Lynas built in two phases, everyone overlooks the fact the second module was brought in on time, on budget for US$225M Jap loan and both trains were brought up to 90% capacity, steady state, in 90 days, in separate exercises as demand warranted.
Mind you the steep lessons learnt wrestling the first module were applied to the first before they fired it up. Frankly it was quite amazing to see how simple some of those "fixes" were, despite the experimentation involved to find them.
No amount of piloting will fully prepare for these types of operations at scale.
Particularly with limited Hf, Dy & Tb end mkts hard to understand why ALK took so long to break the project up.
Lynas now retrofitting a ~5ktpa expansion for US$35M that will leverage the strong points (kilns) and buffer the weak points (tunnel furnace) to extract even further efficiencies from the built base.
Long journey for Lynas, hopefully ALK will start theirs shortly.
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