Member Info for Alfacomp

jonny - it is hard to say to the company that underwrites the vanadium leasing programme one minute 'sure the vanadium has value after 20 years' if the next minute you are saying 'pay for it at the end of that period- you're kidding aren't you ?'

The stuff will indeed have value after 20 years because the alternative is going down the pit, drilling holes, putting explosive in those holes, blow the stuff up, use a digger to load it onto trucks, truck it back up to the processing plant, crush it, grade it and crush it again, then magnetically separate it, then feed it into the kiln and roast it with sodium sulphate, through the kiln and in then into the leaching circuit to take out the soluble sodium metavanadate then pipe it over to the AMV precipitation building, mix with Ammonium sulphate to form insoluble ammonium metavanadate , then dry and dissolve in sulphuric acid to yield clean Vanadium in solution. All this costs money.

Sure our vehicles will already have been paid more than the cost of the Vanadium in the 20 years of the lease, that doesn't mean we shouldn't expect to pay the leasing underwriter a fair market rate. If not they would simply then walk away saying 'find someone else to fund these things because we see nowt but risk'

Miagi - as you are not up to speed I suggest you read this:- https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/

Not all of it but at least 30%

no we have plenty of our own Vanadium resources already thanks very much.

we're just a helpful bunch here MotD

here you go - https://largoresources.com/

they must be getting really worried now as this is the third time I have been forced to post this rather obvious fact

and recommendation of the posts of those who are clearly here to cause disruption only happens when those who are short are looking to close out, or wish to buy back lower.

So look for a couple of largish early sells to try and drop the price, then this is a good buy signal.

"adding more assets to the portfolio - so watch this space" - sounds rather intriguing does it not ?

as an aside - you can see from here how magnetic separation might be used to separate the tantalite (weakly magnetic) from the cassiterite (non magnetic) despite them having quite similar specific gravities - http://ttms999.com/ttt.html

faramog - just like Vanadium Pentoxide you need to take into account that not all of the mass of the Tantalite (Ta2O5) is actually Tantalum - in the case of Tantalum Pentoxide it is around 82% Tantalum by mass. Thus if prices for both Tantalum and Tantalite were available you would expect the oxide to be around 80% of the pure metal price.

However that is not the key thing to be aware of in pricing these commodities - it is the fact that commercial ores are rarely 100% Tantalite, but often grades as low as only 25% or 30% - in principle you might be concerned about the other 70% of stuff mucking up the processing but it seems that the usual impurity, Nb2O5, is not too much of a problem and can be safely ignored.

So whilst Tantalite prices are described at, say 60$/lb - that value is only applied to the %age of actual Ta2O5 that is in the ore - i.e. if it is only 25% Ta2O5 by mass then you only get 25% of 60$ per lb of ore - it is not 60$ for a jar containing 1 pound of stuff labelled (25% pure Ta2O5 and 75% other junk). https://www.tanb.org/about-tantalum/tantalum-valuation-basis

So it is very similar to FerroVanadium - there you can have many alloys with different V %ages and to keep life simple they just quote FeV prices as $ per KgV where 'per KgV' means per Kg of contained Vanadium.

In the case of Tantalite containing ores the price of c. $60/lb could perhaps more accurately be written as $60/ lb(of contained Ta2O5).

Thus if the Tantalite price is 60$/lb (as it was in April 2020 - https://www.metalbulletin.com/Article/3929022/Tantalum-prices-climb-on-tight-supply-amid-Central-Africa-lockdowns.html ) then the 25% ore would sell close to $15/lb

so buy some IES then Fekir, or buy some BMN, or buy both, or simply face up to the fact that an illiquid market is not an efficient or rational valuer of businesses. At the moment the SP is essentially only a reflection of the cheapest price that anyone will sell a share that they own, or possibly don't even own - and that is more a reflection of the people holding, or shorting, the shares, than anything to do with the actual company.

you weren't

What is fascinating to see is that the amount of tin recovered has increased by 29% in one month, whilst the amount of ore processed increased by only 4% - either the quality of the ore has greatly increased or they have managed to really optimise some part of the extraction process.

Faramog - as far as tantalite is concerned they are clearly working actively on it now :- "The Company is conducting test work to investigate the feasibility of magnetically separating tantalum minerals from the tin concentrate."

I guess that we will see some test results, then an announcement of a sales partner, then a report of extraction of Tantalite, probably all within the next 12 months.

Homer - I think that you will find that BMN is going to be a long-term odyssey not a once-off Trojan horse - if you are looking for golden fleeces they went the other way.

40+ tonnes of tin a month might bring in something like $10M a year revenue, and perhaps $1M profit. Not bad for a business that only shipped its first production a tad over 12 months ago.

If you look here you will see that recent V prices settled clearly above the peak level form the entire period between 2010 and 2017 :- https://twitter.com/BMNperspective/status/1335517925965520897

We should not see the recent prices as a 'minimum' but rather the next step up in a staircase of increasing supply tightness, interspersed by regular pricing shocks each time China announces an upgrade to its rebar standards.

Fabulous update - overdelivered. In a pandemic year !

You may wish to let them see this :- https://twitter.com/BMNperspective/status/1334208074568097792

microfocus - you should have a look at the guarantee a bit more closely also

actually there have been a number of airplane fires that have been caused by Lithium-ion batteries

Boeing 787 :- https://www.ft.com/content/c7a03b1e-6667-11e2-919b-00144feab49a

Boeing 777 :- https://theloadstar.com/latest-freighter-fire-prompts-new-questions-on-lithium-battery-safety/

Boeing 737 :- https://www.flightsafetyaustralia.com/2014/06/lithium-batteries-cause-fire-on-board-737/ and https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/lithium-battery-suspected-in-taxiing-el-al-737-fire-alert/135124.article and earlier this year :- https://www.mobilitybatterystore.co.uk/battery-fire-detected/

Not so much on airbus it seems