RE: News Flow9 Sep 2025 12:25
Iturner, as in the post earlier, I'd recommend you watch last week's webcast, as it answers all of your questions (and likely more):
https://investors.cobraplc.com/webinars/6rkdZP-option-to-acquire-a-significant-copper-project
Long story short if you don't want to watch it: A lot of the current work is on identifying the high-grade zones of the Yaninee resource that were acquired in Q2 to complement Boland given the same mineralogy, to bring that into the same MRE instead of drip-feeding everything and the MRE is on track to be released within the next 3-6 months. The rest of the current work is on ways to reduce the low-value REEs (cerium, lanthanum) in the product, to further increase the margin $/kg REO, which as an ISR operation already look like they'll be 5-20 $/kg, see slide 8 of the webinar slides for the margin of ISR resources, but would likely be at the higher end of that range if they successfully manage to reduce the low-value REEs.
That slide is absolute key, it's amusing how fixated people are about resource size for REE, when - as you can see on that slide - the margins really depend on the type of resource (hard rock, clays) and on the type of mining (ISR is the game-changer). Let's say COBR are reasonably successful at removing the low-value metals from the product and end up middle of that margin range, say 12$/kg (would think that 20$ is a stretch as likely opex in China is far lower), and let's say for simplicity that the resource will be 1000 ppm TREO (so 1kg TREO per ton of ore), which looks reasonable from the past results we saw from Boland, might be 800, might be 1200, but around there.
Alright, then all that's needed is 5Mt of ore processed -> 5000t of TREO contained, let's say 70% recovery through ISR, gives 3500t of TREO product. 3500t * 12$/kg margin = 42m$ profit per year. We need to reduce it maybe if the margin shown in the slide does not account for payability % of MREC (discount for necessary downstream processing) that is usually 70% industry standard, but according to the webinar 80-90% is likely if they manage to reduce Cerium and Lanthanum, let's use the conservative success case again and use 80%, so that leaves us at 33.6m$ profit per year and a 20-year operation with "only" a 100Mt resource.
That's why they walked away from the REE at Wudinna even though the exploration target there was 100s of Mt. It's all about the margins, it's all about ISR, and a 100Mt ISR resource at Boland would very very likely produce higher profits than the 1Bt non-ISR resource Meteoric have in Brazil for instance.
I get it that Mt numbers are flashy "oh, they have a 1 billion ton resource!!!", but rare earths are at least in their current environment all about quality over quantity for the real profits.
That said, I still think we will eventually have close to 500Mt lol