parkave, to the best of my knowledge, the rail agreement is an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with a group called CCFB or CCFM. That's a joint venture between the world bank who are paying and a very large Indian construction company who are doing the building of the rail line. Both RIV and CVRD (not Xstrata) have agreements with this group and RIV's share is for I think 8 million tonne per annum. They look almost certain at this stage to be up and running well before CVRD so may get to have full use before CVRD get up and running. Someone I know who went to the site recently was amazed at the progress that has been made on the ground and felt that RIV could have a mine up and running maybe even late 2009 CY. CVRD are talking about 2013. Re barging, I'm not sure of the progress but if they can barge down the Zambesi the capacity would be for some 40 to 50 million tonnes per annum. There are visible signs there to be seen as evidence that barging would work. On the Benga license land there's a platform that was used as a loading facilty for coal in the 1970s and smaller barges can be seen going up and down the river. Barging was actually used to take all the machinery and equipment up the river for the construction of the giant Cabora Bassa dam, which is a hydro power plant about 200 km up river from RIV and has a capacity for 3000MW. So you can see that transport is not a major issue. Not all the coal will be transported of course as a % will be the lower quality thermal that would be used in the powere plant to be built. Hope this answers your question.
RIV Price at posting:
$8.45 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
