| | | A couple of points... mostly about the market issues.
First is that the market (for high purity product) that exists now is small... in large part because customers can't grow a market for products they can't make, because there isn't a capacity to provide the supply to support the growth in manufacture of their new products... so there's a chicken and the egg issue in relation to the ability to grow the market to meet needs that develop with new uses, with growth being dependent on there being a supply to support the growth. Key among the things that would happen, if there were (low cost) supply sufficient to enable the growth... are uses in larger scale production of electronic components... capacitors being a key target. Currently, higher end capacitors are made with tantalum... but, using niobium instead would be a lot cheaper. However, CBMM owns 1/3 of the global tantalum market, and probably aren't keen on undercutting their much larger % profitability in the tantalum market by making available an adequate supply of higher quality niobium as a less expensive alternative that works just as well in many applications. And, its an open question whether they'd be able to do it while making it less expensive. Solving the purity problems at lower cost should enable rapid growth in replacement of the tantalum product with niobium substitutes, with pace limited by the tech development as niobium issues in those applications are resolved...
That does mean that to enable new opportunities in alternative market potential where you can grow customers in new niche's that aren't being addressed at all, now, or that aren't being addressed well by other competitors... you'll need to address their needs directly (and sell the idea to them)... and, at do that at the same time as you focus not only on meeting those new needs, as you'll need to find a way to produce and sell a product profitably from the start, so that you're not dependent on the new users and growth in the new markets to sustain the operations.
There is an element of "if you build it, they will come"... but you probably can't build it based on only that... However, when it exists... you'll also enable expanded development in other things that probably haven't been thought of yet, that aren't worth thinking about inventing and manufacturing now, as long as the supply isn't there to be available at prices that make it economically realistic.
Worth noting, also, that if you read the stuff out there on the history in the development and the path CBMM followed to become the first significant niobium supplier... these were issues they had to address, too... back when ferro-niobium for use in steel was still a new idea. How big was the total niobium market when CBMM started out ?
Second is that the (high purity) supply that is available now tends to be fractured and diffuse... so that most of the higher purity materials in the market now end up being made by chemical refining that is done in a lot of smaller labs in a lot of different companies. They start with whatever's available to them... and that means a market composed of many steps, with many processes tied to the many steps, not because they make sense from an economic or a processing perspective, but only because that's how the market is structured, currently. Apply the same idea as applies in ferro-niobium now, to make as much of that base material and the derivatives directly at the source... and it will lower costs, create efficiency, and enable growth that is supply and price limited currently... or otherwise limited by the market structure.
Third, is that same issues with cost and supply availability that apply in the future markets focus, also apply in the ferro-niobium markets. One way to obviate impurity issues limiting development and expanded % use in high end steel manufactured with ferro-niobium... is to make high purity ferro-niobium directly from high purity iron and high purity niobium... rather than trying to incrementally improve bulk grade products.
Fourth... the need in the high purity requirements doesn't end at 99%. Even if you have lower cost short-cut to the 99% pure material... the same things I've been saying generally still apply... that currently it will cost more to get to 99.90% pure than it costs to get to 99% pure.... and more still to get to 99.9999 etc.
So, you're not done at the first step in moving toward better end product purity... but just beginning. There can't be growth in really high value at very high end uses... until you get out past the 4, 5 or 6 nines you need to reach before it makes sense to think about using larger quantities in routine manufacture of semiconductor products...
The highest value products... cost the most to make... with the costs at that end dwarfing the mining and basic processing costs. Ultimately, what you want is a pairing of an intrinsically low impurity starting material... along with a processing scheme that gets you all the way to the highest value and highest margin in the ultra high purity products without process steps that end up introducing more impurities along the way.
I've not studied the issues at that limit well enough to say what makes sense and what doesn't... but, any new operation will have to consider that focus specifically as an issue in design of the early stages in processing...
That doesn't mean you can't develop more than one approach... so, if the small particle sizes have some benefits in lower intrinsic impurity loading... even is physical separations of them don't make sense to address them only for manufacturing ferro-niobium... it might still make sense to separate "some of" them... for other processing schemes at a smaller scale... that enable targeting particular needs at lower costs.
There will be lot of little specialty issue focus items that come up... as and when you focus on trying to absorb specialty chemical market suppliers markets, by dragging the higher end quality production tasks back closer to the mine face. To succeed in that... you're going to need more than a basic processing scheme, and will require a lot of expertise in chemical engineering and technical sales to even begin to sort out the opportunities. It will probably mean hiring a couple former IAG and/or CBMM employees... along with growing independent sources of technical expertise in R&D the local universities, etc.
Orbite Aluminum may not be the ideal model to follow in terms of the impact apparent there with "ready, fire, aim" problems in their development stage... but, they're still not bad models to consider in terms of the organizational requirement for "low skill" miners needing to become PhD level technical experts (and technical sales experts) in a wide range of processing and application development issues... which naturally comes paired as a requirement, as you work to drag more and more of the higher end in "value added" steps occuring in the after market back closer to the locus at the mine face... |
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