questions re botswana, page-2

Mike (our man in ZA) - firstly, how are the punters there responding to the news of Malema's expulsion from the ANC, and sacking as head of ANCYL?

I have no geological expertise, so can't really help you decipher the Botswana info. However, this post from Psi81 from 3/2/2012 may assist:

The problem here is going to be ash. Some of the coal in these Botswanan basins are quite clean, but others (AFR and NMR particularly) were probably more towards the basin margins and have had a lot of sediment inflow, resulting in high ash. I've already said before that those photos don't look great and I also don't like the references to "interbedded coal and carbonaceous mudstone" or "coal-bearing carbonaceous zones."

Hopefully there will be some clean seams in there. A single 5m seam of clean coal, say <15% ash, 50m below the surface is more worth chasing than 2Bt of NMR's stuff at depths >100m. It just all comes down to "how clean is the cleanest thick seam?"

Rank-wise the coals seem to be okay. So moisture or energy content of the clean coals is not the problem (unlike say EER or MOU). Even if EER/MOU coals are low ash they will never be high energy export thermal. But CCC's Botswanan coals can be if they can find an area of low ash.

If not, they should have a project pretty similar to NMR or AFR - huge tonnage but stranded and requiring a railway, a huge open-cut operation and a huge wash plant to produce a saleable export product. Multi-billion dollar capex in other words.

As an aside, when I read "coal mineralisation" it's the geological equivalent of somebody running their nails down a blackboard. :) Coal is not a mineral! It's like an oiler saying they struck "significant oil mineralisation." (what's the bet someone replies talking about coal mineralisation just to annoy me... :P)

Anyway. If CCC can prove up a resource that the market values them at 5c/t or so, I'll consider that a good outcome. At 2Bt that would be an extra $100M MC. Which seems to be roughly in line with AFR?

....

from page 7 of asx ann today:

"Preliminary results from the exploration program have indicated that the diamond drilling has intersected major coal bearing carbonaceous zones. Drilling on PL340/2008 on the north-western boundary of the license has indicated a coal mineralised strike length of approx. 20km and confirms previous historical results from exploration programs completed in the 1980s."