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@bob_triples No, this meeting was supposed to approve the change of the zoning plan (for the mine and transportation) as one of the points on the agenda. It can't stop the issue of the DFS, could be the exact opposite. They do not want to permit everything and change the zoning plan until they see either the DFS or the EIA (or both).

It wasn't very clear what they want, maybe they're just incompetent and didn't go through the documents they had available from the ministry. Or they just expected they would have the DFS by today...

They said that they do not have some documents from Geomet which they need for a decision. Not sure what that is about, either they are just standard dumb politicians unable to use the internet/computer or they are waiting for the DFS. Then they said they'll gather some questions until Friday and started talking about some hospitals and other topics.

@sporazene I remember CEZ spokesperson saying the FID will be made in Q1 or Q2 2026. Would they be just twiddling their thumbs and waiting for lithium price recovery for a year?

@makemoremoney chartists would call it an episodic pivot followed by a high tight flag that needs more sideways (of tightening range and declining volume). Though technical analysis is mostly meaningless if there's a big fundamental event upcoming.

@Skelly85 when exactly did "RockStock said they were considering pulling the plug on their investment to KCs face in their last interview". I can't find this anywhere.

And tbh I'm getting a bit tired from the AI-generated content here. It would make sense to delay the DFS until the grant is awarded and new CZ government named but it feels meaningless to post these posts until it is published and we know the capex, opex etc. At least the negative posts from Skelly are human written and not this AI slop. I'm saying that as someone heavily invested in EMH from many years ago.

ZNWD was ahead of EMH a few years ago in terms of permits, studies etc.

As of 2025, ZNWD probably has worse economics and less government support. Opex not that bad, energy prices and salaries comparable as it is a border region. It was not included in the CRMA strategic projects list earlier in 2025.

Their biggest problem will be crazy high capex which I'd say will be way worse than EMH - no local utility partner, smaller resource, more difficult processing, in transport they wanted to include e.g. a 9km tunnel etc.. West Germany has VUL, not sure if there's enough will for East Germany to also have something.

@CityOfDelight agreed. Some of the posts aren't even artificial intelligence, they are natural stupidity.

One person is completely clueless about micro and macro economics and posts ridiculous llm-generated summaries.

Another person is someone who hates this stock and their only posts on this website (going back years!) are negative comments about EMH

I don't understand the motivation of the latter person but at least they're genuine.

The CEO of SDAS (subsidiary through which CEZ owns Geomet) was not very excited about tin, let alone tungsten/wolfram.

______________________

This is what he said in a 2020 interview:

And what about the accompanying extraction of other raw materials from the rock, such as tungsten, tin, tantalum?

They are found in the deposit in low concentrations, in low metallicity, so the effect from them will not be nearly as significant as from by-products for cement manufacturers. In this important detail, we differ from the original vision of EMH and Geomet.

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And this is what he said in a 2022 interview:

Mining in the Ore Mountains will also bring other metals, such as tungsten, tin, copper, rubidium, cesium... Do you already know how many tons or kilograms of these elements will be obtained during mining at Cínovec? And can you extract them?

Only some of the ones you mentioned can be obtained from the ore. The extraction and level of trading of all these potential raw materials will be decided primarily by economics. The priority of the planned mining is the extraction of lithium, tin and tungsten. In the case of tin and tungsten, this is the first tens of thousands of tons of these metals during the existence of the mine. Work is also being done on effectively combining relatively different technologies for extracting tin and tungsten in addition to lithium. Rubidium and cesium give the impression that they are elements of the future, but they are metals that are almost never traded in their pure form on a global scale. Among other things, because their production in pure metallic form is extremely financially and technologically demanding. For example, their salts are a useful raw material for glassmaking, rubidium can serve as a substitute for lead in heavy glasses. Among the alkali metals, however, next to lithium, the greatest interest will probably be in potassium. In the form of salts, it is an important raw material for the production of fertilizers.

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So in 2020 he was very skeptical, in 2022 he admitted tin and tungsten are good as by-products. Maybe in 2025 the process was reworked so that it helps opex in a bigger way. Low concentration big magnetic ore and a big resource. Not great but there are way worse mines in the world.

This is the structure of the VUL financing:

https://i.ibb.co/Y4ydLJfS/vul-financing.png

Equity financing at the top level (Australia), equity financing at the project level (Germany), one more equity financing at the phase one level. And then debt financing by a mix of EIB and commercial banks.

Another interesting example is how the new Czech nuclear power plant (€20B+ project) is going to be financed. Originally it was supposed to be fully financed by CEZ but then CEZ got rid of 80% of it and at project level it is now financed by commercial loans which will then be converted into government loans (government calls it a loan but it's more like a grant).

So VUL financing shows that with a good partner (Hochtief in this case), it can be done. And CEZ nuclear financing shows that with some political will, a project that would've been disastrous for CEZ can turn out well if it's considered strategic.

You've repeated this "I don't believe anything until the DFS" at least 20 times here Skelly so don't be surprised people bash you at every opportunity they have.

The truth is that KC is a terrible manager and a terrible communicator. He had everything aligned for him around 2019-2020 and failed to push it. Sure, you can blame COVID and the Chinese but the truth is he just didn't do enough. Compare it with Vulcan which started LATER, as a completely blank sheet project with a weird lithium processing idea but they are now near production phase. So I agree there are no buyers at least until the DFS is published because of zero trust.

Now the project was saved by Czech politicians (from both old and new government) and by EU money which is not something I expected... I'm probably holding more shares and for longer than most people here and I've written it off and considered it zero at the beginning of 2025.

Speaking of "realistic economics" - my opinion is that even if the project economics are not excellent, it will go ahead and get to production phase because a lot of stuff was already negotiated behind the curtains (CEZ, ministry of industry, EIB). CEZ is used to dealing with projects with weird economic incentives (in coal and nuclear) so lithium is just another slice of the pie they can add if there's political will.

You can look at VUL again - in PFS, they posted crazy assumptions of 25%+ or even 30%+ IRR and the DFS reality is now 13% post-tax IRR (which will more likely be 10%) and $2B capex. It's not a good investment but went through thanks to the incentives, probably most similar project from the political point of view. If EMH is bought out by CEZ / government in the following years, comparing to VUL would be a fair valuation (you need to adjust for the 85% vs 49% share so somewhere around 2021 EMH share prices).

When I bought my shares many years ago, I was expecting a 10-bagger. Now I will be happy to be at inflation-adjusted break even and the big holders can't realistically sell due to liquidity anyways.

The shareholder agreement is public

https://or.justice.cz/ias/ui/vypis-sl-detail?dokument=78258597&subjektId=362777&spis=1222371 (draft)

https://or.justice.cz/ias/ui/vypis-sl-detail?dokument=62004908&subjektId=362777&spis=1222371 (signed)

The article 11 (Článek 11) deals with pre-emption rights and transfer of stake. Another important point is article 9 which defines 5 directors (which are split into CEZ and non-CEZ category)

I'm not sure how old this sheet is. It is assuming cca 100 million new shares (325M after dilution) based on PFS and a 2022 interview. This can range wildly depending on how well the secondary offering is done and the total # of shares could be anything between 300M-500M...

If a buyout were to be made by CEZ, I assume a similar calculation would be one part of the fair price estimate (another one could be valuation comparison to Vulcan and producing locations in Australia and LatAm).

Bloomberg has seen the draft but EU doesn't want to publish it until 2026... It fits together hough - Greenland for rare earths, Cinovec for lithium and KC mentioned EIB in today's interview as well.

I read through all the PDFs and the summary of the 30+ pages is "we announce that we will announce something in 2026"

Tl;dr of the interview:

* 37500 LCE/year

* DFS confirmed in December

* FID in Q1-Q2/2026

* possible raise after new year (for expenses between DFS and FID)

* Czech gov grant means it will go into production

* wants to get EIB involved again (for low-cost debt)

* two more EU-wide grant programs available (German, French)

* will work on some technology optimization between DFS and FID

It's good news that Vulcan will go ahead but with the latest data the project makes little sense economically and even less sense for the VUL shareholders. They reduced the NPV by almost 40% and even now they're assuming $20K+ lithium prices.

There was a lot of virtue signalling with negative carbon credits and negative energy costs and blah blah blah and now they'll produce lithium with a method that's probably not used anywhere else in the world and with capex that's crazy compared to Australia or even the US. Looks like regular old-school credits from tin and wolfram may end up with much better project economy for EMH than what VUL presented in the updated presentation.

So VUL (aka lithium from Rhine mineral water) announced details of their financing today. Halted on ASX and trading 20% lower in Germany.

If I read it correctly, they had post-tax NPV €1.15B (looks like they lowered it from almost €2B for some reason) and they needed €2.2B for phase one and did:

€528m in equity raise (269m new shares issued at almost 30% discount)

€1185m in senior debt

€204m in grants

€150+133m in strategic/gov fund investments

Dilution to existing shareholders seems to be 110% and the German project will go ahead but was definitely a bit over-hyped with the claims of negative energy costs and better than LatAm brine on the cost curve.

Gotta love the em dashes in the AI replies

This is the current status: https://portal.cenia.cz/eiasea/detail/EIA_MZP529?lang=cs

Looks like it was announced, some documentation is missing and wasn't approved. I don't know the exact process flow but it seems like EIA cannot be done without DFS (and vice versa).

The Keliber (Finland) capex increased at least 3 times from the PFS iirc. Mostly due to project changes, regulation and increased energy and wage costs.

2 billion dollars sounds crazy though unless Fingers is using Australian dollars.