Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Axel REE (ASX:AXL), Non-Executive Chair Paul Dickson
Lel Smits: Axel REE is advancing its wholly owned rare earths portfolio in Brazil’s Minas Gerais, led by the district-scale Caladao project. Recent metallurgical results have confirmed strong recoveries of key magnetic rare earths, supporting the project’s potential to become a future low-cost producer. Ahead of TIP Group’s Emerging Wealth Winners Conference, I’m joined by non-executive chair Paul Dixon to outline how Axel Re is positioning itself within the global critical minerals supply chain.
Paul, welcome back to the Stock Network.
Paul Dickson: Thank you and it’s great to be here.
Lel Smits: Great to have you back on and keen to hear more from you because recent metallurgical results point to strong recoveries of key rare earths elements.
How do these outcomes change the trajectory of the Caladao project and also its potential to move toward production?
Paul Dickson: Yeah, well it really provides confidence to the board that with good metallurgical results that we can actually move towards trial mining and that would be our first step towards de-risking the project. Assuming the trial mining is successful then this would again add another stage of de-risking and confidence to the board to again progress to the next stage, which would be to put all of that data into a feasibility study and also concurrently run your mining and environmental approvals and that’s the next step towards production. Absolutely and while on production you’re advancing an in-situ recovery approach across multiple zones.
What are the key advantages of this method compared to traditional mining and also how do you think it could shape the project’s cost profile and scalability?
Paul Dickson: Certainly, so some of the key advantages are the capital intensity is much lower than competitors and you really only need to look at the Gerek mine in Malaysia which set up for 20 million dollars US admittedly say four or five years ago but when you compare that to the CapEx of some of the current rare earth Brazilian competitors who are out there it’s quite a stark difference. So the CapEx is certainly one major impact. The environmental footprint is minimal.
It’s still possible to have cattle grazing in the surrounding regions where we would be operating and mining. The time to production, it’s much quicker. You don’t have to construct a massive plant and equipment.
It’s certainly modular, it’s scalable and you can add well fields as you need and customers require them. It’s been proven at scale. It’s been operating in Asia since the 1990s and this is the method that China uses and they are the leaders.
They are the world leaders. So we’re using the Chinese global standard is the mining method that we would be using. Finally, the licensing and permitting is much less onerous and it would be much quicker than comparable methods.
Lel Smits: And Paul, finally expanding the resource and really the strategic upside here with the continued resource growth and also the addition of gallium, how significant is the broader opportunity emerging at Kalajau and also what milestones do you think investors should watch as you’re moving now towards pilot scale trials?
Paul Dickson: Sure. Countries in this environment that we’re faced with supply chain constraints and challenges with different countries becoming a little bit more protectionist, we’re seeing countries actually step up and secure a 50-year supply or thereabouts by actually buying into projects. I certainly think that that’s something that we will see ramp up.
It will get bigger and bigger and countries will secure a district scale resource. That’s what they want, something for 50 plus years and that’s certainly what we have. And we’ve got gallium and that’s something that most of our other competitors do not have.
Lel Smits: Absolutely. Well, I look forward to hearing more when you’re on stage at TIP Group’s Emerging Wealth Winners Conference in Sydney.
Paul Dickson: Certainly. I just wanted to add one thing is that what investors should be looking for coming up is the results of our column leach trials. They’re due soon, which we’re constantly improving the metallurgy and these are testing under in situ recovery standards. And as well as that, we’ll be doing infill drilling where we’re about to get in to do our trial mining.
And we’re going to lift our resource from inferred to indicated. So these are just some of the pointers that people should be looking for.
Lel Smits: Certainly a busy period coming up for you. And I’m sure you will have a very attentive audience when you’re on stage at the conference for TIP Group’s Emerging Wealth Winners.
Paul Dickson: Thank you very much.
Ends