By Matt Birney
Copyright brisbanetimes
However, for all its international posturing, the Trump administration would do well to take a look at little old WA if it is serious about securing long-term supplies of rare earths outside of China.
‘Approving the Jupiter pilot and appointing GAVAQ is a key step on our ‘scale, simplicity, speed’ roadmap.’Critica Limited managing director Jacob Deysel
One WA company that is laying its ears back in the rush to get a piece of the action is ASX-listed Critica Ltd. If Trump just opened the hood at Critica, his business brain would start working overtime.
Critica’s clay-based Jupiter resource, within its broader Brothers project in WA, has an almost biblical scale 1.78-billion-tonne rare earths resource going a very respectable 1650 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxides (TREO). Just the high-grade core within that global resource of 520m tonnes grading 2169ppm is world-class and would rival most others.
Perhaps more important is the sheer scale of the “magnet” resource within that global resource. The four most lucrative of the 17 or so rare earths are those used in electric motor industrial magnets. They are neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium – and Critica’s Jupiter deposit has plenty. In fact, 23 per cent of the global resource is magnet-based. Despite its huge grade and big deposit, not even MP Material’s Mountain Pass mine deposit achieves that number.
