of assets that are getting developed that namasco one was the the mine that had gone bankrupt sced up yeah yeah now it's privately held I think and what what do you think's going to be like do you think lithium's going to have to have a bit more pain before something there's a bit of a 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 reband like what do you when do you think it's actually the Bulls going to get rolling um 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 um I mean if you follow like some projections of lithium right like you know we're going to need you know like uh 10 times of the the the number of lithium Minds 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 show up because because right now like you know if you're win some you know the only way you're going to you going to raise the money to build a mine is if you know that your product is going to display something else in the marketplace so until that happens you know you're you're going to wait around yeah and because it's a an well it's I don't know if you call it an immature Market or what not but there's also the uncertainty about um the other types of extraction of lithium and and where in the cost curve they'll fit if they come to Market and what timeline so take like a Capital bet on on 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 is talking about building a lithium processing kind of Center you know like like focusing it you know they have you know they have quite a number of deposits which are not small you know they're not prly 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 then provide the product and then the government you know like it makes sense right like you're an energy provider uh 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 on the alpex on the capex and these sorts of things to to help them in the earlier years that's through so to to swing the conversation a bit closer to home another one we've been asked about out is wild cat taba taba again like aou no resource yet but what what do you make of the the deposit how it's coming together the the exploration technique and how they've gone about discovering it and so on um yeah I mean iess I guess from an exploration technique point of view yeah like they probably it's a pretty simple story in that um you like people had known about these pegmatites because again they had a tin and tantalum kind of association with them uh all credit to w C that they went and did the deal I'm not sure exactly how much they paid but it was like somewhere between 5 to 10 million some some order of that amount of money that they paid um yeah like they've got this ground uh the pegmatites were mapped they knew they were sitting there and now the question for wild card really is like how can they tie all of them together into a resource and what does that resource look like you know and then 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 aure and wcat 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 what did they raise 100 I think it was 100 million at the time and they still had a bit think it was 70 or 80 cents raised it at a good time and then once lithium had already started peeling right off it was the last I I remember it specifically it was like one of the last raises before like lithium really declined and it was yeah and now they're sitting pretty with 80 plus bucks in in the bank yeah and they we could find a snippet of when I said this is the end it was when wild cat put out yeah drill results they put out results and they go out and you said like M he's like this is the top you're right I just I like to keep it simple boys but that could be enough to see them through to to better days right sh 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 so they K I think yeah so they are going to chew into it quite a bit but because Min Min res on the they're 20 I think they're 20 19.9 aren't they yeah they're 19.9 of wild cap I can't remember they're definitely 15 at least they're the and yeah but I'm just interested to see what they 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 but mean because that's like you think you think of all the standout ones in Australia at the moment that are on the table is you know and over in Wildcat a bloody y you would say the top two mhm of two to be developed like anything else spring toor not really of just Brownfield sort of expansion would be the like actual gra field but yeah new projects that could get developed lithium wise yeah I think they would probably be like ahead of most other most other projects right now yeah so when you think when you think minres you know it's like they've got one of their three trains turned off at w like and I think they're going to I think they've CAU so much haat for the DJ sort of fooing into in the bo that um yeah where's the balance sheet capacity to enable it as well yeah and I suris they just it's one of the they got the it's a l to pull when they need to pull it maybe they do a scrip a scrip offer just to get the cash and boed their balance sheet mate yeah yeah true take a free advisor thing there from Travis Rick yeah um but I think that's one of the maybe the challenges as well is that you know like when when like you know wildcab would have raiseed the money and thing like yeah like it would have been really hard to to take the 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 mines yeah it's really what you what do you think the Outlook would be uh for lithium in your business and do you take the punt now because you could probably buy them for half the price he could a couple of years ago so you know and you think of like say they got 80 million bucks and they drill it um drill it out and they don't really you know the story is not going to really change like we sort of know what's there and it's probably going to get proved up and infi and if taba taba proves up do you think they're going to have enough water if we got any inside 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 pilra there is a metric shit ton of water so you want that stored up just like a tap above and I know get what they would 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 JD because they can they pump they can set up the BS and pump it out into the bladder or just directly into whatever the into the mill or whatever the fuck you want we haven't even mentioned the the guarantees the warranties nothing to worry about you know they got a 10year warranty and a 20e life so based on you know taba taba you know 10 million ton 200 million ton resource like probably won't be million ton a year but fuck that's that's one get bladder the bladder will last longer than the mine yeah phenomenal do you a guarantee probably goes longer than that have you ever seen a hardide like the old school hard-sided 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 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 doesn't rupture doesn't anything like it's just just it's just a little leak phenomenal put a patch fix they have them in fucking blast signs you could you could get a bit of Space Rock fall on it and you'd have it fixed in two minutes yeah that's 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 there I couldn't bore a whole underground Al a get wad but mate if there's any misconceptions out there with a get wet blad's bloody Integrity get rid of them because harly snap and duck shit their solid anything nothing that a bloody patch can't fix so have you ever seen anyone patch a hard-sided tank no is the answer by the way no no no and you never will you can't structural advantages to a fucking blad call M and get wet just go Australia but it's not exactly clear to me why if all these things are outcropping which I understand is pretty pretty common in the area at least the known bits are fairly common why all these weren't snapped up in 18 um yeah that's a good question um for taba taba I think it was held by um a tantalum producer private tantalum prod Mak sense but azour as well and yeah so um azur is a good question yeah 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 to drill there which didn't which I think is something that is going to determine what type of mine it is yeah whether it's an underground or an open pit I would assume pegmatites are a are they not a they're not a sa sacred site to the traditional owners but it the outcropping areas are as far as I understand special places yeah so yeah um tough to leave them there in an open pit unless you hold it with a crane or something but yeah 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 they're at that level so yeah so they were known well and truly for a while and red flags in uh in 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 you know someone spooking big lithium grades but it was petalite you know all this stuff was going on right um what are the red flags to look out for for the punters you know doubling in lithium stocks um yeah definitely don't just do it on Rock chips that'll be the one um I mean I mean that's just like you know like I say that half in yes but I I genuinely say that like you pegmatites are like you know they they're not hard to find right the the problem is not finding a pegmatite the problem is finding a lithium mine and they're two fundamentally different problems um you know I can only talk about my experience right like you know when I went to Green bushes and you go and look at the the pit floor you know like you see the proportion of the pit flow that is actually pegmatites you understand why that's a lithium mind and other places aren't you know like there there's a there's a certain concentration of of pigmenti that you need for it to become a viable lithium mine economic lithium mine that I I'm not sure if picking up you know like rock chips from one pegmatite no matter how continuous and how wide it is like that's not really going to make a lithium mind so yeah and and to your comment I think there was a lot of that right because people were just looking at the the grade number but they but maybe they weren't understanding the context of you it's one pegmatite you know anoses and it's like quite wavy in the in the geological kind of map so you like I'm not sure that's going to make it for you in that sense yeah and I think and I think it's a bit more difficult in Australia is especially down inot you know the go Fields region where the 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 below but as in contrast to Canada I think it SS a bit easier to determine if it's there yeah is it like is that the same principle up north in the pilra like where tababa and all that are yeah so in the pillur you get a like it's a lot better exposure than it is in say the go Fields um yeah that's just because whole wind and shit up there just fucking destroyed it over the years that's why um yeah like it's just like just fundamentally yeah like um yeah a lot of it also has to do with like you know for example in Canada the reason why like you know pigmenti form these ridges is because the the surrounding Rock to the Pigmen ties is actually quite Frable like you know it breaks apart quite easily so you know so so they preferentially stay together and the stuff around them falls apart um and so in the pilra 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 pegmatites preferentially weather slower than the stuff that's surrounding them which goes goes faster so they become more prominent kind of features to see yeah and what about the sort of the width of the intercepts I see some coming out and they're 15 m versus some of the 100 plus 125 that we talk about especially when you think about Lon town and how they speak about how they're keeping that thick border because they don't want any you know dilution with the the outer you know they want a a good Mar exactly and then you see things like Mana their Global lithium project and Delta lithium today and you're talking about 15 M wide things MH and you know the sort of D stacked on top of each other but thinking Downstream to the processing you just think oh that could be that could be pretty hard you think like that as well yeah yeah so I mean I think one of the you know like when when the first wave or kind of like lithium results came out you know these kind of like you know whatever 75 100 125 M intersection you know like um 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 um several intrusions and you stack them together into one and they're not necessarily reporting the internal kind of dilution yeahme them across yeah so you like so maybe you over 100 m you you hit pegmatites but you know maybe they were all like five 10 met 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 shitloads is the a technology which is getting like employed at pill gang Gora now because I think from my knowledge pill gang gor has got a metric fuck ton of like material sitting there that is highly contaminated with waste that they haven't processed so that's right yeah yeah and I mean like you know like if you think of the like the perfect application of or in you know like this would probably be it right like you know like a highly reflective White Rock compared to a rock that's not very reflective and usually dark or some yeah like you know like that's about as big a contrast as you can get so so if you can't make that shit work here like I'm not sure you can make it work anywhere no it sounds like would you say that the Australian Lithium uh development pipeline is probably pretty established now with what we have cuz 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 got wild cat and and over sort of sitting there but everything else below that is just really small like small scale so you're like no you can't see much bloody happening there like Mount art has been around that's been sort of proven up ready for ages but it's tell 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 taba taba or endover can really come into the pipeline so you know like what if or in that graph like you know that I have what if a 50 million ton project can actually Supply the ium into the market and and still be viable you know so if you're the 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 mind 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 pill pill gang Gore chucking an extra what 320,000 ton on to get P 1,000 so it's and you know to make a 320,000 ton spot operation that's a pretty freaking big mine it's half of Kathleen Valley or bit over half so it's yeah it's not an easy feat no no that's hard I think they'll be waiting to see how this line Town ramp draging that line toown ramp Up's a bit of a lit test everyone would be watching yeah yeah yeah all right all this Li talks making me a bit sad guys let's talk about rare Earths is that going to cheer you up JD am I cheer some of the up CU they think you know they're coming 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' 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 um I think it's probably going to take us longer to understand you RS particularly technically I think um and I and I say this you know with all honesty in this in the sense that it took me a while to understand rare as well because it's not geologically one of the easiest things to understand it took you while we're all bugged yeah that's wow maybe not right like that that's kind of the uh the idea and I think you know like you know so so rare it's you know like market-wise I think they're fundamentally different in in how they kind of operate and that's largely because of the influence of the Chinese have on it um you know like they there's some you know like rare that basically China is the primary producer and is is the primary consumer you know like nearly 100% of producer and consumer in in some RS um so you know so that's stuff just doesn't leave China in that sense at all um and so you know so I think like understanding RS 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 Sarah Verde yeah and stand like stand out like for the for the grades and the acid consumption required for it compared to the you know the ionic claz is down in meteoric was that first stand out now you obvious got vmm and uh brail BR is that yeah Brazil r 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 actually probably three different types of rare earth sources yeah so um um so in like layman's terms you you can either get rare out of the the original Rock so yeah know so that's hard rock rare in that sense um there's another one that you can get out of it which is essentially Sands like you know so they're called monoid Sands usually um and so which is what our furer is that's a that's a monite oh is it okay I don't I don't know Prett okay um and so you so like the diff here we go you can you can do a fact check while I is more like um Z it's like the one of the waste streams of the mineral Sands and then they and then that's why I look is going to have their a Refinery cuz they can that's right yeah yeah so yeah so like um uh Luca does uh heavy mineral sense so IL manite and things like that uh one of the major byproducts of that is monite that comes out of it and so yeah like right now they've probably been throwing that stuff away and they could probably process it yeah is a got it's a appetite monite and alanite there you go why why like when I think of like rare Earths there's all of these rare Earths barely any of them really like salable you got what neum praise those are the those have the largest market but they're not the most um the the ones with the highest price that's um the dyt tur disis yeah but the market size is pretty fucking small um so you need to have in the rest like what like you know serum whatever maybe I don't know but just the rest in terms of like your basket um but like when when whenever you see rare 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 like yeah like when you're looking at these projects you can kind of pick them up you know like the often Ed term in the industry is the tro like you know total rare oxide yeah uh which is complete bullshit term right because half of the rars are not economic anyways and so yeah so when you look at that you should always go look at what they have shoehorn into that into that number because people just inflated to make it look as good as possible what and what was it was it Hastings I think their big differentiator was their percent ndpr of of the tryal I think that was that's right so they use a thing called it's like um M EO I think it's like minable rare do yeah some some something like measure and so the the higher the ratio of M TR or like m is the stuff that you can actually make money out of the rest of it is just there's always a good way you can spin it at a conference on the grass got slice it out somewhere you number one on the comp's chart 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 yeah like ideally uranium is often associated with these things and sometimes you don't want 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 cavana 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 torium is is something you you probably don't want in your project at all because you like there's no market for torium really um 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 yeah so you have to end up doing something with it so so the higher the thorium that that sits in these things the more likely you're you're not going to be on the economic curve in that sense either um but yeah to your point that you know like they like you know the rare earth kind of elements of interest is what called the light rare Earths uh which is nimium and predum uh those are the two and then the heavy on so wrong for so long no D you know I've been saying praised you not Pres um and so you can just see like I know what you meant and you can just say like ndpr Dy TB are the heavy ones yes studies yeah and I think that's to be honest most people will will go down that path as well um and so the other thing to know is that actually actually the world has lots of light rare elements you know like they um like you know most rare like yeah they're not very rare in that sense uh in the rare kind of bucket R moded 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 that really produces that um so yeah so to what you want to look for in a project you know you don't want to look for a lot of uranium atorium if if you can help it um ideally it depends how you want to look at it you if it ends up being hard rock then there got to be at least a couple of percent TR tro um if it's not a couple of percent then you know you're not going to make money on you th000 PPM or something like that yeah I think because it's like you look at how the you look at Mount weld I think it's about four and a bit percent yeah I think goes up to like seven or eight one is two and a half and then there's a big a big gap down to the next ones on the Hard Rock for for the Hard Rock like CER obviously in the Thousand like I think meteor's 2,000 odd PPM like which is stand out yeah so PPM is 02 of a percent right so but the it's the there's advantages in processing the ionic Clays yeah in mining it cuz it's all it's all free dig so you just like it's no drill and blast you just fuck but don't don't you skip step on the processing as well you can you can go straight to yeah you don't have to crush it like or anything but then you it's obviously a shitload of acid and and everything to leech it out yeah not too up on it don't ask me too many questions I mean you made the point there that the 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 lacks on environmental standards from mining through the processing is it IP in the processing part why is it that that happens predominantly in China um 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 um you know like rare can be quite complicated um and and China is like light years ahead of everyone else in understanding how you can process these like you know like what reagents you need what type of processing temperatures you need what type of leech you need to set up you know all of those type of things they they are way ahead of everyone else and now the Department of Defense I think the Department of Defense or maybe Department of energy in the States has given MP materials and I think lonus as well um a couple hundred million dollar to build a heavy Rare Earth processing facility I think in Texas that sound right they Fort Worth I think yeah and what 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 knowhow of executing that and making sure that the taxpayer money is well spent um I 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 so you so they will process the Heavies out of the the stuff that lonus owns uh you know like I guess where the Chinese have the dominant Edge in the market is because they've been processing so many different or types for so long you know like they can kind of handle the the wide selection of or types that are sent to them you like for example you know there was a um there's a rare earth mine in California which was funded by Department of Defense uh but you know but because of the The Ore that they produce they actually had to send it to China to to process the concentrate because no other place could actually you know like process it is mountain mountain pass yeah um I think it's mountain pass so they um yeah that's the the big socker yeah so you know so there's all these complications in that like you know 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 is kind of like you know a few labs in China sorry I was listening to the MP materials one of the bloody preo invest calls 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 weld or lest lest like it's just like they America is the world gets me thinking like they just they just said Mountain Pass and then China not one mention of Mount World interesting fascinating are they up to something they already think ofs as uh the same company yeah yeah maybe J write the script for him who knows yeah and then on on the the ionic clay right this is um I think where where there's certainly you know Aussie punter enthusiasm um and also expiration success right so like meteoric was probably first out the gate kind of capturing the attention of people um vmm sort of popped up and you know has like a lot of lot a lot of eyes and a lot of people pretty damn interested in what they've they've got um there might be some like uh like you know complications It's Brazil it's you know um 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 proc like what are the advantages of of you know of ultimately mining this sort of stuff which is like lower lower percentage how do you actually get those cost advantages producing them yeah so they um yeah so the ionically 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 um and it's probably like you know as um as a person that would like to see uh more uh environmentally friendly mining it's probably not the most environmentally friendly way of mining right uh because it's it's like shitload but it's thin so the freaking surface area of it is yeah the footprint of mining you know like would be quite High um and how it had been mined and processed in China the the style of deposits was horrific yeah pretty much the same yeah so they um they just pour acid over the fucking mountain and just leech it through there that's the word on the deine 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 uh like in China Vietnam places like that and they yeah like they historically produced them to to supply the rare earth Market uh and now people have looked back and said it's probably not the the best way of kind of going and grabbing Rays it's something about just dosing the environment with acid in a place that gets a lot of rainfall doesn't doesn't doesn't sound too fucking acid will sort anything out bloody like on and bad damage that caused it that cuz is there there's is there one clay Rare Earth thing in operation in Brazil already it's just come online now yeah yeah and that's it's called Sarah 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 so yeah and you made you made comments earlier about the size of these projects and how on a 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 in that sense you know like I mean I understand the story of that you know we're all using more technology and more kind of devices um and yeah like so so there will be an uptick in the rare earth Market but um I'm not sure you're going to see the market double in size or triple in size anytime soon like you know it's going to be a steady kind of growth not opposed to something like copper you know like where um you know the human consumption copper over the next decade or so will be fundamentally different than what it was for the last decade in that sense um and so I think you know like if you have a large Rare Earth Project um you like you you could Supply you know a significant percentage of the world's Rare Earth in in that sense so so you know so with the number of rare projects I see again I'm not quite sure that that's really going to fit into the market space of how many like how much RAR do we actually need in that in that sense uh um and the other thing is also like from a use point of view you know like one of the major uses of these rare Earths is that they used in in for magnets yeah um and they're used in you know like cars you know largely or um wind turbines yeah like you know like any type of Machinery where they can either be used as a as a generator or as a motor you know like you can use magnets for both um and so yeah so when it becomes a crunch on these these elements uh people can actually engineer them out see so like for example like Volkswagen has created um a car where they don't use any rare earth magnets you know so push comes to shove they could actually create more of those cars and hence then the like the demand kind of disappears in that sense that's that's one of the big knocks we'd heard I think the price right now floats around 50ish n 40 43 44 a bit a bit below 50 I think they said if it get 90 90 was a number where it's gone sh out D and Kelly yeah so yeah so you have kind of like a ceiling price or or like you cealing kind of price or until people go well if it's more than that uh then I'm not using and it kind of makes sense right like yeah know like if 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 at that point right because the the rest of the car still has to be worth $50,000 so yeah know so so there's always a sealing 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 um the quote from I think it was Luka gas and he was talking about Rare Earth and he's like they're just like pixie dust the closest closest thing to pixie dust you can find you know they just make everything a little bit [Laughter] better so to to hone into a couple other 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 White Haven 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 rare yeah um I mean yeah I've looked at him in in in the sense that I think if you're going to look for a project uh you know these guys have a lot of go a lot going for him right they have a huge tenament package um yeah like the deposit that they' picked up was previously explored by Ria as a box site deposit uh yeah they didn't crack the kind of the the the limit for them for box side uh but they never analyzed for rare in that sense so and they've inherited all of the drilling Rio did from the box yeah that's and so so as a as a project that's going to probably go the quickest from you like 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 you know since like 50 60,000 kmers of drilling which they're now asking for rare Earths you know they they've done their own drilling um and it's only on a quite a small part of the 10minute package that they've currently worked on um and that's I think one of the things that like I think that's maybe appeals to people in the Brazilian uh like in Brazil particularly for clay hosted RADS is that a lot of these things aren't hard to find you know they often associated with box side deposits which you know like there there's not going to be any new box side deposits discovered in the world there'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 um so a lot of these Brazilian deposits were originally box side deposits and now people have gone and and analyzed them for rils and realize that there's rils there um could be could be the next upand cominging District I've heard some parts of Brazil like very Pro mining cheap labor shitloads of power fucking tick tick tick just got half 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 is kind of positioning Brazil as a supplier to them um so they can you reduce the 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 create more rare earth kind of projects in Brazil so um so yeah so 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 Sarah 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 but if you talk about Brazil and Tha and rare Earths and lithium together' 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 um yeah so might fucking mate Brazil could be the next Namibia yeah do you know I mean you're you're up in in the exploration world you know the people do you know Jo Joanna from equest yes yeah yeah yeah I want I want to interview her one day she's she's um I know she's pretty interested in vmm and I mean she was like pretty pretty loud and early on wa1 as well so and now doing BHP explore so just I reckon she'd have some interesting exporation insights must be rich oh this is a great that's what you comment to everyone must be rich must be must be rich if you got on that early we should show this uh this cross section of the Caldera that you've you've got here it's a a great way for for me to picture the bul site sitting on top with the clay and the rare Earths y beneath it that's a good one yeah so I think you know so essentially you know like box sites and Clay Hoster RS will form in the same setting um is that if they become really weathered you'll probably get a a box side um and that's kind of what I was talking about like yeah when you talk about rare Earths like you know you have the source Rock like you know the Hard Rock that has rare Earths and then if you talk about the monite Sands you know that's basically that same rock where it's eroded but not necessarily weathered uh eroded just meaning that you just broken up the rock into smaller pieces and that that's gone there um and then the clay is where you've taken that rock and you weathered it so you've taken away everything else and the rils aren't very uh chemically active so the they don't move as easily and so they slowly build up and then that's essentially what what you kind of get so we do see a bit of uh Rare Earth exploration right up in Far Far North Queensland where the all the bulk site mine's kind of sit I wonder if we'll we'll see some of the the Explorers go up there and have a a poke around yeah so a lot of that will get a shell we should yeah fuck it out there you go I mean yeah done give you some s all right done yeah I I'll go scope it out I'll go figure out the chemistry you are the side that's um but yeah and the other one like yeah you can Flash this kind of graphic up as well which is the the mining processing kind of like how the market looks for rare HS yeah and you can see like you know the dominant position kind of China plays in in that sense um you know so they I mean even in China you know like rare is not a huge percentage of their domestic kind of metal Market yeah like it's it's it's a small fraction of it um yes so so it's just you like on a global scale like like yeah you could go find a rare earth like 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 whether you want rare it's as part of a domestic supply chain or not really that that's really kind of the question beautiful amid Ray rths very much remain in the two hard basket for me after this chat just like they did after the DK chat stick with the incumbency reckons yeah yeah and I think that's probably a pretty good advice in that that you know the companies like lonus and even Alca and things like that yeah like they you know like their ability to operate on a on a scale is so so different to someone else trying to come in and trying to work these things out that I I think yeah you like there's their supply can well and truly meet any demand that we're going to have for a while I think well it's probably fucking true with lithium as well like if you're going to if you're going to put a bet on lithium would you bet on a a line toown in development or an end not in development or pbra minerals or pilra p3000 mate p3000 get the costs right down mate Rio keep your eyes out J they're doing Serbia now do you think it's just Serbia we didn't even talk about the jadar right mineral that's right yeah next time mate next time yeah yeah another got the project back yeah they can actually do something with it so yeah very excited to see what goes on there yeah beautiful armed bloody love it mate uh punters if you're listening keep feeding ahed and he will feed you with INF we'll get you in bloody a bit of a fortnite jobby isn't it yeah I think so depend on how many comments we get yes couple of Partners to thank Maddie oh fucking who we got J same as [Music] yesie I I don't know where to go with that one mate I sh there yesterday same mate same same nine yeah verify get wet Solutions DSi underground Silverstone C Insurance wa water balls Brooks Airways kadr and they good spark spark information contained in this episode of money of mine is of General nature only and does not take into account the objectives financial situation or needs of any particular person before making any investment decision you should consult with your financial adviser and consider how appropriate the advice is to your objectives financial situation and needs