RE: Reminder: Rare Earths Aren't Rare27 Feb 2026 17:03
Well Andii, I've given you my opinion of why there are a lot of challenges - SVML have only just found rare earths, and like every company that "just found rare earths", they make it sound easy and they of course highlight the "potential for additional revenue stream". Cobra did exactly that too when they first found rare earths overlaying their gold resource at Wudinna, and people were excited, look back at SP action in early 2022. But the truth is Wudinna rare earths wouldn't have been a massively economic project, even overlaying the gold. Whereas Boland shows extremely competitive profitability metrics, with >30$ value per kg MREC vs cost of 5$ according to the latest presentations and webinars. Without big challenges, as recoverability is extremely high at the lowest acid quantities I've seen from any company so far (helped by the fact that the orebody generates acid itself with the addition of oxidants), and extremely low uranium and thorium values.
I think your next course of action should be to ask SVML management "so how about those uranium and thorium values as they are extremely high!?", or of course you can choose to discard the points in my comments, that is your choice to make, but there is little point in discussing on the basis of "but the company says it's great". Every company says their asset is great, especially if it is an addition to a current project that *could* add value. But in the end this is a Cobra board, so if you would like to chat about Cobra, the upcoming rare earths MRE and scoping study, or the copper/gold/molybdenum drill campaign(s) right now, you're more than welcome to engage, but I hope you will understand that I don't have the time to jump into discussions on other boards for every company that finds rare earths on their tenements, as that's not that rare a thing, it's just usually not as easy as the companies first make it sound. That was absolutely also the case with the rare earths overlaying the gold at Wudinna for Cobra, which is why we are extremely lucky that they managed to zoom in onto Boland and that paleochannel, as it's very prolific on flow sheet front with pretty fantastic results from the in-field ISR tests (which, that is worth repeating, is the mining technique that has gone from 10% to 60% market share in uranium over the course of 2 decades, so that's the potential for ISR rare earths). Needless to say that it's also extremely enriched in the right rare earths elements with NdPr being 32.6% of TREO, DyTb 5.7% of TREO (so MREO close to 40% of TREO), and heavy rare earths 48% of TREO.