Originally posted by ausheds
GL, this thing has never been economic, and never will be, particularly with two leading Chinese mag makers recently confirming Dy & Tb deletion is ongoing up into the higher grades.
With southern Chinese HRE production basically shut down ATM for enviro inspections prices have barely moved, making a total mockery of the "Dy Deficit" story to order.
Maybe they can find the NTUranium they were looking for a decade ago?
With RE market growth would not be unrealistic for this to be economic in 5-7 years, ROW market will need Dy ongoing, just a matter of how much $$ and how many tonnes?
Long term this is still a good resource, one of the keys IMO is having amount of NdPr in magnets reduced significantly to put the entire suite back into some sort of balance, ie; halve NdPr but triple the market.
Should be a positive for the entire RE suite as opposed to now where all the value for extraction is in NdPr for the near term, much of the Dy deletion is quite advanced, will take a few years at least to run off stockpiles of Dy then the Dy portion LYC's SEG product should satisfy ROW demand for another few years at least.
Hence my long term outlook for this and need for it to be totally debt free and preferably in care and maintenance.
As you yourself keep touting Aus the RE industry is a moving beast, not static by any means, the time to lock in resources is when nobody else wants it.
China will be happy to take this resource off our hands, to let that happen would not be wise IMO, look at Molycorp and how the Chinese wangled the resource for $25m, truly incredible, should we allow ourselves to go next?
Would you not prefer to bolster LYC's resource with another local? 25+ years resource is good but it's only 25 years and that is not including increasing production, with "another LYC needed every 5 years" it would be remiss not to increase resources as the opportunity arises, would love to hear a suggestion on an alternative to this scenario.
Also who will get their hands on this resource when receivership is declared?
This question is relevant NOW as this is imminent IMO, I don't mind the Chinese getting our resources, I'm more than happy for them to come in and buy things out for a fair value, just having poor operators like this playing right into Chinese hands to turn over the resources for nothing is what does annoy me.
(20min delay)
