General discussion, page-10087

While we all sit around twiddling our thumbs, I went back to look at the 'direction' of the company. Looking at the past announcements for hints of future, a little more than just doing more Mets and infill drilling. While all that is very important, it's not inspirational.

In the presentation for the cap raise they had a graph showing world production/consumption of Ferroniobium from 1965. Eyeballing that graph, in 1995 production was around 20,000 tonnes, rising to current level of around 100,000 tonnes, a growth rate of 5.8%/yr over those 29 years..

Assuming the same growth rate over the rest of this decade, the world will be requiring an extra 40,000 tonnes of Ferroniobium in 2030, plus we also know CBMM expects 35,000 tonnes of Niobium oxide for batteries by then. That's a total of an extra 75,000 tonnes of Niobium Pentoxide that needs to be mined by 2030, let alone the increase needed in the following 5 years as battery production ramps up further.

To me it means all the calculations we've all been doing on possible/probable production could be way under what's being talked about in back rooms, hopefully by management with big players in both the steel and battery world, which is why we are hearing nothing about actual plans for production. Everyone is trying to work out how big to go initially.

Assuming that all CBMM's forecasts for growth in the battery field are accurate, which I do as the performance gains for lithium batteries will far outweigh a small extra cost, then by 2035 another 30,000-50,000 tonnes of Niobium Pentoxide would need to be mined assuming just 20gms of Nb2O5/Kwh of battery. Plus the assumption that Niobium was in less than 50% of all batteries. This would be way in excess of what CBMM could cope with supply wise unless they kept expanding quickly. However far more likely to work with us IMHO so that we take up some of that demand, then CBMM do further expansion for demand of Niobium by 2035.

Now that we've had our MRE released, the discussions with different parties for future supply of Niobium would be happening thick and fast, which is why we don't have much in the way of 'plans' for what we are going to do. I would also expect when we do eventually get some solid future plans, whoever wants a significant supply will pay a very decent price for a chunk of the company as part of the overall deal. given the number of companies that would be after a constant supply, I'd expect many in competition, so the premium they would be prepared to pay to get the initial deal (and cheap shares in the long term) would be 'goodly'...

Given offtake partner/s and possibly 30,000-40,000t/a initial production, for 2028-30 (still with long mine life before MRE upgrades!!), then perhaps even we've been under sizing the realistic potential...

Oh well enough thumb twiddling for today....