The latest Investing Matters Podcast with Jean Roche, Co-Manager of Schroder UK Mid Cap Investment Trust has just been released. Listen here.
bluerill - please can you stop sending me private messages telling me to stop posting on this board.
For everyone else - Vanadium is critical to VRFB's more than any other battery technology is dependent on any other single element. On a good day 30%+ of the VRFB cost is the Vanadium, on a bad day it can be 60%+. RedT, Avalon and Rongke power all had very bad days in the last 3 years when Vanadium prices spiked above USD 100/Kg - in fact Rongke had to completely pause their 800MWh Dalian project.
If anyone thinks that a company of the stature of Siemens is going to touch a technology like VRFBs without having a Vanadium supply of the depth and quality of Bushveld's Vametco/Vanchem/Mokopane then their are in fantasyland. Siemens will have been brought to the party by Bushveld and may already have picked up some of their shares as part of their overall buy-in process, because let's be frank big companies expect favours like that to be given to them for involvement.
gshivers - the Uis Lithium is in the form of petalite which typically has lower Iron content that spodumene minerals - as a result it is more valuable than normal Lithium spodumene because it can be used for ceramics applications - see this:- https://digitalfire.com/material/petalite :-
"Petalite can be used to create low expansion glazes. It is suitable for white and transparents as well because of the low iron content. It does not present the frothing problems sometimes associated with spodumene and helps improve brightness."
Ceramics makes up about 1/5th of the total Lithium market so is not some niche application:- https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-lithium.pdf
If you wish to understand how Afritin Lithium compares with other resources there is a useful graph here:- http://ukrlithium.com/lithium/
Afritin's 0.45 Mt of Li2O corresponds to 1.1 Mt Lithium Carbonate Equivalent (LCE) hence it is the same overall size as the 'Arkadia' (Arcadia owned by Prospect Resources) resource - which is the world's largest petalite resource shown.
Vanadium flow batteries require Vanadium - get over it you arrogant arse
Invinity investors who complained about Bushveld selling their shares would do well to consider whether Siemens would have even given Invinity a second glance had Bushveld not been standing behind them with guaranteed supply of Vanadium.
somtam - ask yourself if £60 million MC is the right valuation for what was the worlds largest hard rock tin mine.
Then double the number you have concluded when you realise that the Lithium assets put Uis in one of the top 6 largest hard rock lithium resources.
The best thing is that the revenue from the tin sales will help develop the other commodity production so that the we aren't dependent on handouts from anyone else to get this mine fully developed.
nice try numpty - all I will say is that I left the BMN board because I felt that posting fundamental information was for many reasons counterproductive.
On the subject of Afritin I think that we could not be in a better position at any better time in the last 40 years. I would expect that the hoardes may turn up next week and there should be no reason why 7p should easily be broken, because by now the message should be getting into people's skulls that Tin is in shockingly short supply, and unlike software or uber drivers you cannot simply click your fingers and make it out of thin air.
put simply I expect the value of the HREE basket that Mkango collects to have increased by 115% - i.e. 2.15 times what it was originally estimated to be. That is WITHOUT any additional improvements due to the upgrades in ore or processing efficiencies announced since 2016.
These prices were all based on the Adamas intelligence expected 2020 price for each of the key RE oxides in the HREE bracket (Nd, Pr, Dy, Tb) - let us have a look at how RE prices have evolved since then (https://www.kitco.com/strategic-metals/ ) :-
Neodymium Oxide
2016 - 48.2 USD/Kg
2021 - 118.50
Praseodymium Oxide
2016 - 55 USD/Kg
2021 - 106.9
Dysprosium Oxide
2016 - 289 USD/kg
2021 - 605
Terbium Oxide
2016 - 459 USD/kg
2021 - 1839
These are truly astonishing increases.
Overnight - I was chatting recently with Myles about the Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) content of the Mkango Songwe hill deposit - he pointed out that the 2015 updated PFS showed a predicted content for the concentrate of over 36% HREE by mass, which worked out at over 82.5% by value.
( https://www.mkango.ca/news/mkango-resources-announces-results-of-updated-pre-feasibility-study-for-the-songwe-hill-rare-earth-project-in-malawi/ )
"the size of the deposit matches the size of some of the biggest lithium deposits in the world"
No I've not posted on the wrong board - this is ALSO Afritin - from that video only 3 weeks ago.
Now you can see why Afritin needed to be spun out from Bushveld - it hosts one of the largest potential Lithium supplies in the world - you can only imagine the nonsense that would have been posted about that had Uis stayed inside BMN.
Only 5.7 million bucks to increases production by 67%
At 30K tin prices right now this is the time to really push on with Tin expansion as quickly as possible - the extra 480 tonnes of Tin at 30K prices with all-in costs of c. 16K would produce another 6.75M of profit in just a single year