Commerce Resources CEO Chris Grove Sees Demand Rising for Magnet Rare Earths
Monday April 6, 2015
By Teresa Matich+ - Exclusive to Rare Earth Investing News
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RIN: Your pilot plant, which was initiated this February, aims to produce a marketable mixture of rare earth concentrates. Which rare earths are included in these concentrates? Who buys them, and do they need further processing to be usable by end users?
CG: The process will produce essentially the full range of rare earth elements as they are distributed in our deposit. However, we don’t ascribe economics to at least five of those, right from the get-go — even though they will be in certain concentrates we will produce, they’re not expected to have any kind of economic importance.
We believe that in terms of the different concentrates that we are targeting, these are the kinds of concentrates that are bought as feedstock [by] the rare element processors globally right now. I’m talking about Chinese processors, American companies in the rare elements sector and the world’s largest rare element processor, which is the Belgian-French company Solvay (EBR:SOLB). I’m also talking about Japanese companies that have customers who are processors.
All of those kinds of companies have expressed an interest in receiving a sample from us, and each group typically deals with a slightly different concentrate. Very simply, you can make a mixed rare earth element carbonate concentrate, a mixed rare earth element oxide concentrate, a mixed rare earth element chloride concentrate — those are three broad classes. Then you can have either a full range in those concentrates or in specifics. With Solvay, their specifications for a sample are the tightest; I believe it’s a mixed rare earth element carbonate concentrate that has the cerium, lanthanum and the thorium removed, so that is what we would be targeting for them. All in all, there are at least three, if not four, different kinds of concentrates that we’ll be producing from this pilot plant...
RIN: What are your costs?
CG: The cost estimate in the PEA adjusted for the foreign exchange right now would be US$6 to produce a kilogram.
RIN: And how much does the concentrate sell for?
CG: Well, we would suggest the value of what we would produce for a kilo would be in the range of, say, $28. That is the data that we have released at this point in time. That is just from the PEA from 2012 and we are redoing all of that with the prefeasibility study...
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