Nickel is currently priced at $14,000 per tonne. Amur Minerals CEO Robin Young tells us there is tremendous demand coming for nickel not yet reflected in the price, with 2 million tonnes consumed currently and a 50% increase to three million expected over the next seven years, mainly for use in electric car batteries, with a move away from more expensive Cobalt, which costs $85,000 per tonne.
Robin tells us that Amur Minerals have 155 million tonnes of nickel sulphide deposits, the third largest undeveloped deposit in the world. And that unlike most explorers, they intend to take that into production for themselves. The CEO is hesitant to call it 'world class' as they aren't yet in production, but believes that it will be a top-ten world class deposit for that commodity. It will also be highly profitable.
"We would currently make 4$ per pound profit for every tonne of ore we mine and process, which makes us between bottom quartile and the level above currently in terms of cheapest production". "There's a challenge, no doubt about it, but we are staying the course and plan to place the project into production. There's a long term strategy in this. Somewhere along the line we anticipate somebody will come along and we will consider a joint venture, and we would take that to our shareholders for approval."
Next steps are to build a mill and a 350 kilometer road to get materials to a rail head, which then links to the port of Vladivostock and then by sea to the three largest consumers of nickel, Japan , Korea and China. This is estimated to cost $450 million dollars for the mill and $150 million for the road link.
Amur Minerals (AMC)