MOUNT RIDLEY MINES LTD (MRD) - Rare Earth Breakthrough At Grass Patch

And how does the Selecto process impact project economics and environmental sustainability compared to traditional hydrometallurgical approaches?

Yeah, I mean, that's the million-dollar question.

Well, it could be quite a lot more than a million-dollar question.

Essentially, we have obviously conducted our own back-of-the-envelope calculations.

We're extremely excited by those numbers, but obviously it's not appropriate for me to share those with you at this time.

But we have become... initial discussions with engineering groups.

We're looking to initiate an early scoping study to allow us to bring those financial numbers to the market.

So I can't really speak to it just now, but that's something that we're working on delivering into the market in the very near term.

Yeah, on the environmental profile, it's really related to the closed loop design of this process.

And what I mean by that is that I guess you're not wasting the reagent.

So let's just say you're using hydrochloric acid, you will get some loss of that fluid, whether that's into the reactor or whether that's into the atmosphere, and you're constantly having to generate more and more hydrochloric acid and top that reagent level up.

We are certainly looking to design a closed loop process.

And what that means is that it is very recyclable and you get many more cycles of effective reagent use before needing to add any reagent to the system.

So that's the critical piece of the puzzle here, because that not only affects the environmental footprint, but also has a huge impact on the economics of this.

And I guess just finally on the economics of the Selectro process, the reagent that we utilise in the selectro process is cheaper per unit than hydrochloric acid.

So before you even start to consider what the economics look like and whether you have a closed loop system, you're already in front just simply utilising the reagents we're using over the hydrochloric acid.

So that's critical.

And I guess the final part is that we're not leaving any critical mineral behind here.

As I mentioned before, if we were to use hydrochloric acid, we'd be leaving behind gallium and also europium too.

So we're bringing everything with us and it gives us the best chance of making this project into a production story.