Ann: ACQUISITION OF HIGH-GRADE ARAXA NIOBIUM PROJECT, page-55

I wonder if any of the rampers here know how to read a map, like the ones presented by SGQ, not bothering to show the huge tailings dam on the Eastern tenement which would prohibit any mining there, unless they could move many millions of tonnes of tailings..

Of course the question is do these tailings have high REE that could be mined..

One problem with the Araxa mine is high thorium levels around 1200ppm, so radioactivity is a problem with old tailings and the ore in general. CBMM had to introduce extra processing in the late 60's to early 70's to remove the high thorium levels that were in the concentrates they were selling at the time..

Do the high thorium levels transfer through to REE concentrates?? or will extra processing be needed??

With the East effectively closed off because of the tailings dam, the map on pg 7 shows where the past drilling has been, please note the scale. The area of high grade is around 200m long by 100m wide at best. There are a lot of yellow dots which are outside the high grade area, less than 10mX grade Nb2O5 and similar low REE would be my guess.. Pity they didn't include grades for these areas!!

Given the number of closely spaced drilling already, with lots of those yellow dots controlling where the high grade mineralisation is, it looks similar to ENR's find of 'some' rich weathered carbonatite as a fissure off the side of the main intrusion.

With carbonatite it's the weathered sections we are after for mining as they have the high grade from the intrusion being weathered over time with the valuable minerals concentrated remaining in place. The fresh mineralisation is a lower grade, and we already know this from CBMM's on deeper drilling.

As it's from surface, and prior diamond drilling was only to 50m, it's a pretty good assumption the best mineralisation is in this first 50m or so.

Notice the 2 cross sections are closer to parallel than being at 90 degrees to each other, the way normal cross sections are shown. It probably because a proper perpendicular cross section across strike would show how narrow this fissure is...   

Even assuming it's 100m wide by 200m long (remember the east is cut off by the huge tailings dam!!) times 100m deep, with the density being around 1.8g/cc, it's only a few million tonnes...

BTW anyone seriously thinking of this, go and read the PEA from VENMYN RAND (PTY) LIMITED in 2011-12 on this very project.. Only needed $US416M in capital back then for phase 1 of mining..

https://itafos.com/site/assets/files/1773/itafos-araxa_technical_report_final-.pdf

If anyone thinks they are going to get more than what Itafos worked out for ore quantity/quality, then I have a bridge on Jupiter you might be interested in buying....

With over 2.5B shares coming soon, this is a great opportunity for some to sell quickly and reduce their losses while the SP is up a bit.