LawyerTrader, Scarpa pretty much summed it up perfectly. AVL, as he says, has put effort into the back-end value capture of batteries and battery grade products. That didn't work out well for Galaxy first time around, but you never know. For AVL, TMT, NMT, VMC and others, the primary market is steel, so steel specification should be the absolute minimum output for the planned facilities. Proving you can do that via the DFS is what will make or break the mine, not proprietary IP over batteries you may never make if the company goes bankrupt (or effectively so) with a failed beneficiation plant.
Banks, especially after the royal commission, are going to be in wounded bear mode with capital. For miners, in technically risky roaster territory, that means dealing explicitly with the problems that oxidation causes in recovery of magnetite. It's not just redox state - metallurgical recovery encompasses comminuition, mineral separation a well as the pyromet/hydromet or SXEW capture at the end. If one of these steps fails, it all fails.
The deposits are all different, in terms of geology. The response of, say, low-grade disseminated magnetite in oxide, transitional and fresh is different than massive in oxide, transitional and fresh. The type of clay in the gangue will have an effect. Even for high-grade disseminated, the % magnetite to gangue determines friability and separation of ore from gangue and the behaviour will change markedly between 10% gangue and 25% gangue.
Whether or not the proponent has studied the geometallurgy of the rocks in sufficient detail is difficult to monitor from releases, especially ones with very scant details (eg; VMC's for example).
Windimurra has been the example that has gone before, and investors and financiers should be asking questions of proponents about whether the lessons learned there have been addressed for by the proponent. Indeed, we will have to wait and see whether Atlantic has actually solved the problems of the past. Maybe there's a new problem they don't know about.
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