RE: Happy17 Nov 2023 09:04
Morning Dorf,
The modules are simply condensers in the same manner as Roan is. Feed source goes in one size and comes out much smaller, making it much more efficient to go through the refinery. The modules are easily produced and deployed taking 6-8 months from order to going live. They can vary in size depending on the size dump they are dealing with.
So, this is my take. Firstly there are basically 2 types of feed stuff. The first being what was termed as rocks at the AGM. This is the waste that is thrown away by miners. So it has never been processed before. The industry deemed this as impossible to process and simply discarded it. It was basically removed from the mine to get to the easy to process ore and binned. When Jubilee started this concept a few years ago, this material was not on the agenda and is a huge bonus offering massive extra capacity. Jubilee have already announced a life of mine contract for this material and this type of material is going to be predominately processed by Roan. This I took to be the first priority to get Sable ramping up around Christmas time with predominately this type of feed. There appears to be great potential for this type of ore, with many contracts being discussed, but with the priority of getting Sable up to 14k tonnes in the New Year. Biggest risk as i perceive it, would be getting the material to Roan, the first module and Sable because of rainy season approaching. The infrastructure is appalling in SA. Hopefully they have been stockpiling and the roads remain good. The plan is to get Sable up to 14 tonnes imminently with any excess material being sold directly in to market as a 20% copper contained solution. This process can then be replicated, for other miners as cash flow allows. There is plenty of feed source to attack and is constantly being produced. This nut has been completed cracked and roll out is on its way, along with the cash flow this will produce.
Secondly we have tailings, material that has already been processed, but not all the copper was recovered. It would appear this nut is very close to being cracked and i think they will be in a position by Christmas to confirm this after the semi commercial trials have been concluded. All the trails so far have been extremely successful with extraction at as much as 80% of copper, which i believe is outstanding. They are using the Draslovka process technology in this process. No doubt this will come with some sort of fee, but in comparison to the potential of releasing 80% of the contained copper, fades into insignificance in my mind.
Whilst there will be clearly no funding requirements for the southern project ( Sable & Roan ) as virtually complete, im not so sure for the Northern project and how big they want to go initially. But i perceive funding should be relatively easy with the cash flow provided by Sable and the excess concentrate sold combined with the current asset value.
This is just my take.