80 cents by december...., page-124

these were Vertigo's calcs (per post this thread 29.1.11) on BM's profit potential at $55/mt break even point for a CHTD plant next door to the Maddingley Mine:

'the most conservative numbers I have crunched just for the BM project, using $115/mt coal price, $55/mt break even, a smallish 12mt/pa plant to start with and Tata Energy have an offtake agreement for 8mt/pa from 2014. It is a 50/50 JV so that means 6mt/pa could be Mantles. So the bare minimum for the BM project alone by my calcs would be $360m/pa profit. Of course it is likely that it would be a 24mt/pa operation and the coal price is likely to be higher. Then of course there are ST cash flows possible from MT Mulligan and longer term mammoth sized numbers from LV.'

another thing that strikes me as odd about MNM's big SP run in January/February 2011 is that you would have expected a capital raising to get another $7 million or so in the bank to fund a project like BM while it was the ASX flavour of the month. You would normally expect to see a company with a 20c share price, but little cash, (as MNM were in January) look to issue say 5 million shares at 15c by a broker placement, or spp.

Such a placement would have been eaten alive in January or February. but the board of MNM didn't do such a CR? the only possible reason I can think of is that they know they are already fully funded going forward as a result of the exergen JV - either through internal funding via exergen's heavyweight owners - or external finance - and so were not interested in any further dilution. either way, it shows a lot of confidence in their go forward financial position.

I still think the long term plan here is for exergen itself to reverse takeover MNM after the BM project unlocks world scale markets for CHTD. exergen are calling the 50tph plant to be built at BM a 'demonstration' plant for a reason - it will be the global sales HQ for the exergen process.

Ian Kraemer would be the natural CEO of 'exergen ltd'. a cynic would say that is the whole reason he was parachuted into MNM from within the exergen project in the first place. The exergen backers, TATA, Itochu, Sedgman and Thiess have probably put $30 million + into the exergen project to date. A float of exergen would unlock the value of that investment potential if BM is a proven success.

It seems obvious that the indonesian coal that is referred to in MNM ann's as having also be sucessfully processed at Beaconsfield comes from TATA's huge brown coal tenements there. Indo will likely be the first venue outside Oz for a commercial scale CHTD plant. Tata will take that product as well. If mnm and exergen do merge, then MNM holders will be part of a global brown coal revolution.

Sell MNM? No thanks.