In response to Juniorex13 who posted a snippet from an old Winsome presentation showing the maiden MRE is to come out this calendar year...
This is what was in the presentation of 30 August this year.
In the New World Metals presentation in Sydney towards the end of September Chris Evans was clear that the maiden MRE will be released in 2024, and that he was expecting it to happen either in January or February. He said that several analysts had told him that they had crunched the numbers and on existing assay results they estimated that Adina's MRE stands at around 50 Mt, which CE thinks is there or thereabouts. His indicated that 50 Mt MRE just crosses the threshold for being a viable project in Quebec and pointed out how the Cygnus (CY5) share price got trounced after they released a 10 Mt maiden resource at their Pontax project (which is near Allkem's James Bay project). Actually also that the Cygnus insiders got greedy soured the mood as well imo. CE expects that the 50km drill program being run in the latter part of 2023 should drag the maiden MRE up over the 100 Mt mark, putting it in with the likes of Corvette and Allkem's James Bay project. There is a poster drenching the WR1 threads with talk of Adina resources being north of 300 Mt. From what I've heard that is BS. As I said CE was talking about 50 Mt then 100 Mt and that was it.
Onto another point: In the just released 2022-23 Annual Report Winsome has a section on material business risks. Good stuff. But I have to say the identified risks are fairly generic or boilerplate. if I were to have had input to that analysis I would have suggested they also include two more risks that are more specific to Adina: permitting and access.
Regarding permitting, a regulator is only as good as the last application they processed and the body that assesses the environmental and social applications from lithium miners in Quebec, which goes by the acronym of COMEX, took 5 years to process the application for the Critical Elements' Rose project and 5 years and counting for Allem's James Bay project, and the time started from when the applications were formally lodged (and I don't think Winsome has lodged their application for Adina yet). CE is right that COMEX is open about their processes but the fact is that being open hasn't encouraged COMEX to pull their bureaucratic fingers out.
Here is a link to the COMEX website for those of you who wants to see "open but slow" in action (so to speak). Anyone who thinks they can condense a permitting process from 5 years to 2 years doesn't have much experience with the bureaucratic mindset.
Regarding access, the snow road Winsome intends to build this calendar year and the all-weather road they intend to build next calendar year are for the development stage of Adina. Both roads will head north about 70 km to meet up with the Trans Taiga Highway and will be sufficient for limited traffic, workers, equipment, supplies and the like. However for the production stage of Adina the numbers would seem to insist they head south, down Route 167 (or Road 167) to the railhead at Chibougaman rather than going north on Route 167 and then west then south on the Trans Taiga Highway to the railhead at Matagami. By my back-of-the-coaster doodles I reckon road hauling Adina product to the Matagami railhead via the Trans Taiga Highway is a trip of a bit more than 900km whereas hauling Adina product down Route 167 is "only" a bit more than 500 km. And then either way there is another 5 or 6 hundred km by rail to the planned downstream facilities. By way of comparison the haul from Kathleen Valley to the Port of Geraldton, all by road, is about 680 km.
Of course the fly in the ointment with sending Adina product south on Route 167 is that much of that road does not exist yet. There are plans to connect the existing road that ends at Renard up to the Trans Taiga Highway to the north. The entity pushing for this work is called the La Grande Alliance and they have it as a phase 2 project which is being looked at in a pre-feasibility study: in other words there's a bunch of infrastructure projects ahead in the queue so work will not start on extending Route 167 anytime soon.
Here is a link to their website. The good news is that Route 167 was extended as far north as it was so as to service a planned diamond mine at Renard. I would expect one of the purposes of the MOU Winsome has with Loyal is to combine the lobbying for the extension of Route 167 be constructed sooner rather than later.
Below is a mud-map of the region. The Adina project is probably just above where the diamond 8 sign is, in the top right of the map and the two railheads are down the bottom, highlighted in yellow. The east west road up the top is the existing Trans Taiga Highway, the north south road on the left is the Jimmy Diamond Highway, and Route 167 is the north south road on the right of the map.
And here is a snippet from a La Grande Alliance study brief. I highlighted where the Renard Diamond Mine is, in the centre, and circled where I think Adina is (about 70 km south of the intersection with the Trans Taiga Highway).
(20min delay)