Apologies for interrupting current conversation, but I decided to try and work out a 'high grade' part of the resource, by putting together all the intersections of over 2%, just to see what I'd get.
I ended up using a cut-off of 1.9% and ended up with an average grade of just on 2.5% Nb2O5. I get around 15-20 million tonnes at this grade, and of course most of it is fairly shallow, the mineralisation first encountered because that is where the most weathering happened to concentrate the niobium.
This would mean a 1 million tonne per annum processing rate at 80% recovery would give us 20,000 tonnes of niobium per year for over 15 years, before we would have to expand to a larger mine to access the lower grade, deeper ore body. 20,000 tonnes at $US45,000/tonne would make this easily the second largest Niobium mine, with revenue of $A1.36B/yr. (assuming we don't flood Niobium market).
By starting with the high grade ore and smallish mining plant, would make the capital cost of building it a much more viable proposition than every other contender. For example Niobec produces around 5,000t/yr, using a 0.4% ore grade from an underground mine, processing 2.4Mt/a.
Our mine will be opencut (and fairly shallow at that for the first 10-15 years!!), processing only 1mt/a and producing 15,000t/a even if recovery is only 60%. We are way cheaper than everyone except Araxa, and can process ore at as high a grade as Araxa for more than a decade (assuming they are still processing around 2.5%!!).
Those hoping for a $2B TO, you should be hoping for much more IMHO. When operating we will be a $10-15B Mcap company, and that's assuming we don't find a whole lot more mineralisation over the next few years...
Once we have the MRE and metallurgies, within the next year, then doing the feasibility studies, probably straight to DFS of BFS, the cash to build this will come very quickly, assuming we haven't allowed someone to take us over cheaply.
Even assuming dilution to 100M shares IMHO we will be worth over $100/sh when in production, higher with less dilution.
The real question for management is do they want to build and operate one of the world's premium mines, or are they going to be looking for offers??
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