LONDON (Alliance News) - Salt Lake Potash Ltd Thursday said it has issued more shares under its recent placing, pushing the total amount raised up to AUD8.4 million from the original AUD5.2 million.
The company launched a large placing on Wednesday, issuing 16.3 million shares to investors in Australia at a discounted price of 32.0 Australian cents to raise an original AUD5.2 million.
Following that placing, Salt Lake said it had received "strong interest" from overseas based strategic and sophisticated agricultural investors about providing more equity funding, which led the company to ask for its shares to be suspended for a short time whilst it finalised discussions with those interested parties.
On Thursday, Salt Lake said it has received commitments from those investors for up to 9.9 million shares at the same issue price, pushing up the gross proceeds to AUD8.4 million.
The issue price was a 12% discount to the 20-day volume-weighted average, and the total shares to be issued under the placing represent 19.79% of the company's enlarged issued share capital.
Its Australian shares closed down 10% on Thursday to 0.36 Australian cents.
On Thursday morning in London, its shares were untraded, and were last traded at 17.50 pence per share.
Salt Lake is using the proceeds of the placing to accelerate the development of its flagship Lake Wells project in western Australia, which is based around sulphate of potash, an ingredient used in fertiliser for the agricultural industries.
Salt Lake said it will conduct further drilling and has mobilised a drill rig to the project so it can improve the geological and hydrological model at Lake Wells by pump testing three aquifer units and measuring the hydraulic properties, such as flow rates and transmissivity, of the aquifers hosting the brine.
The company will also conduct field evaporation trials on the bulk brine samples supplied from that drilling campaign to define the evaporation patterns, estimate the salting points of mixed salts and predict the conditions for production.
Laboratory evaporation trials are currently underway to assist in designing the parameters of the field evaporation trials.
The company is also continuing to complete several studies on the project, focused on environmental and marketing efforts, which will form part of the scoping study for Lake Wells, which the company is hoping to complete under the current work programme so it can incorporate the recently upgraded mineral resource.
Salt Lake will also undertake reconnaissance sampling and permitting at Lake Irwin, which is covered by the recently granted exploration licence E37/1233, which lies around 180.0 kilometres to the south-west of the Lake Wells project.
By Joshua Warner; joshuawarner@alliancenews.com; @JoshAlliance
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