Member Info for Boffin

If they mean good peer reviewed journals - which is absolutely best from a credibility perspective- then months rather than days or weeks is more likely.

Unfortunately the science gets a bit complicated but essentially you get energy out when converting nitrogen and hydrogen to ammonia. The problem is that even with the best currently available catalyst the reaction doesn't happen that well until you get to circa 400 C and 200 atmospheres pressure. Plus of course they usually break down methane as a source of the hydrogen. Not as wasteful as it sounds as the bye products of this are linked in to other processes. But of course it all costs money in terms of the equipment and energy recovery etc so it only really works cost efficiently at huge scale.

What the Japanese have done is find a massively more effective catalyst based on copying nature that works efficiently at room temperature and pressure using water rather than methane as the hydrogen source. And because the reaction actually releases energy it substantially powers itself. The major cost appears to be needing to occasionally regenerate the catalyst as it seems to be slowly degraded by the reaction. Not a process that will be making millions of tonnes of ammonia next year but demonstrates that much easier methods of making ammonia can be found that don't need the huge infrastructure of the current process.

You can't get ammonia from farm waste at meaningful efficiency. In fact 80% or so of the 175 million tonne global production of ammonia is used to make fertilisers to input to farming. For the past 100 years or so most of the worlds ammonia has been made by the Haber-Bosch process which requires a hydrogen source and because of the chemical kinetics of the process can only efficiently be done on a massive scale.
Interestingly leguminous plants do this much more efficiently via a "nitrogen fixing" enzyme complex. Earlier this year Japanese researchers published a method for making ammonia which is modeled on this process which could totally transform ammonia production. It was published in Nature but a simplified version of their work can be found here https://phys.org/news/2019-04-ammonia-production.html

Essentially ammonia is a much safer and easier way of transporting hydrogen than the massive energy cost of compressing hydrogen and shipping it in very high pressure tanks- let alone the safety issues.

The results may indeed be encouraging or even very encouraging but JORC compliance is a different question. The technical requirements for the various "levels" of JORC are there to ensure a reasonably tight spread in any predictions being made. The air blast re circulation drilling used so far is unlikely to provide the required precision of shape and size of the ore body because of the high level of "mixing" that takes place down hole during drilling. This means that the upper and lower indications of gold present will probably be far too wide to meet JORC standards.

We may though find that even the lowest indication are encouraging and the upper levels even "Bonanza" but we shouldn't get too carried away until we have better detail.

I have no way of knowing how close they are but to me today's tweet is being a bit clever with words. Well a word actually - "towards". Almost any decent reliable measurements move you towards a JORC compliance but it doesn't mean thats imminent or even likely from the data currently at hand.

I could be wrong of course but personally I expect that they will need further evidence either from some bulk sampling (a normal requirement with "nuggety" deposits) or some diamond core drilling or perhaps even both.

Sorry to be a pedant but gold is measured in Troy ounces not avoirdupois. I agree its a bizarre old tradition and would be better for everyone if the whole thing went metric. Then ppm in gold ores would equate directly to grams per tonne and all calculations would be much more straightforward. But anyway there are 32150.7 Troy ounces to the tonne - still a lot I know but we need to keep the books straight.

They also turned down the offer of a "Farm in" on the Windidda project. Not the actions of a business worried about where the cash is going to come from.

Check the date! This is just a rehash of the August 28th release.

There is no way that Craig Brown would release SP sensitive info before issuing an RNS.

OK what follows are my personal views based on having worked at VP level in a major pharma multinational and also having been intimately involved in the defenestration of a chairman from another AIM listed company.

The only way this has any chance of working is calling for an EGM . The requirements for this are reasonably well spelt out here https://www.toppr.com/guides/business-law-cs/elements-of-company-law-ii/extraordinary-general-meeting/

There needs to be spelt out a very specific purpose for the meeting and a very specific motion to put to the meeting once exchanges of views have taken place. The motion should be as short and concise as possible eg " This meeting has no confidence in the Chairman's ability to deliver timely results and communication to shareholders"

The prospect of even having such a meeting called and publicly circulated can bring pressure to bear even if it in the end proves either unnecessary or unsuccessful in removing the chairman. It will certainly put him on notice in a way that a private chat with nominated shareholders won't. Its also usually quite difficult to get a small group of shareholders together with sufficient time to arrange objectives, an agenda, agree roles and how to handle what appears to be a belligerent and defensive individual.

Well I'm a biochemist not a physical chemist but this, to say the least seems weird. OK it wouldn't be the first time a journalist who has limited relevant knowledge has made a pigs breakfast when describing a novel process but this article is quite incoherent.

So I tried looking for other related information or a decent peer reviewed article related to the subject matter emanating from Brazil and couldn't find anything. I also specifically searched for the quoted originator "Giovane Sabino". I completely failed to find anyone with anything like a relevant background or publication history.

I know , absence of evidence isn't proof but personally I need to see a much more coherent description of the theory behind this, the equipment used to validate it and key results eg energy efficiency and process energy balance before I start to give this some credibility.

I've no idea whether we will have enough data and definition of the ore body to declare a JORC compliant resource estimate. It would be unusual to get this from just air blast drilling as it is far less precise than diamond core drilling and even that is "stretched" when its a somewhat "nuggety" deposit. I would expect that a small number of bulk samples would be needed to ensure a more reliable indicator of gold content before a JORC status can be confirmed.

ut I must agree this assay work is taking an unusually long time. It may simply be that there were many samples from others in the queue before the lab could deal with ours. However since I have 5 minutes spare how about a bit of idle speculation? We know that another listed company were interested in a "farm in" on the Windidda prospects and they have far less data than we have here. Perhaps there are some intense discussions taking place over a major "farm in" or even an outright purchase of Creswick and the BOD want to see that through before they say anything more? I emphasise I have no knowledge or evidence for this beyond the assays and subsequent resource modeling taking an inordinate amount of time. and its boring waiting!

I've no idea whether we will have enough data and definition of the ore body to declare a JORC compliant resource estimate. It would be unusual to get this from just air blast drilling as it is far less precise than diamond core drilling and even that is "stretched" when its a somewhat "nuggety" deposit. I would expect that a small number of bulk samples would be needed to ensure a more reliable indicator of gold content before a JORC status can be confirmed.

ut I must agree this assay work is taking an unusually long time. It may simply be that there were many samples from others in the queue before the lab could deal with ours. However since I have 5 minutes spare how about a bit of idle speculation? We know that another listed company were interested in a "farm in" on the Windidda prospects and they have far less data than we have here. Perhaps there are some intense discussions taking place over a major "farm in" or even an outright purchase of Creswick and the BOD want to see that through before they say anything more? I emphasise I have no knowledge or evidence for this beyond the assays and subsequent resource modeling taking an inordinate amount of time. and its boring waiting!

If you remove or significantly reduce the £80 per tonne gate fee that is in the business case for a DMG unit you lose up to £1 million a year in revenue . It makes the economics rather challenging to say the least.

The tyres have to be shredded to remove the steel belts before the resulting crumb can be fed to the DMG unit. This could in principle be done elsewhere at an established tyre recycling facility. Tyre crumb is thus more expensive to prepare and also has other uses eg added to road resurfacing compounds to reduce road noise. It thus may not attract the scale of "gate fees" that unusable plastics may be able to command thereby reducing the IRR of any tyre focused DMG investment. I don't rule it out but it may be more for the medium term.

For the future it's just as important to know where not to drill and avoid unnecessary cost and time wastage. There is also a chance that in some samples they are wrong and they still find worthwhile quantities.

Plus it all helps better definition of distribution and volume of the ore body to improve modeling and thus help meet JORC criteria as quickly as possible

About as good as it can get until planning permission is granted and a signed contract is in hand. They certainly seem to be making encouraging efforts to build a pipeline of projects which is essential.

Encouraging progress
"Whole-of-bag testing process has now been completed successfully and remaining samples have been sent to the laboratory for assay testing; "

Just waiting for the confirmatory assays plus useful progress at many other ventures

I rather liked the comment about another large company looking to "farm in" on one of the projects. Suggests others believe we are onto something worthwhile

Frustrating though it is the rules are quite clear. If Craig intends to say anything new that has even the slightest chance of being SP sensitive then there has to be an RNS first. So if we don't get one first thing tomorrow then he won't be saying anything that we don't already know.

But one day.......................
We just wish we knew which one

Perhaps not much those of us following PHE didn't know already but nonetheless may help attract some new interest

https://www.edisongroup.com/publication/fuelling-the-hydrogen-economy/25046

Well he didn't hang around for long! Six months or so? It says "accepts the resignation with immediate effect". I can't help feeling that he was pushed because of either conflict of interests with other positions or he didn't buy into the appointment of another geologist in the company.

Rather abrupt whatever the reason.