After fifteen years of drilling, sampling, metallurgy and regulatory work, Lofdal could soon join the handful of heavy-rare-earth mines outside China — projects like Browns Range in Australia, Nechalacho in Canada and Ngualla in Tanzania — that supply dysprosium, terbium and yttrium to global technology and defence markets.
The newly released Pre-Feasibility Study explains why Lofdal is moving into that league.
It confirms 58.5 million tonnes of measured and indicated resources grading 0.16% TREO, containing 93,730 tonnes of total rare earth oxides, including 4,503 tonnes of dysprosium oxide and 692 tonnes of terbium oxide.
Namibia Critical Metals — then Namibia Rare Earths Inc. — picked up the project more than a decade ago, when dysprosium and terbium were niche materials and supply chains were still treated as global rather than strategic. The licence they now hold, ML200, was granted in May 2021 for 25 years to 10 May 2046, and sits about 450 kilometres northwest of Windhoek and 25 kilometres northwest of Khorixas, linked to Walvis Bay by roughly 390 kilometres of main road.
The company owns 95% of the project through Namibia Rare Earths (Pty) Ltd, with 5% held by Philco 196 on behalf of Historically Disadvantaged Namibians.
Beneath that quiet landscape is the Neoproterozoic Lofdal Intrusive Complex, a series of structures and alteration zones where hydrothermal fluids altered the host rocks through albitisation and carbonatisation across an area roughly 20 by 10 kilometres.
Within those altered zones, the key mineral is xenotime, a heavy rare-earth phosphate and the primary host for dysprosium, terbium, and much of the yttrium. Over the past fifteen years, geophysics, mapping and trenching have gradually narrowed the targets to two core zones — Area 4 and Area 2B — with additional mineralisation identified at Area 5 and elsewhere along parallel structures.
From 2010 onwards, the work was methodical rather than spectacular.
By 2025, the company had completed 58,039 metres of drilling in 411 holes, enough to define a resource that can be reconciled with a pit shell and a plant.
At Area 4, mineralisation has been traced over 1,100 metres at surface, with an intensely altered core zone of 15–30 metres wrapped in a halo up to 100 metres thick. Area 2B carries a 600-metre strike length, with mineralised widths of 20–35 metres.
In all of these zones, xenotime appears as delicate veins and disseminations, making Lofdal a technically demanding but coherent heavy-rare-earth system.
On the back of that work, the new PFS draws a clean line between resources and reserves.
Total Proven and Probable Reserves stand at 32.01 million tonnes grading 0.176% TREO, split between 6.19 Mt Proven at Area 4 and 25.81 Mt Probable across Area 4 and Area 2B.
That reserve base will feed a 13-year open-pit operation designed to process 3.01 million tonnes of ore per year. The mine will be worked in 10-metre benches, with 2.5-metre flitches where selective mining and tighter grade control are required.
A mining contractor will perform drilling, blasting, loading, and hauling under technical direction from the owner’s team.
The plan is to move roughly 20 million tonnes of rock per year, at a life-of-mine stripping ratio of 6.8:1, with Area 4 averaging 6.4:1 and Area 2B 8.7:1. Of the ore, around 1.10 million tonnes per year of higher-grade material will report directly to the concentrator.
In comparison, 1.91 million tonnes of lower-grade ore will first pass through XRT sorting to upgrade the feed before flotation.
The PFS deliberately leaves space for satellite pits, such as Area 5, to be drilled out and used as “swing producers” to maintain steady plant feed.
The tailings facility has been sized to accommodate a mine-life extension if more reserves are converted later.
Much of the last three years has been about proving that this ore can be treated economically. In 2022, the company cut a 60 by 20 metre starter pit to 15 metres deep in the centre of Area 4, removing 30,000 tonnes of material and producing a 550-tonne blended sample at 0.18% TREO.
In early 2025, the starter pit was deepened to 17 metres, and an additional 15,000 tonnes of material were excavated. From that, 500 tonnes of bulk samples were prepared from five ore zones representing hangingwall, primary ore and footwall material.
The XRT programme became one of the most intensive rare earth sorting campaigns yet run on Namibian ore: about 300 tonnes of run-of-mine material were put through the upgraded TOMRA COM Tertiary XRT sorter at Gecko Namibia’s Ondoto plant in northern Namibia. Across roughly 200 test runs and 27 parameter settings, using both Dual Energy and Inclusion Detection algorithms, as well as TOMRA’s new OBTAIN and CONTAINTM deep-learning models, the test work improved on earlier results despite the fine-veined nature of xenotime.
On low-grade ore grading 0.10–0.17% TREO, the sorter achieved upgrade factors of 2.3–2.7× with 60–70% REE recovery — enough to justify a flowsheet in which low-grade ore is sorted before flotation.
The pilot work shows 94% dissolution of Dy and Tb during the bake, removal of thorium, scandium, iron, aluminium and some uranium with only about 2% HREE loss, and uranium stripped to below detectable levels with negligible co-extraction of rare earths.
The result is a high-grade heavy rare earth carbonate product — a Mixed Rare Earth Carbonate heavily weighted to yttrium, dysprosium and terbium.
Supporting this plant requires water and power, and those, too, are quantified.
Around 1.5 million cubic metres of water per year will be needed. Six high-yield boreholes drilled into the Fransfontein aquifer, 35 kilometres to the north-east, have tested at 237 m³/h over 48 hours of constant discharge, with a recommended abstraction of 180 m³/h, giving between 1.3 and 1.7 million cubic metres per year. The CAPEX to abstract, pipe and store this water is estimated at US$10 million.
Power demand is set at 94,361 MWh per year, to be supplied by the national grid via a new 200 km, 132 kV transmission line and a 20 MVA substation, supplemented by solar PV for roughly one-third of the plant’s energy. Bulk power infrastructure costs about US$29 million.
Over the 13-year life of the mine, the mine is expected to generate about 16 million tonnes of tailings, thickened to 46% solids and pumped into a cross-valley Tailings Storage Facility east of the central pit.
The TSF will initially have a 28-metre-high embankment built, with downstream raises using pit waste, then raised upstream to the final height. It is lined to reduce seepage, designed with underdrainage and recovery systems, and deliberately sized larger than needed to allow for a longer mine life should further resources be converted.
Tailings are described as silt with trace clay and non-acid-generating, but further geotechnical and radionuclide work is planned at the next design stage.
All of this infrastructure boils down to a single question: On that front, the PFS presents two distinct cases built on the same physical assumptions but with different price decks.
In the Base Case, using a basket price of about US$158/kg TREO (excluding La and Ce) and long-term oxide prices of roughly US$663/kg Dy₂O₃, US$2,880/kg Tb₂O₃ and US$60/kg Y₂O₃, Lofdal generates a pre-tax NPV (5%) of US$389.2 million and after-tax NPV of US$275.5 million, with pre-tax IRR of 21.7% and after-tax IRR of 19%.
Cumulative cash flow over 13 years is US$709.6 million pre-tax and US$513.1 million after-tax, and capital is repaid in about 4.2 years after tax.
In the Divergent Case, which assumes that export controls keep ex-China prices structurally higher — with average oxide prices of about US$855/kg Dy₂O₃, US$3,712/kg Tb₂O₃ and US$130/kg Y₂O₃, and a basket price of around US$230/kg TREO — the economics steepen dramatically.
Pre-tax NPV (5%) rises to about US$1.25 billion, with an after-tax NPV of US$747.9 million. Pre-tax IRR climbs to 44.1%, after-tax IRR to 34.8%, and payback shortens to about 2.75 years. Life-of-mine cash flows in that scenario reach US$2.03 billion pre-tax and US$1.24 billion after-tax.
The sensitivity analysis makes one point very clear: yttrium now drives the project’s leverage. Because yttrium oxide likely makes up 40–50% of Lofdal’s recovered oxide basket, and because European ex-China spot prices surged by up to 4,400% in 2025 to around US$270/kg, the NPV moves sharply with slight shifts in Y₂O₃ pricing.
Even at 85% of expected metallurgical recoveries, the Base Case still delivers a positive after-tax NPV; at 115% of design recoveries, the NPV rises significantly in both scenarios.
JOGMEC, the Japan Organisation for Metals and Energy Security, has been funding Lofdal through a structured earn-in.
The current joint venture terms give JOGMEC 40% of the project in return for C$10 million in expenditures across Terms 1 and 2, with a further C$10 million in Term 3 available to increase its stake to 50%. It can then buy an additional 1% for C$5 million and has the first right of refusal to fund the project to commercial production and purchase all output at market prices.
Namibia Critical Metals and the 5% HDS shareholding are protected from dilution below 26% through a C$5 million contribution, and NCMI may elect to hold up to 44% by funding pro rata after earn-in.
To date, C$17.445 million of the C$20 million earn-in budget has been approved and spent.
