Will Disko live up to the expectations?17 Aug 2023 17:35
PAR I
I hope so because this is what people who are close to the action have said so far about Disko. I have highlighted, in bold, what I would regard as significant words in their statements.
VANITY FAIR – APRIL 2022 - Kurt House(CEO, KoBold Metals) and Dr Peter Lightfoot (Technical Lead of Magmatic Systems at KoBold)
Millions of years ago heat from the earth’s core rose up to the mantle, forming magma. If that magma reacted with enough sulfur from the surrounding rock layer, the products—nickel or cobalt sulfides—might separate out as a more stable form and sink into the keel - the underside - of a larger tube of magma. Ideally, that keel is what House calls “chock-full of the really good stuff.” The absence of those metals in higher layers of the magma is often a good indication of a keel’s presence. DISKO SEEMED TO SHOW AN EXCITING ABSENCE.
“THIS IS THE BEST NORILSK ANALOG IN THE WORLD,” HOUSE HAD SAID before the trip, referring to a Siberian deposit site that was originally mined by Gulag prisoners under Stalin. Today, a company called Nornickel is the world’s largest producer of refined nickel, and its mines in the Norilsk region produced more than 4 percent of global cobalt in 2021. Over the past decade, the deposit has helped generate more than $120 billion in revenue. The two largest stakes in it are controlled by prominent Russian oligarchs. (One, Oleg Deripaska, was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018 for his links to the Russian government following Vladimir Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. The U.K. sanctioned Deripaska in March. The other, Vladimir Potanin, saw around $3 billion of his net worth temporarily wiped the day Russia invaded Ukraine in February.)
Among the earliest Western geologists to visit Norilsk, then part of the USSR, was a man named Peter Lightfoot. His knowledge is “encyclopedic,” according to House, who sought him out as one of KoBold’s earliest hires. A Canadian mining firm, Falconbridge (subsequently and coincidentally acquired by Glencore), had asked Lightfoot to evaluate Disko’s deposits back in the 1990s. At an early KoBold staff meeting, he had wowed his new colleagues by recalling the Falconbridge data with unfathomable precision—“It was almost like a parlor trick,” House says. But by the time Gertler was beginning his DRC copper-cobalt acquisitions in earnest, the then-independent Falconbridge had abandoned further exploration on Disko after several drill holes turned up zip. It was an all too common cost-related decision in the boom-and-bust mining industry, but it left behind some tantalizing breadcrumbs.
“IT HAS ALL OF THESE SIGNALS, IT HAS ALL OF THE RIGHT ROCKS, AND IT’S STILL NOT TESTED,” Lightfoot told me of the territory that is now the center of his focus.
https://tinyurl.com/y36vbrhu
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