afr today alloys gleam appetite grows

Article in AFR today all boads well for Moly Mines, should be nearing last opportunity to buy at current share price.

"Alloys gleam as strong steel appetite grows"

Demand for steel has driven up the price for the rare metals used to strengthen it, reports Carolyn Boyd.

As energy gets harder to find, major energy companies are buikliug more pipelines in remote areas. Those pipelines require a Jot of special steel to withstand conditions such as freezing cold — they need steel that
strengthened with rare metals.
That’s pushing prices up for metals such as molybdenum and tungsten, and driving Australian mioers to seek viable deposits.
In a scrubby outcrop of state forest in Victoria’s north—east, Dart Nlioinghas stumbled across what looks to he 8 promising molybdenum find.
The company bad been exploring for gold and happened upon the find while waiting for a late-arriving drilling rig to reach the site.
Until recently, molybdenum was mostly pulled out of the ground as
by-product of other mining activities, such as copper. The US, China and Chile are now the world’s biggest producers. About 60 per cent of molybdenum is used in steel production (35 per cent for constrnction steel and 25 per cent for stainless steel).
Demand is up and the price is
about $US33 ($37.9) a pound.
Dart Mining is racing to become Australia’s second primary molybdenum producer after Western Anstralia’s Moly Mines, which hopes to begin exporting the molybdenum in early 2013.
Dart’s Victorian site, south of CorEyong, appears to hold a deposit funneling up from several kilometres under the surface.
Continued
Luckyfind
• Dart Mining stumbled across its molybdenum find while exploring torgold.
• Until recently the metal
been a by-product of other mining such as copper.
• About6O percent of molybdenum is used in steel production.

Moly Mines’ east Pilbara deposit is low-medium grade that will be mined open-cut from a pit stretching a kilometre in each direction.
The Australian and Toronto stock exchange-listed junior explorer’s already putting together finance to cover the estimated $1.1 billion required to develop Spinifex Ridge, which it is billing as the world’s next major molybdenum mine. Moly estimates the site could have a life of 30 years-plus and it hopes to supply S per cent of the world molybdenum market once it’s up and running.
Earlier this month it announced
SPEB SOB
that it had authorised a North American financier to complete detailed due diligence with a view to making a loan offer of
SUS ISO million. Meanwhile, Dart is still at the
exploratory drilling stage and estimates that if the drill samples are as good as the initial surface exploration, it would be four to five years away from production.
Both are confident that they are onto a good thing.
“Molybdenum has become more valuable because of its special properties,” Dart chief executive John Qunyle says. “People are looking for oil and gas and of course
nuclear in situations that are much more stressful,” says Quayle. “So you’ve got pipelines in the Artic, you’ve got pipelines under sea, you’ve got high pressures, [ corrosive crude oils] and gases which eat out the steel. So all of these tend to weaken the steel and you’ve really got to add molybdenum to it to make it stronger and to be able to resist those conditions,” he said. “There’s very few other metals that you can add to steel to create those properties, so it’s got quite a demnnd.”China is one of the world’s leading producers of molybdenum. Moly Mines company secretary Andrew Worland says that as China
has needed to use more and more of its own molybdenum, particularly for its growing high-end stainless steel market, it has begun to restrict molybdenum exports. Worland expects that somewhere close to 2012-IS, China will become a net importer of molybdenum.
“The molybdenum market itself is looking very robust,” Worland says. “It’s an industry where there’s been very little investment over the last 30 years or so and as a result of that, there’s a lot of projects that are well behind us in terms of their ability to come online.”
Tungsten is another rare metal that is enjoying a market comeback
nfter big falls. An extraordinarily dense and heat resistant metal, tungsten is also incredibly hard.
its price has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to demand from China.
Vital Metals is drilling for tungsten at its Watershed site, 100 kilometres from Mareeba in north Queensland, and hopes to begin mining either late next year or in early 20i0.
Nearby, Queensland Ores recently reopened Wolfram Camp, which was shut down about 20 years ago. After a $30 million redevelopment, Wolfram Camp is being mined for tungsten and molybdenum.