3 Proton Lithium - Nice Try, Probably No Cigar

There's also true lunacy here

So we’ve this announcement:

3 Proton Lithium Inc. (3PL) today released the updated Resource Report for its Railroad Valley Minerals Project in Nye County, Nevada, confirming measured resources of multiple world-class critical minerals in a single salt complex. The findings include a discovery of an inferred tungsten resource of approximately 1.78 million tons, more than five times the largest tungsten resource currently listed in the United States, a Tier I critical mineral the country has not mined commercially since 2015.

And, well.

Tungsten. 1.78 million tons of inferred tungsten, a Tier I critical mineral the United States has not mined commercially since 2015 and now imports amid Chinese control of the global market.

Is the tungsten there? Well, I don’t know, obviously, but OK, let’s run with it it. Wouldn’t be a surprise if it is anyway. I’d hesitate to call it a resource myself, even that weakest form of inferred, as we’ve no knowledge on extraction costs as yet. But, well, OK.

But we can run by analogy. For there’s something similar over at Searles Lakes. No, no, you’re right, it’s not exactly the same. But we do know that extraction of tungsten - as a byproduct - from that process stream is possible. Costs about $5 a lb in 1984 money - $17 in modern, call it $40 a kg today - to extract. And current tungsten costs are in the $70 to $80 per kg range (which is about what $700/MTU comes to). Down, a lot, from recent absurd highs. And, well, when you’re planning you’d probably like to see more of a gap there between production and sales price. Especially in something so obviously under political pressure as tungsten. And, you know the tungsten price dropping as it is as people realise the political pressure might not last and so on.

Or even, everyone realising there’s an awful lot of tungsten out there at $300 a kg - a recent price - and therefore tungsten’s not going to stay at $300 per kg.

Oh, and Searle Valley has just gone bust. In fact, up for auction in Chapter 11. Even better, if we did add the extraction to Searles then the revenue would be of the $30 million a year sort of range. Which is nice, definitely, but just not the sort of thing that moves the dial on a large scale brines project.

But all of that’s true enough, it’s this bit that’s absolute lunacy:

Together, the resource represents an estimated $3.5 trillion in gross in-ground value

That’s insane. It’s not an unusual form of claim but it is insane.

For what they’ve done is added up the value of all the metals and fun stuff they claim is in there, at the extracted, purified, marketed price. Without any of the costs of extraction, purification or marketing. The actual value of the deposit is what’s extracted after the costs of extraction, of course. Do it any other way and we get idiocies like claiming the North Sea’s worth $5 trillion for the gold in it. The gold is there too - it’s just likely to cost $20 trillion to get it out. The in-sea value of the N Sea for gold is thus minus $15 trillion, not plus $5 trillion.

Which is how they’ve calculated this “gross in-ground” number.

Complete insanity.

But then junior mining companies, eh?