RE:Drilling ResultsThe "benchmark" standard is Mountain Pass, which has about 18Mt of ore in the ground (despite having been in production for decades) at a grade of about 8% TREO. The thing about Mountain Pass is that over 80% of it is low-value cerium and lanthanum, leaving it with about 1.5% of the "good" rare earth oxides. At these levels the operation is only marginally successful and struggles a bit.
Appia's "most exciting" results from the Athabaska properties are showing similar properties, with some of the "good" rare earth intercepts in the 1.5%-2.5% range. If there was enough of it then it would probably be "ore", but if you look at the delineated area of the outcrops in the corporate presentation photo (slide 13) they are looking at an intrusion of about 100m by 150m. If you are really generous and assume that everything under the overburden is ore, and give it an average 20m of depth then it would calculate out to about 0.9 million tonnes. (In actual fact, you are probably more in the order of a couple of hundred thousand at best, but I am trying to be generous). To even stand a chance of a positive PEA you would need to be able to produce maybe 1500 tpd for 10 years, or 5.5 million tonnes. In other words, they have a good indication that there might be a system up there that produces "ore grade" intrusions, but they have not got an ore body, nor will they have one for some time. That is why they are in no hurry to talk about "tonnage estimates", but they need to keep looking.
The place that they do have ore defined is Elliot Lake. I have not looked at that closely yet.