Also, thanks for all the good work you guys do.

MICHIGAN CONGRESSMAN PETERS TOURS
GREAT WESTERN TECHNOLOGIES INC. PLANT IN TROY, MICHIGAN

http://www.gwmg.ca/html/media/news/index.cfm?ReportID=203370

Cheers

The UK government (and probably most others) has virtual no knowledge or understanding of the role of strategic metals, despite hearings like the one yesterday, so I think there is a vanishingly small chance that they would be _that_ proactive in terms of getting involved in the supply chain. Much of the discussion yesterday actually focused on mining for metals in the UK, which in my mind is just daft (with the possible exception of tungsten mining). Finding sources of metals is not the problem…. perhaps working to help develop those that we know about (if such help is needed) – that’s where the effort needs to be focused, I think…

Hope you are well. I think you grew up in the UK, so I’m sure it comes as no surprise that a 2 hour session managed to come up with no conclusions other than to look at the issues further and from a European perspective.

Must be quite frustrating to have had your submission ignored. It’s quite frustrating living in England at the moment to be honest, economy is a mess. Do you think the government have considered approaching Great Western Minerals to purchase a stake in Less Common Metals, seeing as it’s in Birkenhead and would at least give them a foot into the market? Or perhaps having a look to see if there are any REEs in the UK (do you know if any work has been done around this?) Or sell half the public stake in RBS and distribute the funds into shares of some of the junior-REE miners, I’d be happy to suggest some. Obviously these are just random ideas, but you get my drift. Sitting on our hands will not give us access into this market.

Ok rant over, thanks for another interesting article.

Only projects with a 43-101, JORC or similar resource estimate, or a historically operating mine + reliable data, were included in the lndex. To my knowledge, Iron Hill / Powderhorn and Deep Sands do not fall into either of those categories. In addition, we deliberately excluded projects that were not at least partially funded by private enterprise, though one could argue that this is a somewhat more arbitrary criterion than the others. When it comes to Dong Pao, I’ve not yet seen a code-compliant resource definition, but there could well be one out there, and if there is I would certainly consider adding it to the Index.

I was careful to state for each of the projects in the Index, the type of estimate noted – if you visited the Index page, and clicked on the names of the projects, in the window that appears you can see that each part of the estimates is noted as being either Inferred, Indicated or Measured, when it came to resources, or Proven or Probable when it comes to reserves (the portion of established resources that are economically mineable) I don’t know where the figure of 4.5 Mt for Mountain Pass comes from; I used Molycorp’s own figures for Proven & Probable Reserves, published in November of last year, during a webinar, although those definitions are per SEC Guide 7. They do also have a 43-101 compliant resource estimate which shows Measured, Indicated and Inferred resources of approximately 2.08 Mt of TREOs – but this would include the portion previously described as reserves, too. If you want to be absolutely sure, you might want to contact Molycorp directly.

I hope that this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions on this.

I was wondering why you didn’t include the Iron Hill/Powderhorn project in the advanced-rare-earth-project-index, as according to the USGS it is a potential source for REE (http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2009/1005/). Also the Deep Sands project (US) and Dong Pao (Vietnam) are not included, but there is information available about these two mines.

Another very important thing to clarirfy is whether the numbers mentioned in the TMR-RE-project-index are ‘resources’ or ‘reserves’ ? For example information about the Mt. Pass is really diverse, as Oakdene Hollins Report (2009) and Roskill state that proven resources are 4.3 Mtonne REO, but the TMR-RE-index suggested only 1 Mtonne REO. Can you confirm that the number used in the TMR-RE-Index are all resources (the physical amount of REO in the ground, not taking into account any kind of economic feasibility)?

As I am working on my Msc thesis about REE, this would really help me out. Thanks!

Best regards,

Sander