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Tawana digs in at Bald Hill

Some highlights:

Mining of the company’s Bald Hill lithium-tantalum project will begin this month ahead of the planned first concentrate shipment in the March quarter.

“It’s been tremendously quick,” Calder- wood told Paydirt.

“A year ago, we hadn’t even started drilling. It’s probably going to be one of the quickest development projects in West Australian history, from the start of drilling to production.

Design of the lithium DMS cir- cuit was about 80% complete at the time of print, with concrete and steel works well advanced and bulk earthworks nearing completion. Administration buildings were also in position, along with the communication towers.

The preferred mining contractor was due to mobilise on site late last month.

Tawana will soon release an updated reserve for Bald Hill, having announced an upgraded resource of 18.9mt @ 1.18% lithium and 149 ppm tantalum last month, representing a 47% increase in contained lithium.

“The next step of course is to increase our reserves, which is what people are really looking for. We’re infill drilling at the moment and we’ll start doing some optimisation work soon to see what indi- cators we have to be able to increase the pit with a bit more engineering.

“It converts very well to reserves. The last bunch of indicated resources con- verted at 94% conversion rate, so I would expect a not dissimilar number. It just comes down to doing the work.”

Calderwood is anticipating further off-take deals with Hong Kong-listed group. “They want everything we can pro- duce, they want more if we can produce more and there will be some news flow out on that soon,” Calderwood said. “The amount of inquires we’ve had from other people has been quite impres- sive, but we’ve got the one off-take and we’re happy with that at the moment.”

“It’s going to be a solid margin busi- ness,” Calderwood said. “Shareholders should be looking forward to a dividend in the next few years, I would hope, given the payback on the project is so quick.”