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More likely that recent tanking global rare earths/strategic metals prices caused the SP dip/recovery. Global RE/strategic metal prices have been in free fall since June 8th (as has PRE) but now on the rebound in last day or two.
Go here: https://www.mvis-indices.com/charting and have a look at the MVIS Index for Global Rare Earths/Strategic Metals Price index and compare that to PRE chart for the last couple of weeks.
Click here MJM3:
https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/pre/research-ratings?countrycode=uk&mod=quotes,quotes,quotes
Now there's a nice PRE closing quotation!
Tony - mining stocks generally took a pasting today.
Copper giant Antofagasta fell 2.8 per cent, or 39.5p, to 1393.5p, Glencore was down 4.8 per cent, or 24.2p to 481.3p, Rio Tinto dropped 1.9 per cent, or 110p, to 5580p and Anglo American slid 2.6 per cent, or 94.5p, to 3518.5p.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine the FTSE 350 Mining index has collapsed from 18,500 by 8,000 points to 10,500 - that's a 43% hit. It's been meandering around this level for 3 months now.
I've suspected for some time that PRE SP (in the absence of any positive or negative news) just follows the mining sector, so today's SP drop probably doesn't reflect any adverse Pensana news or developements IMHO.
Latest June news on Pensana webpage - 06 Jun BMO Rare Earth Supply Chain – JUNE 2022 Presentation - see it here:
https://pensana.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/BMO_Rare_Earth_Supply_Chain_JUNE-2022.pdf
Don't get excited though - it's the same as the one given on April 2:
https://pensana.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Pensana-Plc-Corporate-Presentation-WEBSITE-April-2022.pdf
and in May at AMVEST INDABA:
https://pensana.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Pensana-Plc-AMVEST-webinar-MAY-2022-Presentation.pdf
and probably by PA yesterday for his 25 minute slot at the Global Mining Finance Conference as well.
Surely Pensana could make the effort to update progress since Apr 2?
The 6 June version STILL shows the old Saltend planning application site photo/plant mockup & there's no reference to new site/Saltend planning permission/final FEED announcements, ATF award, etc
PA is doing a slot at the Jun 7 Global Mining Finance Conference 2022. http://www.global-mining-finance.com/
11.55 am – Independent and Sustainable Rare Earth Production.
Sponsor, Pensana PLC, Speaker, Paul Atherley, Chairman.
Global Mining Finance conferences connect listed mining companies with financiers, mining professionals, and investors.
You begin to wonder just what ABG Sundal Collier are doing for their money if PA needs to do basic ground-level stuff like this?
Gloomsters, please read for a balanced and rational assessment of PRE's current worth as an investment:
https://masterinvestor.co.uk/commodities/two-footholds-in-the-rare-earths-industry/?mc_cid=ec725e4548&mc_eid=288f0b71de
Dated April 2022 so the ATF grant hadn't materialised then, but that now adds to PRE's investment potential.
I have more than 60% of the posters here filtered out. If this board goes further down the tubes there'll only be 3 or 4 contributors left who are worth reading.
Simple suggestion - if you don't like what people say about you here, or they won't respond to your questions, or you don't value their input, or you just think they are lying lowlife - why not just filter them out and give us all a rest from the endless rubbishing and name-calling?
If you want to have a dig at me about freedom of information/censorship/freedom of debate, etc - go right ahead - I'll likely never see your post anyhow.
Interesting article dated yesterday here:
https://www.business-live.co.uk/manufacturing/offtake-plans-progressing-pensana-robust-24055829
Reckons Saltend will be in full production during 2024. Says that discussions are ongoing for 50% 2025 output offtake by Asian magnet manufacturer, and another 30% by a 'major trading house'.
Also mentions that "Further backing from government has also been rumoured this past week."
Near the end of the article there's a very interesting statement that Pensana are designing Saltend to also process feedstock from ionic clay deposits, not just Longonjo feed - suggests ties with other miners maybe??
Nothing much new but all positive stuff.
Back at the start of the year in Jan, the ATF awarded British Volt £100M for their North-East gigafactory plant investment. The government backing annoucement included the comment- "The support from the government will help unlock a significant amount of further support from private investors".
In the weeks following Abrdn, Tritax and Glencore all piled in with £1.7bn funding for British Volt.
Now Pensana has (at long last) been awarded the ATF £4M funding, government ministers are again saying "Its latest grant is intended to help Persana unlock the private investment needed to fund the plant, which is expected to cost £150m and create 125 jobs."
If Pensana succeed in leveraging the same ratio of Private Investor to ATF funding (17:1) - we could be looking at £68M private funding over the next few weeks - more than enough to get Saltend and Angola construction underway.
LSE keeps removing my post - I'm guessing it's because I quoted a Pr*ssR*ader link to the article of interest , or maybe they just don't like the word 'Pr*ssR*ader'. (e for *)
So here is my third and final attempt to post an update on where PA is going with his Tees Port Lithium refinery, see different link to the same story here:
https://www.business-live.co.uk/business/manufacturing/the-demand-scale-says-man-23949628
PA set up Alkemy Investment plc in early 2021 and he's the majority stock owner with 2 directors (Ruth Pein - geologist) and Sam Quinn (lawyer/secretary).
Alkemy 100% owns Tees Valley Lithium plc - who recently appointed 2 directors - CEO John Walker and Sam Quinn again.
PA reckons he'll get planning permission this summer for the Tees Port Chemical Park site he's taken a £60K option on, and by 2030 he'll be supplying 15% of all European lithium demand.
If this is PA's next big thing, you have to wonder just what he's got in mind for Pensana to clear the decks?
As a news subscriber, I get Pensana updates via my email - today's (all about free electricity for Pensana from a giant 200MW battery 10km away) mentions a presentation PA will give covering the latest Saltend update, to the Indaba conference: Investing in African Mining Indaba, to be held in Cape Town from 9 to 12 May 2022.
Here's the presentation (final version)as of 16:40 06 May 2022:
https://pensana.co.uk/company-update-presentation-mining-indaba-cape-town/
It's title is:
Independent and Sustainable Rare Earth Production Establishing the world’s first Rare Earth processing hub at Saltend Chemicals Park Humber Freeport UK
Guess what? - it shows the original planning application swampland Abadan site at Saltend - not the current proposed site at Reedmere, and offers not a word of explanation.
Hope he gets some probing questions on that....
Tony - unfortunately Stage 3 rings far too many bells for comfort:
"Stage 3 is the period when the studies have largely been completed and a production decision is pending. At this time the company will be seeking strategic partners and project funding. Permitting is also underway. Unfortunately a lack of financing or poor permitting efforts will extend the time in Stage 3, which can extend for decades or even perpetuity. It’s easy to rattle off the names of companies sitting in Stage 3; for example Donlin Creek, Casino, KSM, and Galore Creek. It seems that once locked in a prolonged Stage 3, it can be difficult to get out of it. Company promotion and marketing can be difficult".
If only the UK had a critical minerals strategy like the rest of the West - come on Boris - get to it.
Adamas Intelligence has doubled its NdPr oxide price forecast to average well over US$200,000 per tonne for the next decade due to double digit growth in EV and Offshore Wind and the supply side struggling to keep up.
The demand for NdPr oxide is forecast to grow with a CAGR of 8.3% from 2022 to 2035 due to burgeoning demand from EVs and Offshore Wind and the supply side struggling to keep up. New production scheduled to come on stream and expansion from existing producers, including those in China, is expected to achieve only 5.4% CAGR over the same period. As a result, global shortages are expected from 2026 onwards
The capacity of rare-earth companies in Ganzhou, East China's Jiangxi Province - one of China's biggest rare-earth manufacturing bases - has been cut by at least 25 percent compared to last year, after major border gates for rare-earth minerals from Myanmar to China shut down again for COVID isolation at the beginning of the year, which has largely affected raw material supply. Myanmar accounts for about half of China's rare-earth mineral supply.
Industry insiders warned of a potential price hike in the near future, as major border ports, including one in Yunnan's Diantan township, that are regarded as major channels for rare-earth mineral shipments, remain closed due to COVID. "We haven't received any notification on the ports' reopening," a manager of a state-owned rare-earth enterprise surnamed Yang based in Ganzhou confirmed. The COVID situation continues to deteriorate in many parts of China, dur to their ineffective vaccine and poor rates of vaccination of the elderly.
As raw materials from Myanmar are now in short supply, local refiners in Ganzhou are only operating at 75 percent of their full capacity. Some are even lower than that.
That will aggravate the imbalance between supply and demand. Some countries have a strategic rare-earth reserve of three to six months, but this is only for the short-term. Despite a mild drop in recent days, the price of rare earths will continue "operating at a relatively high range," and there may be another round of price hikes on the way.
(source: Global News)
Gaia - do you believe Pensana is going to develop both sites? Where did you get your June build start date from? I couldn't find anything in the RNS to either effect. They do claim that Saltend site geotech drilling/trenching is underway - but not which site is referred to. Since they haven't yet got planning approval for Reedmere, it's not very likely they're permitted to start this work yet, so they may just be fronting work which PX Group is undertaking anyway to support advertising and leasing of the Reedmere site generally.
Mumbles/Tony - Crux Investors previously did a piece on Pensana back in October 3, 2020, concluding: "Atherley is certainly confident, with pom-poms at the ready, declaring, "you should buy some shares now and see how much money I'm going to make you along the way." We'll definitely be referencing this in a few months time is he doesn't deliver"
Well Crux Investors are back - here's a link to a Crux Investors video interview with PA a week ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nQ0YbamzVU
Curiously, PA was drawn on the make-up of the share register - particularly the size of retail investor holdings. PA said the kind of investors they are now want are institutional funds and that "there are funds now wanting to take more of the business". PA estimates (at 20:25) that (excluding directors holdings) about 30% of the register is still in the hands of retail investors. He says "they will sell" and (20:26) "we will have to generate the buying to take them out" - an astonishing off-the-cuff remark.
He states (19:41) that Virginia's job is to continue the transition from retail to institutional investor ownership.
He concludes (19:49) - "we want people in the company who want to own more of the company".
So there it is - notably no reference or explanation why PRE is back in planning approval for a major new site, though he does say construction at Saltend will begin in "a few months, no - weeks" at the end, so he must be confident approval is nigh.
It's clear that if PRE want to displace retail investors, and replace them by the institutional fund investors now queued up and demanding volume buys, now would obviously be a very good time for a tree-shake - hence the trolling/shorts/down-ramping - question is - who is doing it? Watch the share register breakdown at Pensana's Investors page over the next few weeks and we'll see where the action's going on.
With luck and some positive PRE financing news in the next month or two - it's the last chance saloon for the tree-shakers.
Why is Boris/HMG fannying around trying to concoct our very own UK Critical Minerals Strategy (CMS)?
Do we really need waste years going over the extensive ground-work done by the EU, USA and Australia over the last half decade - no - the strategic issues and imperatives for CMS are already beyond clear. There is no justification or time for going over the ground yet again.
There is a perfectly obvious strategy readily available off the shelf - see for example:
https://www.industry.gov.au/data-and-publications/2022-critical-minerals-strategy
All the necessary footslog has already been done - just pick out the appropriate bits for the UK out of this all-encompassing document and move on:
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Do-Business/Files/Futures/Critical-energy-minerals-roadmap/21-00041_MR_REPORT_CriticalEnergyMineralsRoadmap_WEB_210420.pdf
What is desperately needed now is some action on the ground, not endless waffle with business breakfasts, policy and strategy sub-committees, promises of reports, sometime maybe never....
Does Boris not understand that we, the UK, are already trailing the field in a dog-eat-dog race for limited supplies of essential minerals to build his greener future?
Does he worry that we are pitted against the likes of China, USA, Australia and the EU who are already spending vast amounts of money to make absolutely sure they will not be among the losers in this race?
In the US, the Administration highlighted in March that MP Materials has been awarded $35 million by the federal government to separate and process heavy rare earth elements, and it has announced it will invest an additional $700 million in the magnet supply chain.
In Australia, The government established the $2 billion Critical Minerals Facility in 2021. The facility is administered by Export Finance Australia. It will help projects aligned with the Critical Minerals Strategy overcome gaps in private finance to get off the ground. In February 2022, the Critical Minerals Facility issued its first loans for up to 1/4 billion US$ to 2 Australian companies.
China has consolidated its ragbag bunch of polluting Rare Earth pirates into a single mega-company under complete state authority and control, and is mopping up other countries' critical minerals sources as fast as it can sign the cheques.
And we have - the ATF - a paper work black hole.
Dishy Rishy is currently sitting on some £35bn to £55bn of unexpected savings in borrowings, windfall receipts and other proceeds of fiscal excess.
Time to get your finger out HMG and start putting this cash where it will make a difference - not next year, not in a few months - now - or else.
PreNut - re: Business Live update story - the mag doesn't really live up to it's name does it? - the photo shows the old abandoned site.
Here's a schematic of Wood Group's design for the new planning application Reedmere plant site:
https://imgur.com/a/Fos3ToZ
I'm still bemused that Pensana apparently see no need to offer confirmation and explanation for a major change of location, and the resulting backtrack on planning approval, to their investors.
Adz-K - here's a drect link to the same magazine article:
https://mine.nridigital.com/mine_mar22/pensana_angola_yorkshire
I've just checked the current planning application for the new Saltend - Reedmere site for Pensana and I can see the internal "target" date to complete this application is 18 April. Public consultation ends in about 2 weeks on Mar 28.
There has been a fair amount of public comment - mostly adverse, about the the closeness and safety of the site to the local community. However, it is reported that a site clearance of trees and vegetation has been ongoing on the proposed Pensana site during recent weeks - this is unlikely to be Pensana themselves at work - more likely to be Humber Freeport/Saltend Chemical Park facilities management heading off possible "tree-hugger" objections.
Other industry consultations are ongoing with Highways/Yorkshire Water/National Grid - largely seems like routine clarification and forward agreements in the light of Pensana's proposed site operational management.