I am continually surprised by the RNU fanclub. They seem to have bought hook, line and sinker that the important metric for Graphite is the proven and probable reserves and failed to understand that frequently graphite resources are large meaning only a small proportion of the resource needs to be drilled to proven and probable status to get an economic life of mine. Drilling beyond this at an early stage is wasted money.
To understand the size of the graphite reserves you need to also look at inferred. RNU are unlikely to include inferred resources in any presentation it ever publishes because that would require including SYA's 1,422Mt resource. It would make RNU's 87.4Mt look tiny. It would also clarify the problem isn't a shortage of graphite, its a shortage of graphite with attributes that make it readily purefied and with a good distribution of large flake sizes because they sell for more. With many thanks to @Balduran who has shared his expertise and also previously posted a table showing 10 named projects with 100Mt or greater resources (One of which is EGR's Epanko resource).
One RNU fanclub poster recently stated "RNU's focus primarily is to process their world class Australian resource as most cost effective and efficiently possible." Presented below is my attempt to get a like for like comparison of the graphite resource. For simplicity I've just focused on volume and grade. If RNU has a world class resource, the Epanko's is even more world class. Yes there's been a few problems getting it operational, but its as good, if not better!!
If just proven and probable reserves are compared, RNU is around 3x the resource of Epanko. This is because RNU have drilled 58-59% of the resource to P&P while Epanko's P&P drilling is about 10% of the total resource. Epanko's drilling is enough to have a good mine life which can be extended later. If EGR wanted, they could do sufficient drilling to have a 100 year mine life, but there's no point in doing that now. Those drilling dollars can be kept for later.
RNU uses a 2.3% cut-off for their resource, which is fair as they presume the economics work at that grade. To be comparable, Epanko's resource should be stated with the same cut off. Interpreting from the grade-tonnage chart below, Epanko is about 175Mt @ 6.1% for contained graphite resource of about 10.6Mt (60% larger). If contained ore figures are aligned at a 5% cut-off Epanko is 35% larger.
EGR also has further resource size upside in Merelani-Arusha (17.7Mt @ 6.5 TGC for 1.15Mt contained)
EGR Price at posting:
57.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
