Street Talk

Standard Chartered gets golden ticket at Chalice Mining

Anthony Macdonald, Sarah Thompson and Kanika Sood

Feb 15, 2023 – 9.35pm

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Tim Goyder’s battery metals tearaway Chalice Mining has called in Standard Chartered’s metals and mining bankers, as it heads towards firming up the resource at its headline-grabbing Gonneville deposit in Western Australia.

Chalice Mining has Standard Chartered prepping a minority stake sale for Gonneville in the background.

Street Talk understands Standard Chartered has been chosen to run Gonneville’s minority partner search, which Chalice first flagged to investors back in October and hasn’t said much about since.

Sources said it was early days as far as the minority partner search was concerned - there’s no bids or even NDAs yet - but the investment bank that is big in Asia Pacific resources deals has already started working on the assignment. Its first task is to help Chalice’s executives prepare the process, including thinking about what the minority partner could look like and who could be a potential candidate.

The mining-hopeful and its bankers are expected to wait at least until Gonneville’s revised resource update, which should land before March end, before pulling the trigger on any official process. It makes sense that tyrekickers would want to see the (already delayed) scoping study as their weigh Gonneville’s potential.

Gonneville’s six saleable metals include copper, nickel and cobalt - all essential ingredients for battery-led decarbonisation push. Chalice’s first official estimates for the deposit in November 2021 earned rave reviews from several sell-side analysts, while its boss Alex Dorsch staked claim to the biggest discovery of “platinum group elements” in Australian history.

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