FRB definitely has a lot of potential sitting on Oakover with 64 Mt (@10%) Manganese mineral resource. The exploration of Oakover is definitely also relatively advanced as noted in the prospectus, but still very early in the overall project. As with all early mining projects, rewards are high, but risk are also high. As each successful milestones are reached, risks is lower and rewards can be realised, but it also goes the other way.
As was mention by
@8horse, two other manganese players are EMN and E25. If we look at these players comparatively in terms of the undertaking of preliminary studies on their main projects we can note:
- E25 has release a PFS on Butcherbird (May 2020) noting mineral reserves of 50.6 Mt @ 10.3%. They are also closest to start mining out of the 3 players (as noted by @BWinter) however still waiting on an DFS/FFS
- EMN released a PEA on Chvaletice (Jan 2019) with a target date to complete the PFS by end of 2021
- FRB noted in their prospectus that in terms of Oakover, "work will commence immediately" which includes "moving the project through a scoping study" (aka PEA)
For those new to mining, PEA is Preliminary Economic Analysis, PFS is Pre-Feasibility Study and DFS/FFS is Definitive/Final Feasibility Study. They are undertaken in this order with the last study giving the all important "traffic light" before mining begins. However, please note that there is not regulatory industry standard for these studies and will differ company-to-company making it a little more inconvenient for comparative purposes.@eternalrichez, to answer your question about what happened to Brumby Resources, they were merged with Marindi Metals (2015), then Marindi Metals were renamed Firefly Resources (2019) and finally Firebird Metals was demerged out from Firefly Resources. As to why Oakover has failed to progress to mining in all those years, I don't have any idea and it is definitely something worth looking into.
Always DYOR
