SYR Charts, page-2022

The most comparable company outside of China would be Etablissements Gallois which is a family company with mines in Madagascar. Being a family company, you can't get much out of them. Richard Song from Gallois said at the Benchmark Minerals webinar they intend to start producing just under 500kt/yr of concentrate from their 3 mines by next year. Mainly large size flake though and I have no idea if it is cheaper to process large size flake. The other produces ex china are all 30kt or less so pointless trying to compare.

Balama has never been anywhere near full production (30kt/mth or 90kt/qtr) so we don't really know how low we can go. Obviously feed plant grades and recoverable rates have a large bearing on costs. Also we're at 96% staffing levels with the plant barely running at 50% capacity preparing for when it is at 100%.

One of the biggest costs is transporting the graphite to Nacala. Mozambique have 3 unconnected railway lines running west to east towards the ports. They have plans to build a North/South line down the entire country linking them but Africa runs on its own time so don't hold your breath. It's planned to go through Montepuez which is 60km away by road.

They have updated google earth 19/09/2019. The bare patch east of the processing plant next is the sight for the 2nd pit or the patch just south. I'd have to go back and look at some of the vids on youtube.