The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring Jeremy Skillington, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma has just been released. Listen here.
Lionel - indeed - that battery sits alongside the 60MWh VRFB already on the same site. Energy Storage news got the location wrong though, it's at Minami-Hayakita not Minami-Hayarai, apart from that they seem to have the details right.
could get very interesting.
ignore the one time posters who have popped up just know to try and get a few fractions of a pence off their buy in price.
The simple fact is that Fortune and Mikhail appear to have kept the MUST deal alive and that Cellcube/Enerox could well be a useful part of our VRFB manufacturing strategy ahead, despite the attempts by Garnet to steal it by foul means.
uksteveg - two of the directors of Grafton Commodity Trading, who were connected with Duferco, resigned from GCT 4 weeks ago so I expect that they simply took their BMN shares with them into a new vehicle. I would expect the published GCT holding will appear to fall by more than just 11M in the next month - the shares are simply being transferred into a new vehicle that is too small to be listed.
As I strayed onto the subject of Prospect Resources, given it too is proposing to produce petalite :- “Our sales team has been receiving pricing feedback from potential customers in the glass & ceramics market that our low iron petalite would receive
premium pricing over prices available in the chemical market, validating the advantages of our product differentiation from classic spodumene producers." - it is therefore perhaps illuminating to look at their market valuation.
1. Their MC is currently 386M AUD = 215M GBP
2. They have no production at present.
3. They are based in Zimbabwe
4. Their Arcadia JORC resource (0.2% Li2O cutoff) is quoted as 72.7MT ore grading 1.06% Li2O containing 770 kT of Li2O which is roughly 1.68x our petalite resource of 71.5MT ore grading 0.63% containing 450 kT of Li2O
5. If it were simply a matter of comparing resource sizes then you might expect our MC, JUST DUE TO THE PETALITE, to be 215/1.68 = 128M GBP (i.e. 66% up from where we are now) - however it should be higher than this because
a) we don't just produce Petalite but are already making profits on Tin
b) our mine is not in Zimbabwe but a much more stable country
c) our mine and processing plant is up and running
d) expansion and by-product production plans are already in place
e) the quote JORC resource grade is irrelevant because the stuff that is going to be processed for the Lithium has already been crushed and preprocessed before it get processed for Lithium - hence the effective Li-grade at this point is already much higher than 1%
I remember these guys trying to do a hatchet job on BMN, it was pretty amateur then, and this is pretty amateur now.
After only 3 minutes they are claiming that petalite cannot be used for Li Battery production but spodumene can, furthermore they claim that petalite trades at only 500 dollars a tonne whilst spodumene trades at 2,500 a tonne. Unfortunately both their claims are wrong so I gave up listening at that point.
1) Afritin petalite will be low-iron concentrate (less than 0.05% Fe) and as such is a premium product - see https://www.miningweekly.com/article/afritin-further-investigates-lithium-tantalum-potential-at-uis-2021-09-06
2) As you will be able to confirm for yourself by reading this ( https://www.prospectresources.com.au/sites/default/files/Low%20Iron%20Petalite%20Report%20MEDIA%20RELEASE_1.pdf ) document " Low iron in this context is 0.08 to 0.1% iron for spodumene and 0.04-0.06% for petalite." Hence our 0.05% concentrate will be definitely be classed as low-iron.
3) If you were only interested in extracting the lithium you would expect petalite to be less valuable than spodumene because petalite contains roughly 4% lithium whilst spodumene contains 6% lithium - however it turns out that the reality is that the reverse is true - prospect resources quotes Benchmark mineral intelligence " Benchmark expect an average price ratio relationship of 1.61:1 low iron petalite to chemical grade spodumene (61% premium for low iron petalite concentrate over chemical grade 6% Li2O spodumene concentrate)." This is now doubt because of the higher purity and specialist demand for petalite.
I reckon that the MMs moved it back down as part of a fishing expedition following recent price rises, then as people, such as myself, have taken advantage of the price drop to buy more shares they have been forced into going even lower to try and uncover some spread bet longs they can pinch from.
Once they have got those shares the price will rise and anyone still sitting on the sidelines will be left scratching their hands wondering what that was all about. The moral is to have the courage to trust your own research and to be prepared to buy when the discount sales are on - this is how I have ended up with over 13 million shares
Cornishknocker - I was not suggesting that 100% recovery was in practise possible only illustrating a thought experiment that showed the two different percentages that appear in the recovery rate and the concentrate tin content.
Cornishknocker - the bristol Baron has correctly reported the 1200 TPA concentrate production rate that will result from the current expansion programmer reported here - https://polaris.brighterir.com/public/afritin_mining/news/rns/story/rg8j2zw
You are correct in pointing out that it is a coincidence that both the overall Tin recovery rate and the Tin metal content of the concentrate output are both close to 61% - in principle there is nothing preventing a perfect 100% recovery rate of pure cassiterite (SnO2) as concentrate, which of course would only be 79.6% Sn and 20.4% Oxygen - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/cassiterite
It is indeed remarkable to see Tin go above 50K per tonne when it cost us less than 24K USD per tonne to make it.
Afritin is therefore making 25K * 95% (assumed for Tin payment rate)* 61% = 14.5K USD profit per tonne of concentrate produced. At 1200 TPA ore production that would yield 17M USD profit.