Juniors: Arrow Minerals:The last mid-tier iron ore producer...

Juniors: Arrow Minerals:
The last mid-tier iron ore producer built in the Pilbara was Atlas Iron under the leadership of the ever-bustling David Flanagan.
Atlas was acquired by Gina Rinehart in 2018, by which time Flanagan had long left the company. But he still gets excited by what a junior can achieve in iron ore.
His excitement level is maxing again thanks to the potential for his new vehicle to pursue iron ore riches, Arrow Minerals (ASX:AMD), to kick goals at its Simandou North project in Guinea.
As its name implies, the project is just to the north of the $US26 billion and counting development by Rio Tinto and Chinese interests of the iron riches of the Simandou mountain range, the world’s biggest undeveloped high-grade iron ore deposit.
Arrow has only recently rolled up the drilling rigs on to its ground and it is fair to say that first drill results targeting the host banded iron formation (BIF) on its ground did not excite the market.
But it is early days yet with Arrow acknowledging that it was still trying to establish some basic geological facts such as the orientation of the mineralisation. So it was no surprise that Arrow has come back from its recent highs to 0.4c in Thursday’s market for a $40m market cap.
It might be baby out with the bathwater sort of treatment though as there is some excitement around the potential for Arrow to work up a near-term production opportunity from the extensive canga style (alluvial or detrital) iron ore on its ground (the style is part of Simandou’s resource base).
Importantly, before spending too much on drilling for canga, Arrow first conducted some metallurgical testwork that indicated the material could be upgraded by around 8% by simple crushing and screening.
This could well put the canga in reach of the 58 per cent Fe material as a direct shipping ore product, which is the sort of stuff Chinese steelmakers will eat all day, every day.
It’s why Arrow has rolled up some canga-focussed drill rigs at the project in addition to those drilling away on the BIF targets.