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Copied from advfn
I see that COBR is up some 40% today - all on the back of its usual tactic to attempt to confuse and mislead gullible investors. Of the results released today the CEO states - "These results are sensational! It is pleasing to see our value proposition materialise, and these results, coupled with the excellent metallurgical recoveries achieved last year, demonstrate Boland is not only unique but world class.''
Er, no it isn't.
He also states -
'Whilst the Brazilian ionic rare earth projects have captured market interest, our results are comparable in grade, scale and metallurgy.......'
Er, no they aren't.
COBR was set up as a gold explorer / miner but when it couldn't find any economically viable gold on its plot (must be a great team) it decided to see what else might be there. Hence they joined the REE bandwagon and tried to convince folks that it was a rare earth junior instead. It then set about creating an image of itself that might impress gullible investors.
As for the results being sensational - that's very disengenious. So the average ppm of TREO for all 3 zones is 1196ppm. Why not express that as a percentage? Well as a percentage it really doesn't look very good at all - only 0.1196%. As a comparison Rainbow has 0.43% at Phalaborwa. Compare that to 2 existing producers (Lynas Mt. Weld and MP Materials' Mountain Pass) who have 6 - 8% grades and Brazilian Rare Earths' recent drill results of 18.8% TREO. Admittedly these 3 are in hard rock so more difficult to process than the gypsum dumps and soft clay of RBW and COBR. The chart below illustrates this very well - the blue section represents TREO concentrations and black sections illustrate the respective concentrations of the most sought after REE, that is Nd and Pr. As one can see COBR's figures would hardly be visible on the same chart - unfortunately chart does not copy but can be viewed by searching Innovation News network under title - Brazilian Rare Earths: A paradigm shift
Seems peculiar that your first post is a negative one...maybe you need to check out RV latest presentations for actual comparisons.
As for the title of 1p being about right...I think given our current portfolio we should be at around 2p min. Anywhoo I'm sure the more geotechnically advanced posters on here will be more than happy to share their opinions on grades and percentages... as technical side is a bit much for me.
Listening to RV on the Sunday Roast yesterday as soon as I heard him say 16-18months I figured many that would consider buying in, or at least that have now put COBR on the radar won't be rushing to buy, unless there's a general market uplift that everyone's being saying is coming - for the last few years.
SO I think we will remain roughly around here for a little while longer - good if you're stake building ofc.
I'm a mug then ...lol
Oh well, that rise didn’t last long!
Guess the market is not quite convinced of the project yet. Hopefully that will change over the next few months but given the ADVFN post there’s obviously disgruntled investors/non believers following Cobra!
'Seems peculiar that your first post is a negative one' - I'll explain. I had no interest in COBR until I saw the huge rise in SP on Monday - then I did some research and didn't like what I found. This board is by far the busiest for COBR so where better to post? Anyway, my brief research showed that the team at COBR are talking up their worth and their claims of 'sensational' and 'world class' are very disengenious. I cannot contradict the details in post I copied from advfn - which shows that COBR has only 0.1196% TREO on its patch. Contrast that with Pensana that has VASTLY more on its Longonjo patch. There the site is split into 2 areas - a weathered surface area (easily accessible) and a fresh rock layer beneath. Drilling on Longonjo has gone down to 80m and found REO all the way down - COBR recorded their 8m deep find as sensational. The entire area of Longonjo has an inferred mineral resource of 313 million tons at 1.43% TREO including 0.32% NdPr - that's 12x the concentration that COBR has. The weathered area is even better - that has 39.9 million tons at 2.38% TREO including 0.52% NdPr - that's nearly 20X the concentration that COBR claims to be sensational.
No wonder COBR's SP is disappointing - it's all built on bluff and extremely disengenious statements.
You missed the gold in your brief research Rach.
RachT…
Is Pensana rare earths contained within hard rock or clays?
Open pit mining or using ISR?
Is the deposit/operation within a politically stable country?
Environmentally friendly means of production with little environmental impact for extraction?
Potential province scale?
Do they have a gold resource?
Do they hold potential IOCG deposits within their tenements?
Hopefully Cobra can convince and prove to the market that their strategy can be as much of a game changer for rare earths as it was for uranium when producers starting to implement ISR tech for uranium production.
Time will tell!
The problem with your approach, Rach, is that you don't differentiate one bit between heavy rare earth and light rare earths. First things first, nobody says Pensana doesn't have nice grades, it also has over 10x Cobra's market cap btw...
Second things second, for Cobra's Boland drill results, of the MREO (and really that's what we look at, cause the others, well, Cerium Oxide and Lanthanum Oxide have a price less than 1/500th of Terbium Oxide, so who cares about the parts of TREO that aren't MREO?), 12% are Tb and Dy, 88% are Nd and Pr, that's the ppm split. The value split using current prices of the REOs, 47% of the basket value are Tb and Dy, even though they're only 12% of the MREO in ppm. For your guide, current prices are 760$/kg for Tb-Oxide, 253.5$/kg for Dy-Oxide, 50$/kg for Nd-Oxide, 53.5$/kg for Pr-Oxide.
Then you have to take into account the resource style and recoverability, if you even looked at the most recent presentation, you have the hard numbers how much more profit margin ISR produces at massively lower grades.
Then you have the jurisdiction, if you looked into it, you know at what discounts African miners trade to Tier 1 jurisdiction ones.
Then you have recovery % in the leeching process, the high 60-70% recovery rates at Boland are outstanding compared to pretty much all metrics for IAC-style deposits out there.
Even if we assume the same recovery % for e.g. MEI, which also is an IAC-style deposit and much more directly comparable, the basket value of MEI's resource is at most 2x higher than Boland average (across all zones, and in reality recovery % is lower at MEI). Then you have MEI in a somewhat dodgy mining jurisdiction, Brazil hasn't been great there, look at other UK-listed miners in Brazil like Serabi or Harvest Minerals, complete mess. And yet you have MEI at a market cap of 250m£ equivalent. So you're definitely missing some things here, the biggest ones being 1) the vast premium of heavy rare earths over light rare earths in market price, and the vaster premium of magnet rare earths over other rare earths (we're talking x50 premium of LREO and x500 premium of HREO over the others, making any talk about TREO completely obsolete, the ones that aren't MREO create zero value), 2) the jurisdiction the project resides in, 3) metallurgy, recovery grades, as important if not more important than the MREO %, what's the point of looking only at MREO %, when 1 has recovery rates of 70% of them and the other has 35% of them?
What does make this world-class, isn't the grades in themselves, but the combination of Tier 1 jurisdiction, very high recovery rates, the potential for very very low-cost extraction if ISR will really be possible, very decent concentration of HREO as part of MREO, and economic MREO grades (even if not the MREO grades that some others have, who lack the ISR potential and the high recovery rates, and the high HREO content, which yeah, is x10 the market price of LREOs, and the prime juri
And SWS, adding to that, if you do the maths from the recent RNS then Boland is between somewhere between 450-900 Million Metric Tons at that TREO; which is massive!
Numpty & amateur investor am I? How flattering, but such comments are very misguided. Any research I've done took a little over an hour so you're nearly correct in that regard. However, even that short time was enough to convince me that this is an investment with a poor chance of being a good investment at this stage and even if it is successful it won't be producing for 5 - 10 years yet. I had little knowledge of Pensana before Monday but my > 1hour research means I see that they are starting construction and see that they are one of the largest undeveloped RE mines and one of only 3 worldwide with JORC reserve greater than 100k tonnes of NdPr. COBR has many many expensive hoops to jump through before it even gets close to that stage - numerous dilutive fund raises ahead for anyone already aboard.
The market clearly agrees that the company's latest news is sensational, the SP is back to where it was before the news broke - strange that.
SWS - thank you for your post, it has provided me more info to consider. Certainly one I'll be watching.
Good luck to holders.
It's glaringly obvious that RachT has suddenly surfaced here to ramp his investment in Pensana. Part of that is to de ramp Cobr in the hope investors may switch from here to there. I suspect that he has lost a good sum of money recently in Pensana as their sp has dropped like a stone in the last calendar year and he is rather bitter. As soon as you see the volatile countries Pensana are operating in then you will understand the sp drop.
As regards Cobr you have to believe the geologists Clarke and Verco when they say the results are sensational. There are rules in place and nomads appointed to deter false claims being made in an RNS. Law suits would follow against parties making untrue statements and perhaps RachT should be more careful before calling RV disingenuous.
At the end of the day who do you trust? The geologists on the ground with years of experience and expertise or a new poster who has popped up from nowhere with an agenda?
Spot on Jolifant, I know who I trust the most with my investment here
Rach, not gonna go into it more, I'm glad you found some more perspectives to explore from my post, but please be careful with things like "market put SP back to where it was, so it can't be good"
Because then you'd also have to say Pensana must be horrible, with SP going from 185 in March 2021 to 25 now.
As far as I'm concerned both have their merits, personally I'm interested in the province scale, ISR-suitable, heavy rare earths enriched deposit in a prime jurisdiction that Boland shapes up to potentially (!) be, with a board that holds 30% of shares and raised at a premium last time they raised. But that's personal preference, what is clear is that these two are hugely different, if you look for NdPr (which has a much more challenging outlook than Tb and Dy reading any REE focused news) and don't mind a high risk jurisdiction, or rather if you're okay with these factors for higher overall MREO grades (although also important to keep in mind that extraction likely will be much more expensive for Pensana), then I wish you good luck with your investment there, I can see it go well too, but for me for many reasons I wrote about at length, Cobra is the superior play, in particular with less than a tenth of the market cap, and with the similarities Boland has to MEI's REE resource (which is valued at 250m£)
Thanks SWS for your post - it does indeed contain some details of note. I'd definitely agree that both COBR and PRE have been dismal investments - both way off their respective highs. I'm not sure why Jollifant makes the claim that I own PRE; and Rach is short for Rachel so he's wrong on at least 2 counts. PRE was just a competitor that sprung up when I was looking at COBR.
I think your choice of investment may well do well IF COBR's proposed method of production actually works - as far as I can tell that's still unproven as yet (even in a laboratory level) - it works for lithium but only time will tell how it works for bulk REEs. By contrast PRE's method of extraction is proven and its much nearer to production.
I'll be watching both co.s going forward - good luck with your COBR holding.
SWS - can I ask a question of you? You seem to have a better handle on this than most. Now this is where I might qualify for the title of numpty :-) but here goes anyway! According to COBR figures for NdPr they claim to have 212ppm, 205ppm and 305ppm on the respective zones 1,2 & 3. So that's an average of only 241ppm over the entire area, that is only 0.0241% is NdPr. Now if they use the weak acid (they often refer to being just like orange juice, which is c. Ph 4.2) of Ph4 the ANSTO results give recovery rate of 20% Nd 16% Pr, 25%Nd 22%Pr and 45%Nd 35%Pr for respective zones 1,2 & 3; that gives a generous average of around 28% recovery for both Nd and Pr. Now here's my question - that looks to me like the recovery rate using the ANSTO methodology is 28% of the available 0.0241% (that's the amount of NdPr over all 3 zones as shown above) so the final recoverable NdPr is only 0.006748%? The same COBR release gives an average of 32.5ppm over all 3 zones for TbDy = 0.00325% and recovery using acid of Ph 4 gives a recovery of around 40% of that figure (using ASTRO figures) so that would be 0.0013% recoverable of Tb & Dy over all 3 zones. Do you read the published results any differently? Seems that they have a huge area and ultimately a good tonnage of TREO's etc but the recoverable rates look miniscule to the point of maybe being uneconomic? Sorry, that's 2 questions.
So from all the recovery rates I've seen on IAC-style rare earths projects, the ones in this RNS are at the higher end for pH3, and not quite sure where you found orange juice to be pH 4.2, it's closer to pH 2.5 - 3 from what I know, see for instance Table 1 in this scientific paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6898880/
Where things become much more expensive and environmentally more impactful is when pH 1 is needed in the acid leeching, I'm not quite sure why the RNS includes both recovery rates at pH4 vs pH3, but possible to show that a relatively small increase in acidity from 4 to 3 vastly improves recovery %, especially when looking at Zone 3 (which also seems to be highest MREO grades) and especially the 79% Tb and 67% Dy are exciting to me given that these are the most valuable REOs.
Also, please consider these are the very first recovery rates, one resource that Rupert compares initial results to is MEI, and look for instance at this RNS by MEI: https://wcsecure.weblink.com.au/pdf/MEI/02779218.pdf
Initial recovery rates for MEI were 32% Pr, 59% Nd, 21% Dy, 41% Tb, look at the increases in the RNS. Cobra again is known for focusing on metallurgy a lot (and some here would say they focus on it too much, Richy was one of the people being quite critical about the amount of metallurgy going on I think), so it is very likely that recovery rates will improve considerably as they understand the specifics of the resource better and better.
On your question if I think it's economic or not, there's work left to do and I think Rupert is the first one to be honest about that, you have many explorers who will always make it sound like "in 3 months we go mining", while both Rupert and David Clarke have been open in the interviews that the pilot project with first production would be 15-18 months from now still. If ISR works as extraction method, you can be absolutely sure that these grades are economical and that much lower grades would also be; of course there's no comparables in REE space, but the slide that compares the biggest companies in uranium and shows that profit margins are a lot better for Kazatomprom with 0.06% uranium grades with ISR vs Cameco that also has a high-grade hard rock resource of 8%+ grades: https://cobraplc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/20024.03.25_bloand-results.pdf
You won't hear me say "This will DEFINITELY work", there's work to do, this was the first drill campaign that really targeted Boland in a systematic way. But it looks good, imo very good indeed, the scale and very low-cost extraction prospects are what makes this resource so exciting to me, well, paired with a market cap of 7m£, it's not at 70m£ like Pensana or 250m£ like MEI, the grades, hey, I'm not shouting from the rooftop about them, but from all I can tell, they look economic enough, and ofc REE prices would additionally go through the roof on any China/Taiwan escalation
I'd like to add, Rach, that with Cobr you have to look at the rest of the company too, because the gold resource, even though it is not high-grade, is economic grade, all of that gold sits at shallow depths and is suitable for open put mining, where economic grade is ~1g/t, see for instance this article, which has been written when gold price was still much lower in 2021 than it is now: https://stockhead.com.au/resources/making-the-grade-what-to-look-for-in-gold-and-silver-drilling-results/
So the gold resource is 279k ounces. No, definitely not huge. No, definitely not a company maker. But given it's shallow depths that lend themselves to open pit mining and in one of the Top 3 mining jurisdictions in the world, it's likely they'll manage to monetize it as gold M&A heats up even more with the gold price ATHs and rolls down to the juniors (while for now you mostly have megadeals only like the Newmont takeover of Newcrest).
So 279k ounces. It's of course a wide distribution of what's paid for an ounce in the ground in M&A deals, but the absolutely most conservative estimate I find for inferred resources is 20$: https://munknee.com/how-to-value-a-junior-miners-gold-in-the-ground/
Note that the comments on it are crowded with info that this does not apply anymore in a 2000$+ gold price world and that Inferred ounces were valued as high as 80 or even 100$. But let's stay conservative and use the 20$ number. Alright, so that would mean if a company acquires Cobra's gold resources, even at this conservative valuation, that's 5.58 million USD, so 4.42 million GBP at current FX rate. In all likelihood any such deal would be for a considerably higher price, and not 20$ per ounce, at least if we go by the info in that link, if anybody has more accurate info, would be much appreciated.
Alright, so then Cobra right now at the 1.05p SP has a market cap of almost exactly 7m£, lets use the 4.42m£ conservative estimate for the gold, why not. Then that means you can currently buy shares in Boland prospects for 7m - 4.42m £ = 2.58m£.
You can like other resources better for their higher grade, for their nearer-term production start, but do you really think that with the scale prospect that Boland has now, that isn't a buy at 2.58m£ valuation for Boland?
Keep in mind that 2.58m£ val for Boland assigns a very conservative estimate for the gold resource value, and essentially throws in the uranium prospects in the new tenement adjacent to the Yarranna uranium deposit ( https://www.isoenergy.ca/portfolio/australia/yarranna/ ) and the REE prospect in Tasmania that is adjacent to the Deep Leads / Rubble Mound REE deposit ( https://www.abxgroup.com.au/site/projects/mineral-resources ) entirely for free.