Learn about our “HHREE” target market
HISTORY OF OUR TECHNOLOGY – Geomega Ressources
“How did that shape up over the last five years? Our cost per one unit of one liter was five million dollars, which is not economic. Over the last five years, we brought it down towards $500 per liter. With this $500 per liter, it’s now starting to look like you can really do significant development.
“… we chose a slightly different approach. It’s important because the demand is growing with wind power, electric vehicles, and the expected supply shortfall means we are expecting rare earth prices to increase. Mostly for those 4 elements. What’s the bottleneck in the industry? It’s the refining capacity. All the juniors we’ve seen pass through PDAC over the years are always trying to produce a concentrate. That concentrate will go to China. If you make a concentrate that is going to China, then you’re not helping the problem. The idea we always wanted to pursue was bringing new production or new capacity of rare earth elements outside of China. If you don’t have solvent extraction then you can’t really solve the problem. As a result, the magnet consumers are more than 85 percent in China and Japan.
How do we address that? How do you enter the rare earth market? We need to focus on the high price and high demand rare earth elements. Back in the day, you heard light rare earths, heavy rare earths, mixed rare earths, or critical rare earths — I’m introducing here a slightly different term. In the mining industry, we always have to be in the industry of making money. We want to focus on the highest price and the highest demand material, which in this case is neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. These are the HHREE.
Now, the target is the European and North American market. If you are going to put a mine into production that’s going to produce 4,000 tonnes of those four elements then consider that the entire market today is less than five thousand tonnes. You are going to squeeze-out the existing supplier, which is China. That is not a very good thing. You need to do a small-scale mining operation, which is very hard because we know that in mines we need economy of scale. Most of the mines that are going to present a story for how they want to go into production will be producing too much material and will have no choice but to sell into China. That’s not what we want to do. The big points, as well, is large capex. We don’t want to be starting a mine for which we will have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars or even a billion dollars. The focus on small volume with high-grade feed, 500 to 1,000 tonnes per year, with 38% HHREE can give us up to 300 tons per year of those four elements. You can place three hundred tonnes into a market of five thousand tonnes quite nicely. You need clean technology, which we have developed over the last six years, for a high-margin operation. And that’s where we are focusing today on the magnet recycling.
Over the last six years, we’ve been slowly developing a clean technology for our separation. It’s organic-solvent-free, which is the main thing that we want to avoid. We don’t want to be dealing with solvent extraction. It’s a sustainable and competitive alternative to solvent extraction.”
How do we address that? How do you enter the rare earth market? We need to focus on the high price and high demand rare earth elements. Back in the day, you heard light rare earths, heavy rare earths, mixed rare earths, or critical rare earths — I’m introducing here a slightly different term. In the mining industry, we always have to be in the industry of making money. We want to focus on the highest price and the highest demand material, which in this case is neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. These are the HHREE. “KIRIL MUGERMAN @ PDAC 2019”