Scandium International Mining Corp T.SCY

JK: SCY is dancing with RIO

[AllDutch1234567]

FT has an article about Rio TInto's new CEO, Jakob Stausholm. Towards the end after raising the task of making a decision on whether to fund its share of an iron mine in Guinea, it provides this observation:FT: While Stausholm thinks iron ore has a "tremendous future", he also wants Rio to be more proactive and "grab" opportunities in other metals and minerals created by the energy transition. This is likely to come through developing new projects, although small deals have not been ruled out.JK: Rio is already involved in the giant Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold project in Mongolia. It already owns the Alcan aluminum division. What "other" metals and minerals related to the energy transition are there that are worthy of Rio's ambitions which would be "new"? Lithium comes to mind. Niobium does not because CBMM has an unshakeable supply stranglehold on niobium which only allows extra bit players like Niobec and James Bay. Nickel is missing from Rio and is part of the energy transition but will always remain part of the macro economy as the key input for stainless steel. FPX Nickel has the scale to be interesting to Rio, potentially double if Van drilling this summer delivers a Baptiste clone. Plus Decar would have big ESG credentials. Keep in mind that the original Cliffs team was a group of ex-Rio people who first recognized the potential of Decar. The project is a lot more advanced today. Rare earths are part of the energy transition. The project would have to be big. Maybe Strange Lake goes from private hands directly to Rio which can throw money at the metallurgical challenges. It already operates iron mines in the Labrador Trough. Manganese? Already part of the iron supply complex, though a different style of deposit is needed to make electrolytic manganese which is turned into the manganese sulfate needed for batteries. But will manganese be a key input for the cathode that eventually is part of the battery technology winner? Cobalt is pretty much controlled by the Congo producers and everybody is trying to reduce its supply. But maybe Rio Tinto would acquire Clean TeQ's Sunrise nickel-cobalt project with the scandium by-product? Surely the acrimony created by Oyu Tolgoi is water under the bridge? Speaking of scandium, here is a metal that can play a very big role in the energy transition and Rio, which already owns an aluminum division, is starting to produce scandium at its Sorel-Tracy iron-titanium facility, with a theoretical 50 tpa SC2O3 extraction limit. The scandium space is owned by nobody. Rio Tinto doesn't need to sell pails of white powder. It will recreate an alloy division within Alcan, maybe even buy back Alcereco. So maybe @Montralblob is onto something with his speculations that SCY is dancing with Rio. Maybe the Juukan Gorge fiasco which ousted the prior CEO and brought in a new CEO from inside Rio at a time when the importance of ESG is growing and the Biden victory cements the clean energy transition regardless of who becomes president in 2024 is the impetus for a broader and greater forward looking attitude at Rio. If so, let's hope the SCY 45 percenters don't sell out the rest of us with a take the money and run deal.