Admittedly coming from a point of much ignorance about base...

Admittedly coming from a point of much ignorance about base metals, I reckon that the 121 presentation by the boss of Western Mines Group is one of the more remarkable presentations I've heard from a speculative mining junior. This company sits with a market cap of about $31m and yet is claiming that just a subset of its ground is enough to place it in the top ten of nickel sulphide resources globally. Already claimed to be capable of producing 40ktpa of nickel over a 50 year mine life, 2 hours from Kalgoorlie, marks the first subset as a tier one project destined to be operated by tier one mining companies. And the steak knives come in the form of the company thinking that they could have multiple deposits of similar scale. And all for a market cap of $31m.

So, what is missing from this story? or, more to the point, what am I missing? Two things immediately come to mind: an MRE; and, how easy is it to extract the nickel.

My basic understanding is that the bulk of this area the company is focusing on seems to be VERY low grade so there has to be lots of it and it needs to be really easy to extract for it to even begin to look like a viable project. Caedmon Marriott, the MD, said in the preso that maybe down the bottom of the deposit there might higher grade material (but like a kilometre down) and maybe just to the north of the main deposit there might be some much much higher grade material but both those maybes are at this stage no better than blue sky mining. So back to the very low grade stuff with the maiden MRE due out by no later than August. Can't recall when the metallurgical testing moves out of their home lab but I guess those results will also be crucial to this story.

While I'd happily take for Western Mines to have a similar market cap to what Chalice currently has I'm not sure Chalice is that great an analogue for Western Mines as Chalice also has copper while from what I can gather Western Mines is all in on nickel which makes the Mulga Tank deposit fundamentally more risky. And I'm not naive enough to think that every kid winning track events at school can go on to compete in the Olympics: the last potential tier one mining project I chased ended up in a fire sale to the Chinese. Tier One mining projects are like hen's teeth for many good reasons. And as CM said at the start of his preso, he is an enthusiastic geologist making a lot of forward looking statements. But even taking all those provisos into account I come away from the presentation with what Caedmon said at the end of his preso: that WMG wants to change people's lives.