Member Info for ShipwreckSheep

Richy, PFS is in the timeline slides marked for starting in April 2026 already: https://res.cloudinary.com/investorhub/raw/upload/v1758551504/leaf-prod/234/documents/Cobra_Resources_South_Australia_Critical_Minerals_Company_September_2025_FULL_VERSION_x7civr.pdf

GGPThru, yes, he commented on that in the Q&A section of the seminar, saying that it is compatible with the ore, but that his expectation is that Blue Rose will be big enough to justify its own processing facility

It would also be great if someone could ask him what ore throughput stages he has in mind (or are realistic) when it comes to ISR. Both, (a) when production first ramps up (e.g. 3Mt first year), (b) after ramp up (e.g. 5-6Mt per year), and (c) what he sees as upper limit of annual throughput in a scenario where resource is big enough to support long minelife at high throughput, e.g. is 10Mt/year or more realistic with ISR.

That'll help us refine metrics for sensitivity analysis / fair value estimates going forward

Not saying the management team aren't an amazing bonus, they are great!

But let's face it, at the current market cap that doesn't even matter that much yet, there's 2 potential Tier 1 projects, both in Tier 1 jurisdiction in the company portfolio (with Boland a lot already de-risked, Blue Rose skarn/porphyry early stage but great grades to start with), with 30m£ mcap for both (the rest of the mcap is cash & Barton shares), that'd be great risk/reward setup with almost any management team. David and Rupert just skew that risk/reward setup even more.

Very happy also to see Barton doing very well and making another ATH today

Cobra's holding of 6.45 million Barton shares by now worth 6.837m A$, so already increased by around 1.8m A$ since the gold deal end of June.

You have a cost estimate by the company, almost surely that'll be more accurate than anything Grok comes up with for it. That was before the flowsheet optimisation with lower molarity and consequently lower acid costs from earlier this month:

Slide 19

https://res.cloudinary.com/investorhub/raw/upload/v1740479854/leaf-prod/234/documents/Feb-25_Cobra_Resources_Presentation_FULL_xghtcz.pdf

GGPThru, the 2p warrants are also not before Nov 2026, so at that time if things go remotely according to Rupert's plan, there'll be a lot more institutional flow to offset the warrant-related flowat the time.

This time around it was all still retail investors absorbing them, and all things considered that went completely fine too

Very encouraging to see that (a) the warrant-related profit taking flow looks to be done, at least the vast majority of it, and (b) the sold shares from that have already been fully absorbed judging from price action

Richy, I'm with you, >50Mt (which is 10y resource life already at 5Mt p.a.) would be important to see, over 100 would be what we need for eventual MRE by PFS time so that it's 20y mine life at 5Mt/year, which would underpin valuation.

I think cutoff grade is lower than your Grok analysis gave. Have a look at the composite sample of the MREC test currently, 1 of the 3 is far below the Grok cutoff, while the composite is above 1000ppm, so I'd think that's what Rupert sees as representative for both average grade (around 1000ppm) and cutoff grade (around 300ppm). He did comment very enthusiastically at one RNS in August that the lower acid need makes lower grades economical to bring into the resource too

Edinburgh, I think it's mostly that REE you don't have in confined aquifers sand (highly permeable) with impermeable clays surrounding that from the top and the bottom. That's pretty unique due to the paleochannel (ancient river system) geology.

That's what makes ISR likely to work, the permeable sand in-between impermeable clays. Note for instance that the REE at Wudinna also were ionic absorption clay deposits, but you didn't have the paleochannel and the impermeable zones around it, so that's a main reason why for Wudinna you never heard anybody speak about ISR possibilities and why they dropped it like it's hot when they discovered Boland and that confined-aquifer uranium-style ISR is a highly likely possibility there.

DF, I'm on the same page about those too, but: it's the first in-field test, so as long as the results aren't "nothing worked", even if it isn't a triumphant full success, the management have a great track record of analysing results, recalibrating the approach, and optimising the output in subsequent attempts. So "it works" is a large scale in-between "nothing works" and "everything works". If the first tests come back in the middle of that range, with this management team and ANSTO, there's still very high chance that they shift it to "most things work very well" over time.

ISR for Boland is what can make it an absolute cash cow, but the first test doesn't need to be a FULL success. Of course I also hope it will be, and think it can be, but we also should keep in mind that we were incredibly spoiled with the bench scale test which basically was a "everything works" result

Hope you guys also watch the video that Rupert released along with the RNS. Great to see him within the pilot wellfield for the ISR field test. And to hear him talk about the scoping study ahead...

The initial metrics from the Scaled column test that will produce a large amount of MREC also look good, going for molarity of only 0.3 now after last week's promising reduced acid consumption news (vs industry standard of molarity of 0.5), they do fully lock in on the lower acid use and not just theoretically talking about the possibility.

Https://www.ft.com/content/3193ddc3-fe9c-4349-8f2b-5cc76cbb48d8

Also won't hurt COBR in their negotiations with potential offtake partners once the bigger amounts of MREC have been produced that they're working on right now. Still think they will target UK and EU companies for that, as a European/Australian company, it'd be a stretch to expand to a 3rd continent for the offtake

There's still questions to be answered, optimisations to be made and potentially challenges to solve about ISR, but signs so far look very positive. And that's interesting that ANSTO worked on that process with RBW, so that makes it more likely that Cobra will at least try to make that route possible also given their close work with ANSTO for years now.

Overall it looks more like smaller challenges to solve if any show up along the way, it is not PRIME farmland in South Australia, and the ground water issues that others had are likely no factor given the hyper-salinity of it in that area, so 2 factors that would be massive challenges to ISR on social and environmental permitting front are not in the picture here.

Downstream processing being key, as in "Would they have to be done on COBR side", I'm not sure, maybe I'm an optimist too much on that, but I do believe that Western governments will fast-track and sort the lack of separation plants over the coming years. But hell yeah it would be amazing if an economic separation process works on COBR side without the need for offtakers for further downstream processing and bringing payability to 100%. I'd see it more as an extra bonus though than it being a make-or-break factor, the only real make-or-break factor imo is ISR viability which...yeah...looks good, but it's not proven fully yet.

Let's see, I wish South Australia would work a bit faster with permitting and that title transfer for the tenement today's re-analysis results were for, I think we get news on the Copper target next and will have to be a bit more patient when it comes to answering those other REE questions.

Yeah, I don't disagree that there's a lot of BS by REE juniors overall, with many hyping things they have, "oh, look at our resource size", without having spent any time on metallurgy, profitability, anything. Or like AR3, projects that are situated in absolute PRIME farm-land and that aren't ISR, so would be incredibly hard for AR3 to even get to mine that. It's very hard to separate the ones that *could* be viable from the hype, and it's why I'm very happy that Cobra strategically chooses to do all the metallurgical optimisation first with finding optimal recoverability conditions that allow for reduction in acid consumption need (both on pH optimisation and molarity optimisation front), and focusing on holding the right land packages that can leverage the opportunity (like picking up the license cheaply for the tenement where today's results are from, which is also a paleochannel, but not the same one that Boland is in), and only then focusing on the "look how big a resource we have".

I'll try to read more about the Serra Verde issues, but my suspicion is that it's very different conditions there with water than it is in the Boland area, as ground water there is hyper-saline as it is (often brought up in the webinars that the aquifier is x times saltier than the sea) and of no value for consumption or industrial use. So as long as they can replicate the environmental conditions that surrounding uranium-focused ISR operations have, it's likely that won't become a headache.

As for incorporating the separation of MREC -> metals on COBR side, that would of course be the dream scenario. The impurities are low at Boland, but grades are undoubtedly lower than RBW given different deposit style. For now I believe the work they do on reducing Ce/La presence in the MREC in a preliminary step (which is actually more likely to work exactly due to the aquifier being naturally hyper-saline) is time well spent to potentially increase the payability to 80 or 85%, but if there is any way to bring it to 100% with CIX/CIC later down the road, I'm sure they will work on it with ANSTO and through their collaboration with Watercycle Technologies

Now you're more positive than me on the project suddenly, that's fun. For me ISR still very much makes or breaks the project. But ISR looks likely from test-work and general geology/metallurgy and you have a guy with 50y+ experience as geologist as the biggest investor in Cobra. So risk/reward looks skewed enough for Boland alone, and there's now 3 targets with at least known mineralisation in the 2nd Project area, Manna Hill, as well -> Blue Rose (Cu/Au), Golden Sophia (Au), Netley Hill (Cu/Mo)

On ISR front we'll just have to agree to disagree. Because there's multiple ISR uranium operations in the near vicinity of Cobra's project, and it's exactly the same style of ISR they are going to, with wellfield, so very different from Chinese ISR which has no confined aquifier, and - at least from their PFS and DFS - Serra Verde, while marketing-friendly branded as ISR, is really leaching after removing soil, not actual ISR. If they did change their techniques since DFS and I've missed that, then that might be possible, but from what I find, that's not ISR like used for uranium and they just smartly branded it "in-situ mining" as opposed to hard rock.

But yes, that is the company maker, ISR working...if it doesn't, then that's not an economic project and I won't argue about that. However, all tests for ISR so far have been better than expected if anything, and the geology lends itself to it, and it's quite similar to uranium ISR operations in that geography. So while that is a risk, let's keep in mind that we sit at 30m£ mcap with great signs so far that ISR is a green light, and with a copper target with existing hits of 2.2% Cu waiting, and with 5-10m£ cash or cash-like (Barton shares)

I fully agree with you on that part, that's one of the big challenges of the global West to get out of China's fangs in the REE space, but unless you think that geopolitics will quickly tone down and everybody is buddy-buddy with China (my expectation is more that it'll get worse), that shortage of separation plants is something that Western governments will have to address and solve and in a fast-tracked manner. And something addressed by the Cobra CEO also often when he mentions that the goal is to grow in tandem with the Western supply chains.

So yeah, there is a question mark around that, but if the West wants to be self-sufficient on REE front, it's something they have to solve. And I do think they want to be self-sufficient on that front, even just looking at the list of "high importance" on the US government's 2025 Draft List of Critical Metals

https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/department-interior-releases-draft-2025-list-critical-minerals

5) “Other ionic clay miners aren’t using ISR for a very good reason.”

Verdict: Misleading.

Most ionic clay projects are advancing agitated leach/heap leach because their geology suits that route. COBR is pursuing ISR because its geology is different (permeable sand confined by clays). Different ore settings → different optimal mining methods

6) “NdPr ratio is only ~18%; separation is the hard bit; you can’t charge 4× market for Dy/Tb.”

Verdict: Partly true, but context missing.

Separation is hard and capital-intensive—that’s why payability matters for pre-separation products like MREC. COBR is explicitly designing to maximise NdPr+DyTb in MREC and minimise Ce/La to lift payability. Edison’s note outlines the very high bench recoveries (up to 93% NdPr / 89% DyTb) at low acid—that drives unit costs down and spec up.

No one is claiming “4× generic market” pricing; the point is composition-linked value. Basket up, discount down → higher $/kg realised.

3) “China has banned ISR; Sierra/Serra Verde shows the problems; ionic clays at depth don’t work.”

Verdict: Mostly Incorrect / Overstated.

China tightened regulations after major environmental damage from poorly controlled ionic clay leaching; that’s well-documented. But that’s not a blanket, permanent ban on all solution mining—rather a shift to stricter “green mining” standards.

Serra Verde (Brazil) isn’t ISR; it’s a conventional mining project. There are environmental concerns in Brazil, but that’s about land/water management for various projects, not a proof that ISR per se “fails.”

Depth: Ionic adsorption doesn’t require outcropping laterite only. Boland sits in palaeochannel sands with ionically bound REE—precisely the reason COBR targets wellfield ISR.

4) “MREC sells for $5.5k/t; COBR claims $10k/t opex; you can’t get paid for Dy/Tb without separation.”

Verdict: Incorrect.

There is no single “MREC price”. MREC is typically priced as a payability (discount) to the oxide basket based on its composition and spec; 70% payability is a common scoping assumption elsewhere (Ema study). Premium specs (less Ce/La, better magnet ratios) can reduce the discount and lift realised price.

COBR’s cost guidance is ~US$8/kg MREC (US$8,000/t), not “$10k/t”—and the 11 Sep update implies further reductions via lower acid/molarity.

“No value for Dy/Tb until separated” is wrong. Offtakes pay on the oxide basket (NdPrDyTb etc.) via payability. Improving MREC spec (e.g., removing Ce/La early) increases payability and hence realised revenue before any third-party separation. That’s exactly what COBR’s flowsheet optimisation is targeting.

Since he loves using AI on other boards judging from posting history, let's see how our favourite de-ramper's claims stack up to an AI check:

1) “Drilling results are dire… low TREO, poor 18% NdPr ratio, thin intercepts, not at surface.”

Verdict: Misleading.

The 17 Sep re-assay RNS shows multiple thick mineralised intervals (e.g., 18 m @ 720 ppm TREO incl. 2 m @ 2,546 ppm; 10 m @ 747 ppm; 8 m @ 1,095 ppm incl. 2 m @ 2,676 ppm) across new tenements adjoining Boland. These are historic uranium rotary-mud holes that typically under-report REE (loss of fines), so true grades on proper AC/sonic often improve. Depths are tens of metres in palaeochannel sands (not an issue for ISR).

Boland’s metallurgy and geology are tuned to ISR (permeable sand confined by clays; ionic adsorption to clays/organics). This is not an open-pit grade/width game; ISR economics hinge on recovery, reagent usage and permeability.

2) “COBR is not the only non-China ISR rare earth project; ISR is common elsewhere.”

Verdict: Mixed.

There are a few non-China projects proposing ISR. Serra Verde’s Pela Ema project is a large ionic clay resource in Goiás, Brazil. Their PFS/DFS material shows they plan to use scrubbing, screening and agitated tank leaching of mined material — i.e., conventional mining + leach, not “true” uranium-style wellfield ISR. The “in-situ leaching” phrase you saw in the article is being used loosely as marketing. In reality, Serra Verde digs up the clay, then applies leaching in tanks, sometimes branded as “green ISR” but not the same as Cobra’s proposed confined aquifer ISR.

Articles may casually label Serra Verde “ISR” for investors, but from a technical and economic perspective, it is not the same. Cobra’s method remains much rarer and potentially disruptive. What differentiates COBR is the confined aquifer architecture (uranium-style ISR) vs. the historic Chinese unconfined hillside leach that caused environmental harm. COBR’s technical docs spell out the confinement and low-acid concept.