Ann: 40T Bulk Nickel-Cobalt Sample Collected at Itapitanga, page-46

It's an "awful long way to cart 40 tonnes" because Simulus happen to be in Welshpool (Perth) and the orebody happens to be in Brazil.

The chances of drawing a blank are nil. Simulus have already conducted preliminary testwork on this material and yes, they do already know that the ore is amenable to HPAL processing. However you can't design a commercial plant based on lab-scale testing. Now they're moving to pilot-scale, for which Simulus has an excellent and well-proven set-up. Plus they have experience in HPAL testing of many other Ni-Co-Sc ores.

Lab-scale testing will have assessed a range of processing parameters and will have given good guidance to the conditions needed for successful extraction of the value minerals, but batch processing then needs to be scaled up to a continuous process. Added to that, HPAL processing is anything but a cake-walk. A 40T sample is certainly on the largish side, but it helps when you own the facility. There is nothing worse than getting to the end of a test run and finding that you still have unanswered questions because something went wrong along the way and you've run out of sample. If you think that sounds like the voice of experience - you're right.

40T allows for assessing sub-lots at different leach conditions in a continuous process. The metallurgical team will be evaluating the daily plant log sheets and the assay results from the various sample points through the process, making changes where necessary and continually optimizing the parameters. And at the end, after the leach liquor has finally yielded the various crystallized products, the JV will then have a significant amount of material that can be provided to potential consumers for them in turn to conduct their test programmes. Just as CTM/Simulus need to scale up their testing, so too do their prospective consumers. They would have received small samples from the lab-scale tests; now they need larger samples for more comprehensive evaluation. I seriously doubt that anyone in CTM or Simulus has contemplated selling the product to offset the costs.

It's a slow, expensive but necessary process because without the knowledge that the testing will yield you cannot run the various levels of feasibility studies, or make the decisions that we're all hoping to read.