How miners grade mineral discoveries, page-4

For the DRC, it is a combination of size and grade...which they have both and thus 70% of the world's cobalt now comes from there...

For the Australian cobalt juniors with a defined resource, whether laterite or sulphide, it is also about size and grade...The cost to build a mine with mill and refinery is very high....more so for laterites than sulphides...Also important is distance to either a port, for shipping the product or for roads/rails for land transportation to the end buyer(s) of the product...Some of the cobalt juniors in Australia have 100s of square kilometers of tenements....

For the Greater Cobalt Camp, it is more difficult as the mostly Co-Ag-As sulphides are very narrow veined deposits....Most are shallow and close to surface for open pit mining which is good...The historic Cobalt Camp cobalt/silver mined were by following the veins and digging them out with most all being ultimately underground...

So far, the Cobalt Camp claim holders that have done any drilling (First Cobalt/Cobalt Power Group/Lico Energy) haven't turned up enough cobalt to make it profitable enough for mining it (they would be looking at all open pit mining for what they found so far)...First Cobalt then decided to buy up the Idaho mine even though they are the largest land holder in the Cobalt Camp...if they can come up with enough money to refurbish their refinery, they could then take on cobalt ore from other Ontario juniors, especially from tailings piles that abound...

There will need to be partnerships formed by multiple Ontario juniors for the cost of building refineries/mills....It will be very interesting to see what BMR comes up with at their Iron Mask project..
For most Cobalt Camp juniors, if they can drill enough product they will most likely need to transport the raw ore to one of the few refineries that exist...

There was quite a lot of cobalt and silver pulled out of the Cobalt Camp historically and there still could be the mother lode here and there...but because it is usually thinly veined, many closely spaced holes must be drilled to find it and determine what the resource size might be...

I'm starting to ramble so will quit...All of the above is IMO and DYOR...