PGM capex...I see the basis for the small capex estimate, it is based on a 2015 scoping study by SNC-Lavallin for a small open pit operation. I did not see the SNC report on the website altough they quoted 30 tpa and a cost figure of $500+ per KG.
One wonders why the scandium project did not progress. Maybe PGM felt they could not comfortably bring to market the equivalent of world annual production for such thin manufacturing demand; maybe they felt it was better to go for a bigger score in cobalt and nickel.
But one thing is that it was a scandium project, so if they did it, I would think that the cobalt and nickel would be wasted since the "simple open pit operation" using conventional methods may have needed substantial additional capex to allow for cobalt and nickel extraction. Also the big profits are in specific sulfate formulations, these may have required much bigger capex.
I do not know and would defer to those in metallurgy and process engineering etc to inform on it.
Obviously when I referred to $500-$1 bil capex, I was envisaging a full size project like Sunrise or Sconi,
not a small open pit for scandium.
I think the main thing here is that such a deposit needs to have an aggressive approach to get big as fast as possible. CLQ could have put a toe in the water also with a small capex scandium project; they did a scandium-only PFS in 2016 for Syerston. But they explicitly stated the other option was to roll the scandium into a larger ni-co project, and this is what they decided to do at Sunrise, even though the 2016 stand-alone scandium PFS was pretty good.
I short, both CLQ and PGM decided against the low-capex scandium-only option.
But the $50-$100 million capex is not valid if you want large production of all three metals in a big mine.
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