Nice work. I still think it would be NPV positive to concentrate further, but that would could occur in parallel with DSO shipping until a concentrator plant is commissioned and operating at nameplate.
If it's a temporary ore sorter needed for a few years for a cheaper setup, I'd be enquiring about what E25 are doing with their optical ore sorter if they do indeed do an expansion + upgrade to a larger DMS system over the next year. I've no idea whether it would be the model required, but on good days it has exceeded 1,000t/day of successfully sorted product (to date their daily record is 1,251 tons) and was intended for feed product volumes of 1Mt/yr. If ESS was a serious buyer they would likely be able to take a truckload of crushed ore up to butcherbird and test it. That said, if you were to ship 400kt of ore at perhaps a margin of $600+, that would be $240m of EBITDA so the economics would work to buy the best not cheapest model. I can tell others that if ESS had $240m of near-term EBITDA its market cap wouldn't remain at half that ($120m), no need to tell @Pete2019 because he's already realised that.
On the subject of E25, their 3 December 2020 study noted the receipt of transport offers ranging from 7c/ton km to 9c/ton km for the road truck haul up to Port Hedland. Essential Metals is 275km north of Port Esperance. If 10c/t is used as an estimate for ESS road train transport, ESS could be looking at "only" $28/t to truck the DSO ore to port. Even if it was 20-50% more than that, it won't kill the economics at current Spod prices.
As a very minor point (because its ball-park right), I'm trying to understand where 5.333 came from. 6%/1.4% = 4.286 and 4.286/.75 = 5.714.
ESS Price at posting:
46.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
