RE: Reminder: Rare Earths Aren't Rare23 Jan 2026 11:44
I mean, unless you think that in 10 years we'll have abandoned electric vehicles, AI, elevated defence investment needs & whatever value humanoid robots or other robots can add to society, then yes. If not, then - for a long-term investment - it's not that huge a factor, cycles come and go and that's the beauty of this rare earths deposit, given Rupert mentioned several times already that the low-cost nature allows it to be profitable at any stage of commodity cycles.
Take late 2021/early 2022, when they did the reanalysis of the Wudinna drill cores and found "hey, there's rare earths overlaying the gold" (which later led them to the actual prize asset, Boland). That was a period when rare earths were red hot, and the REO prices at cycle highs with the shipping constraints during late-stage Covid period. Do you really think that if they had "made hay" at that time, it would have made a difference? In a way they did "make hay", as with Wudinna rare earths, the drilling and MRE progression was very fast. But what did it change?
In the end a mediocre deposit is a mediocre deposit, and the rare earths at Wudinna were just that. So if you remember back then, share price close to tripled on the initial few signs of the REE, and then hype vanished and it converged back to the actual fair value of those Wudinna rare earths project, which wasn't very high.
Conversely, a high-quality deposit is a high-quality deposit, and Boland is exactly that. And as long as the de-risking proceeds, that's what causes the convergence to fair value for the high quality deposit that it is. Personally I prefer the prioritization of metallurgy and hydrology derisking, I mean that flow sheet isn't far from being optimized by now, especially if they manage to reduce/remove lanthanum a bit more in the next step as well (which is one of the tests at ANSTO at the moment). So 2.5 years in, metallurgy and hydrology are by and large de-risked and we are months away from the MRE that will be at least big enough for 10 years of mining and could well be already big enough for 20 years of mining, it's not really all that slow, especially considering that the first half of the year we have several drill campaigns in the exploration programme.