For those that are interested, the public consultation phase of the Bolivar approval closed on Friday, the next stage is that RNU needs to produce a 'Response Document', screenshot below from Plan SA. So the ball is back in our court.
In my mind this should be a fairly simple thing to do, i mean seriously, how many meaningful 'public comments' would we have received? I'm thinking none. But in my experience with RNU, everything seems to take much longer than i think it should, we do like to dot every 'I' and cross every 'T', which is a good, but slow, practice.
The decision from the Salisbury City Council was essentially a fast track of our proposal, they accepted it and gave the council CEO authority to approve it and submit it to the Minster,
without it needing to come back to the council for review again. This is certainly a win for RNU.
Now for a bit of speculation, my reading of the tea leaves makes me thing we are going to get a 'super' BOA announcement that will include bringing forward the PSG plant construction at Bolivar. I think the reason we haven't had a BOA for graphite concentrate is because we are not planning on selling any/much, i think all our concentrate will be going to Bolivar to be turned into PSG. The BOA when they come will be for PSG. The evidence that has formed my opinion is:
- Submission of the approval for Bolivar now, doesn't make sense if we are not planning on building it for years. It only makes sense if we are building it soon. Applying for approval years before it is needed just risks having to do rework when plans change.
- Signing a lease for Bolivar makes no sense if we don't need it for years, why pay for something we don't need for years?
- Building of the PSG demo plant now, makes no sense. What is the hurry to spend the money if we only need it to validate the PSG plant design? Also, we have had to mine some graphite and send it to China and back to get it turned into concentrate in order to get the demo plant up and running. Why didn't we just wait until Siviour is producing concentrate and use that as the feedstock, it would be cheaper?
The only way all the above
does make sense is if we are planning on building the PSG plant at the same time as the mine site.
The bit that worries me, is that we don't have enough money to build the PSG plant, we have finance sorted for the mine site and the PSG demo plant, but not the full PSG plant. DC has been clear he will not borrow too much as to endanger shareholders if there is a drop in graphite prices, and he won't do a massive capital raising and wipe out existing shareholder. So the only think left is a government grant, my guess here is that there will be a bit of all 3, borrowing, capital injection and grants.
Happy to hear anyone that thinks i am wrong, but please tell me why you think I'm wrong too.
