Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
I would agree that the hot mess under the ground in Norilsk is only going to get worse and worse with massive plant having been built on a melting ice cream, plus they have a government that are happy to slap massive fines on them whenever there is a problem, I can see trouble there for years
On a much more interesting note, it is pretty amazing to see Iridium now fixing at 6150 , incredible to think that it only first broke through 1000 usd last December, so at the end of the last qtr, the 6000+ oz we produce a year are now worth 6 times as much .....
Whichever way you look at it with current prices so high they are going to be making serious money, the market is heavily discounting a collapse back to the old pricing structure but it is worth bearing in mind that we were for many years in an oversupplied situation where prices represented the cost of production of marginal mines, the assumption is that we return to this situation quickly, however there is very little capex going on and what there is seems focussed on reducing cost rather than ramping production, so this may be the new normal, if one looks at the iron ore market we have bhp and rio digging massive volumes out in a tight market at a production cost of 10-15 usd a ton and selling it at 170 usd a ton, and this is one of the most abundant elements on earth, the ability to make 50-75% ebitda margins as we are currently enjoying is by no means a freak of nature but given the unique mineral endowment that South Africa enjoys it should be the normal state of things ...
yes , tbtt , had a look at Eastplats, looks like a half done SLP type project , they seem to be just sending the PGM concentrate to impala so have no idea how valuable it is or what production will be, there is no guidance on this front only the number of tons of conc they are producing, however if they are cashflow positive just about on just the chrome then it could be a good business and fund the re-opening of the long life mine , If you want to look at a similar business but with a different commodity that long term could do very well then take a look at Kenmare, Mining mineral sands in Mozambique
What these guys need to do is get Netflix involved to do a program/series about the most polluted city in the world and how they are involved in cleaning it up, it is well worth spending a small part of these windfall profits on doing some good in the Kabwe community and getting some recognition as being a leader in taking toxic tailings dumps and cleaning them up while removing valuable metals, having a good ESG story as well as a cheap stock will turbo charge the stock, it is not worth getting involved in these highly toxic tailings piles unless you are really going to help provide a solution to the problem, this Kabwe situation could end up being a horrible outcome or an ESG badge of honour , it is Flint on steroids ...
After JSBs recent post I had a look around and found the documentary I think you saw about Norilsk in the apple store "A moon of Nickel and ice" It really was fascinating, it spends some time with the repair engineers at Norilsk "the mining intelligentsia" as they like to think of themselves, it will be these guys jobs to down their vodka bottles for a while to fix this huge problem in this dystopian mine providing half the worlds palladium, highly recommended film that will make anyone feel grateful about how lucky they are ...
and rhodium is back to 29,000 that didnt take long and palladium and iridium are breaking higher too ... every day we stay at these crazy levels the company is printing cash .... now all we need is more news on what the refining plans will cost and return ....
comparing with similar sized oilers it looks to me like the 1.7bn is only priced in at 10c on the dollar, really this company is more like a Burford than an oiler, Burford have a large part of their assets represented by a case against the Argentina government over YPF partial privatisation, looking at Burford who have yet to win their case and then need to enforce against a much weaker creditor they have easily been able to sell off parts of their claims at much higher valuations, I personally think that this case now that it has been won should be trading at closer to 85c on the dollar, kind of like where the PMO debt is trading when bondholders should make 15% holding the debt for a month or two, however this glaring misplacing should entice someone like Elliot on board who would be super aggressive in forcing the board / India to repay in full asap ... I have bought in at 180 on this basis and will buy more when the PMO transaction cashes out my bonds there ....
Reading more about this Kell process from the company website
https://www.kellprocess.com/kells-advantages
It would seem that the smelting cost is less than half , plus recoveries are higher, they also indicate that it works well on material from the UG2 reef that Tharisa are mining so I would think that given the majors were happy to refine at 15% when basket prices were 1500 usd the gains from refining using this process must be extremelly compelling and crazy at the current prices, also seems like a modular system , ie process half the new way by spending 25m usd , they are clearly running a pilot already and I would doubt they would be using anything other than current best technology there must be a very high return on this project ...
As far as capex to refine goes, this article talks about the new Kell process which uses a fraction of the power and has huge cost savings, looks like a 250k pa oz plant costs around 65m usd , at a basket price of 2k and paying away 15% at present that would give a gross revenue of 60m usd which lets say costs 30m to run ( given the massive savings touted for the plant maybe a lot less ) so at lower prices could pay for itself in 2 years or less , off current prices a matter of months ...
https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/print-version/decision-soon-on-pgm-process-that-can-save-a-medupi-power-station-worth-of-power-2020-10-26
yes if you consider the cash generation of the second half of the year and that diamond prices are now even higher the 2021 results are going to be awe inspiring, the will just have to find a home for all the cash they will be generating .....
I thought the presentation was pretty good , they are generating a lot of cash and if they can reinvest at very high Irr's into diversified but related businesses then it makes a lot of sense, sounds like they have a decent plan around smelting and have been trialling the process, would be interesting to know the Capex involved and the IRR on that Capex off a lower basket cost like 1500 usd an oz , In general though I like these bolt on projects like Vulcan which improve the efficiency of the mine and will have a huge benefit of reducing unit costs if we see lower chrome prices again, my guess is that the refining cost to develop will be ballpark 10m usd so easily covered with a months ebitda in the good times and will improve margins if we return to tough times... all in all happy with how things are being run ...
Also worth bearing in mind that not only will it take years for new supply to hit the market, the Ivanhoe Platreef mine is the only large scale one being built at the moment as far as I am aware and that is years from full production, but today we have more news out from Norilsk about the state of the flooding at the OKTIABRSKY and TAYMIR mines which make up the bulk of Rhodium produced outside of South Africa, it looks like a bit of a mess there ... And that has just happened so we were already in a big deficit and we now have a deficit and a big mess ....
Wilsby, If you want to view THS as a pure rhodium miner then its production cost per oz of rhodium is negative several thousand dollars an oz taking into account platinum and palladium credits, all that rhodium is literally free, you also have a chrome production that is thrown in for free that is basically worth pretty much the market cap of the company, plus exploration / proven assets that are worth another bunch too , and no debt , of course if they were producing bitcoins instead of rhodium the market cap would be a hundred times higher ...
Tiger , do we know how much Iridium they produce ? My guess from the 6pge number quoted would be about 5k oz per year, but I could not see a quoted number, at 4,800 per oz that is a decent contribution but I am not certain it is correct .
I dont understand either, lets do a comparison with solgold, Solg have about 3bn ton of .5% copper equiv deep underground in equador in the jungle, they will need to underground mine this, market cap is about 700m gbp, so over 100 times Kav, given the size of the structure Kav should easiliy have a resource of the same size and it is the size that makes solg valuable, so to make Ditau a comparable resource we just need to get to 0.5% copper equiv over say 50m of the worst of these two drills, I dont think that will be tricky we just need .1% cobalt and .1% copper , bring on the assay results and lets hope we get to the same valuation as solg which will be a 100 bagging !
looks like abm are doing a bit of nearology from todays news, I think they are just trying to jump on the same Botwana bandwagon after the results of the first drill here, that is why I suspect whoever is talking to Kav has told them to limit market updates to the bare minimum, stop all the other chancers out there claiming up all the good ground ...