Gordon Stein, CFO of CleanTech Lithium, explains why CTL acquired the 23 Laguna Verde licenses. Watch the video here.
Re: HMG/Grant Shapps recent announcements of closer financial involvement of Saudi Arabia in UK critical minerals/rare earth supply chains - may not be entirely good news.
The latest announcement of Saudi investment in lithium refining, see here:
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/european-lithium-signs-mou-for-saudi-arabia-plant-2023-01-13
which says offtake from the Austrian Wolfsberg lithium mine will be processed in a new refinery to be built in Saudi, rings a few alarm bells.
Could be there's an economic case for Longonjo output being switched to in Saudi Arabia for refining not Saltend- on the grounds of abundant cheap energy, and Saudi's willingness to use its SWF to diversify away from their dying fossil fuel economy. Above announcement also has implications for Teesside Lithium's future customer base.
See here:
https://twitter.com/PensanaRE/status/1603723503693332483/photo/1
posted 16 Dec 22 - China Blue's comment sums it up. (Just a minute - China Blue? - that's not you again is it China?)
The good news - it's definitely Reedmere site not the earlier Swamp of Despond site, which is nice.
And it's a different excavator to the one they rented for PA & Kwasi's shovel shot. Remember him? (Kwarteng I mean).
Bad news - that large blue pipework looks like standard mains water connection so that'll be PX Group's men hard at work, not Pensana's.
Judging by the damage to the access road, I'd guess they rolled 20m of hot tarmac just for the shot, about 10 mins before it was taken... then had to beg a local farmer to bring in his forklift to unstick the digger.
Longonjo looks like a similar story - the Repo company's just seized their only decent sized grader, but the lads have managed to blag a tractor from a local farmer which is just as good - honest.
Trading in PRE appears to have ground to a halt. Nobody's buying, nobody's selling.
PA's message remains the same - difficult times but optimistic, and still spending confidently on both sites.
LTH's I suspect have all made their moves by now to cost average down as far as they feel wise and now we're all sat here waiting for the news.
No interesting posts - just the current mud-slinging slapstick ****show going on here - LSE isn't worth tuning into now, so up go the filters, down come the shutters and PRE goes on the back burner for the next few weeks. See ya.
China - thanks for the comments. If you want to have a crack yourself at cross-checking authorship of posters - download the free version of the NeoNeuro app here:
https://neoneuro.com/products/authorship-attribution
Just click Download, then virus-check the download zip file and unzip the file, then virus-check the resulting exe file. It instals to one program on your PC desktop, click to run, select 'New' then cut and paste posters' text into the "Unknown", Author 1, 2, 3 etc boxes - it's pretty easy to use, despite the naff user interface. It also doesn't save your inputs, so don't close the program til your finished with it.
I'm actually done with this line of investigation - it has its limits and I feel a much stronger package is called for. I agree it would be much better if the app could take say 8 or 10 individuals, then just produce a correlation matrix, so you could look at all the possible links strengths
BTW I haven't looked at Sundrum or Lizard - just Theo/Tony/LewisW and me. Also I decided not to join Telegraph as it wants too many access grants/privileges for my liking. Also, for what it's worth, it didn't seem very likely that TK from RareEarthInvestor was also HamiltonEngineering.
Have fun.
Theo - you ask "So what do you reckon about the cash then? Can’t see them getting past Christmas, can you??"
Simple questions - complex answer.
Pensana is in the late-stage part of the Lassonde curve where it has successfully negotiated through most of the planning/permissions/development stage and has entered the financing stage prior to the final production stage. It already has three significant institutionals' backing - Angolan Sovereign Wealth Fund, HMG Government ATF support and M&G Invesment.
Judging by the lackof volume in PRE trading over the last 3 months, the shareholder register has consolidated and stablised, and trading is now in the hands of a bunch of day traders content to pick up pin money by knocking the price about on the sidelines. Significantly, the 45% of shares held by the 4 largest nominee accounts and their domination has increased steadily over the last year and has now stabilised. We know something about only a few larger investors in these nominee accounts, and not a lot about the volume of private investors in there. What we do know is all investors are holding their positions - surely a sign of confidence that Pensana will make it through to financing?
Secondly - Paul Atherley has openly stated that Pensana really only wants institutional investors and is very happy to see hordes of PI's pushing off. So within Pensana there must be a drive to accumulate PI shares and build a reserve of shares ready for the new institutionals when they pile in and presumably this process has been on-going for quite a while.
Continued....
Thirdly, Angola has invested twice now, and I feel there is a strong possibility that they will be stumping up more cash soon. My thinking here is:
- Angola has been tied down to repaying most of its China debt with a large chunk of its oil exports at discount pricing as part of the 'Belt & Road' deal signed to get the Chinese to rebuild their infrastructure.
- Ukraine has just about killed off Russia's oil and gas exports to the West (if not yet, very soon) and Russia is a forced seller to China, who will no doubt extract a punishing deal to offtake their oil and gas - thereby reducing their needs for Angolan oil imports which will much improve the profits Angola will make selling into world oil markets.
- I haven't got the figures, but oil prices hikes in the last 12 months must mean Angola has already had a bumper year and added considerably to its Sovereign Wealth.
- Angola had already declared its policy to becomes less dependent on oil extraction, and its strategy is now to rebalance to mining and mineral exports, and the UK and EU have agreed that Africa will get support in its trading with Europe/UK
- in recent months both Pensana and HM Govt have put a lot of effort into raising their game/visibilty in Angola with the aim of stronger economic links.
- the Coola assays can only reinforce the confidence and likelihood of further investment by Angola in the whole Pensana/Longonjo project.
What form the fresh investment might take is difficult to say. Certainly Pensana will have to deal with minority/majority shareholding issues in the register, so a top-heavy Angolan SWF holding might not be ideal.
I realise it grates with you, but Pensana must be pretty confident it has something lined up on finance. It will be seen as having sailed much too close to the wind by regulators if the various interviews, conference statements, announcements on imminent financing turn out to be hot air. Similarly, to actively recruit paid staff, (150 or more reportedly) and agree employment contracts under false pretences about the company's viability seems to me to be lunacy if there really is a genuine risk of a "British Volt" event, inevitably followed by redundancies/sackings?
So no, I don't think Pensana is going to run out of cash before Christmas, on the contrary - I'm very much looking forward to getting my Christmas cracker of a bonus the moment the next institutional investor makes its move.
We'll all know in the next 6 weeks - fingers firmly crossed.
Whoops premature posting finger fumble...
Results:
Theo is Hamilton 81%
Hamilton is Hamilton 74%
TK is Hamilton 40%
So there you go - you are more likely to be HamiltonEngineering than the man himself.
Want to 'fess up?
Theo - made me laugh.
Last word on the topic - for China's benefit I roped in some old TK posts from rareearthsinvestor chat. I also took a second (different) set of Hamilton's posts on ADVFN so I could test these against himself. Added your good self of course, then ran NeoNeuro.
Results Thero is Hamilton - 81%
Hamilton is Hamilton - 74%
OK Tony/China/LewisW - fair comment. When I get the time I'll look into RareEarthInvestor to see if there's any author similarities to Theo.
I did run the NeoNeuro app again comparing several posters here to Hamilton - Theorist, TornadoTony, ChinaSyndrome, LewisWinthorpe and (me) Hogsnipe. Again Theo comes up as most likely to be same as Hamilton - but shock news - the second most likely is Tony (though not very). I found out you also need to use roughly the same word-count in the sample texts for each author.
Here's the results:
Theo is Hamilton - probability 66% - result ranking - "maybe"
Tony is Hamilton - probability 44% - result ranking - "hardly"
LewisW is Hamilton - probability 38% - result ranking - "hardly"
Hogsnipe is Hamilton - probability 27% - result ranking - "hardly"
China is Hamilton - probability 23% - result ranking - "hardly"
See this link for a screen print of NeoNeuro's results: https://imgur.com/a/4FeC6xG
Looking at these results we can pretty definitely rule out the last 3 - LewisW/Hogsnipe (I'm definitely NOT Hamiltion)/China (don't make me laugh). So taking 40% as the mean, the spread is roughly 25% points either side, giving a range of 15% to 65%. So 66% for Theo being Hamilton looks like a very significant result.
Tony is ranked where most posters would end up if say 40 or 50 posters were compared, rather than just 5 - so nothing much can be inferred (bet that's a relief Tony!).
I've read that the problem with style analysis of chat room posts is that there's always a common theme and interest in the topic of the board, hence many people will use same phrases, words, quotations, pasted stuff from publications etc which weakens the discrimination in the results. Go figure....
Are HamiltonEngineering and Theorist the same person? One way to investigate is through 'stylometry analysis'
I took a sample text made up of random posts by HamitonEngineering over on ADVFN (they are still there BTW China). I also took some random posts by Theorist here on LSE. Then I found a couple of online stylometric analysis apps which use AI and other algorithms to compare two texts and give a probability they are probably written by the same person.
Language Style Match (LSM) here: http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/exercise/synch/feedback.php
and Authorship Attribution here: https://neoneuro.com/products/authorship-attribution
LSM says they are the same person with 93% certainty
NeoNeuro agrees - same person with 99% certainty.
I offer these findings for you to make your own mind up whether Theo is Hamilton - I have no opinion either way - software is software, not reality.
Have a go yourself - it's just cut and paste. DYOR.
Only Theo knows the answer.....
Tony - some general views on China RE dependency culled from Google May up to now:
A 2018 Pentagon report observed that China had "strategically flooded the global market with rare earths at subsidized prices, driven out competitors and deterred new market entrants."
A Bloomberg report in 2019 indicated that China had drawn up plans to restrict rare earth exports to the U.S., to be executed when necessary, as part of the intensifying trade war.
In June, the Pentagon acknowledged the work of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, a Google subsidiary, which identified a pro-China disinformation campaign that sought to undermine the U.S.-based projects of Lynas and others by mobilizing protests over alleged environmental concerns. See:
https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/dragonbridge-targets-rare-earths-mining-companies
"Neodymium, praseodymium and dysprosium may be the metals of the future, but the only window into their pricing comes from expensive proprietary surveys of transactions among Chinese mining and processing businesses. No superannuation fund is going to stump up equity on the basis of that."
John Coyne, head of the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Center states "China is acting outside of the market to maintain its level of control, so any solution for rare earths is too big for any single nation to address, the solution must be through a form of minilateralism," he said, meaning a small grouping of nations that share common strategic interests. "Some markets are not going to jump ship to new suppliers overnight, so I think a smaller group of like-minded countries could invest heavily with equity, knowing that it would take eight years to get the technology right," Coyne argued. But even then, it would be difficult to compete with Chinese rare earth prices.
China plainly sees geopolitical advantage in its lock on the rare-earth sector. However, it also intends to dominate the manufacture of downstream products, including electric vehicles, wind turbines and batteries - which means it will be absorbing a greater portion of worlwide RE metals supply domestically, implying a supply shortage in a few years.
Neo Performance receives $25 million from Europe's Just Transition fund to build rare earth magnet plant in Estonia.
See link: https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/neo-performance-materials-europe-rare-earth-magnet-plant-estonia
Ever heard of the EU Just Transition Fund?
Me neither.
Pensana neither it seems.
This fund has a 5.8 BILLION euro budget for 2022 rising to 19.7 BILLION euros over 2022-2027.
Deep pockets indeed......
It's all happening - just not in Humberside.
REEtec raises EUR 115 million to build Norway's first industrial rare earth refining/magnets metals plant - output from 2024
See link: https://mercuria.com/media-room/business-news/reetec-raises-eur-115-million-first-industrial-rare-earth-plant
"Through this financing round, LKAB, an international mining and minerals group (wholly owned by Swedish govt), will become the largest shareholder in REEtec. The Norwegian State's climate investment company Nysnø and energy and commodity groups Mercuria and TechMet also participated with new equity alongside existing shareholders."
Nice to see somebody actively raising RE finance in Norway.....
Maybe Pensana should approach Nysnø /LKAB and ditch ABG Sundal Collier?
Theo/??punter - what makes you think it's Pensana's patent? Or even a new patent at all?
Wood Group, supported by Radiation Advice & Solutions Pty Ltd Brisbane) jointly developed the PROPRIETARY method of NORM removal for Longonjo to produce a thorium-free NdPr sulphate concentrate, so the intellectual property is theirs, not Pensana's, who presumably licence it for (probably exclusive) use themselves.
Would you please read and understand the Snowden/OPTIRO Competent Person's Statement for the Longonjo Ore Reserves before making your half-baked claims?
Look here:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjyx5vI-aP7AhWYbcAKHclSDNcQFnoECCQQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpensana.co.uk%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2022%2F09%2FSnowdenOptiro_Pensana_Longonjo_Ore_Res_Statement.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1JD7B4dvk9qhuSeDHdP-FX
The report specifically describes the Longonjo processing as follows:
"To address this issue at Longonjo mine in Angola, the team of international experts at Wood, advised by Radiation Advice &
Solutions P/L, have developed a process route which extracts the rare earths to a clean mixed rare earth double sulphate
(MREDS) product. This includes a final scavenging ion exchange stage which provides additional security in “mopping
up” any residual radionuclides in the unlikely event that the several previous process stages have not fully removed these
small (ppm) residual amounts.
This proprietary processing methodology ensures all naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs) are safely sequestered in a tailings containment facility designed to the 2020 Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management. The containment facility will be resistant against erosion, leaching, intrusion by burrowing animals and constructed in accordance with ANCOLD guidelines."
Pensana is on record( May 2022) as stating:
"The mine will make use of a patented processing technology. Pensana says it is ‘one of the few in the world that has pioneered and championed it’ and which could be applicable to other resources".
Doesn't say Pensana is patenting anything. The Longonjo process "MAKES USE" of an existing patent and the actual process has been refined and engineered by Wood Group, together with Radiation Advice & Solutions Pty Ltd and this solution is PROPRIETARY - look the word up.
End of.
Non FT-subscribers can read the whole article here:
https://www-ft-com.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/content/d01b91d2-d1bb-4d74-93ed-0fd2cae8d232
The whole future of EV manufacture in the UK hinges on British lithium battery production. Because the UK has so little by way of UK-owned vehicle manufacturing, the article suggests that foreign car makers will have to be the funding source for investment in new UK gigafactories. Batteries are too big and costly to transport, and new EU trading legislation/rules of origin require EVs to be manufactured from the ground up within Europe - so the business logic is - unless you get some UK gigafactories built, you can say goodbye entire British EV car industry.
The APC/ATF/Govt funding quandary is how best to encourage this inward gigafactory investment without going down the Nissan/Envision route which simply further increases our China dependency.
The article comes to the conclusion that the APC/ATF/Govt would rather see a multi-pronged gigafactory development plan to put create the 10 gigafactories the UK needs, to be a player in 2040, and has done enough with BritishVolt to get them on the investment trail.
IMHO - given the hundreds of millions the EU is pouring into attracting gigafactory builders into their countries, it was a pretty stupid move for the sake of just £30m support, for the APC/ATF and Govt to undermine all of the progress made with BritishVolt in the last 3 years and damage the confidence of potential investors, just as we appear to be going into a UK recession.
Given that the sponsoring govt dept - BEIS - is remarkably sanguine about mislaying 160 times that amount in COVID business support loan fraud (£4.9bn down the khazi) - some sense of proportion is called for here.
Both projects are fully permitted says Tim George as Pensana starts construction recuitment and placing plant orders:
https://www.business-live.co.uk/economic-development/recruitment-underway-pensana-orders-placed-25366142
"Recruitment underway at Pensana as orders placed for infrastructure to build £150m (???) chemical plant".
"Tim George, chief executive, said: “Following the recent ground breaking ceremony we are delighted to have moved out of the study phase and into the construction phase for both projects. We now have a multi-disciplinary team of over 120 engineers working across both projects.
“Our project delivery teams led by Hamish Westwater for Saltend and Kevin Botha for Longonjo are working closely with our main contractors on the long lead items and the other preparatory work ahead of the main construction.
“Both projects are fully permitted, operationally robust with fit-for-purpose technical solutions for both Angola and the UK. The value engineering exercise we undertook early this year has given us confidence that we can maintain the overall project timeline and budget in an environment of significant inflationary pressure.”
Mining Weekly reported from the Las Vegas Rare Earths Conference, last week's presentation given by William Izod:
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/pensana-positions-saltend-to-reap-supply-chain-diversification-rewards-2022-10-19
"In this regard, Pensana is in offtake discussions with US-based and European automotive OEMs, as well as major European wind turbine clients. Initial offtake is expected to stem from companies in East Asia and later the UK, the US and Europe, while Pensana expects third-party feedstock to come from South America and Europe. To date, Pensana has secured a 25% of yearly production agreement with a major magnet producer"
If it's a major European wind turbine producer, the most likely ccandidates would be GE(France), Seimens-Gamesa (Germany & Spain) and Vestas (Denmark)