George Frangeskides, Chairman at ALBA, explains why the Pilbara Lithium option ‘was too good to miss’. Watch the video here.
The first target in the ramp up is to reach 400 tonnes per month, so if that picture shows about 100 tonnes, its a weeks worth of production waiting to be loaded up and shipped out. Worth nearly $1m at current prices.
Hope we've got a bigger storage yard sorted out for when we get to the target of 25,000 tonnes per year
Thanks for spotting and sharing shivers. It does indeed look like a lot of copper, but remember its chicken feed compared to what we will be producing in the near future.
Also some other pictures up that are encouraging. The 4th one is titled "Zinc Refining Circuit under construction", and then further down we have pictures on Sulphuric Acid being shipped out. Not a major income stream, but all adds to the bottom line.
Current status on the website is also saying Q3 for zinc production to start, so sometime between July and September. Not sure what’s happening with star zinc though. I haven’t been paying much attention on that, but don’t remember seeing any news that the licence has been granted.
Don’t think it’ll be an issue for us though, we’ve more than enough tailings to be getting on with whether or not star zinc is ready to supply extra material this year.
Yes I think its been mentioned by LC before that its not worthwhile building our own smelter for the quantiy we'll be producing. Its a numbers game, once the cost of building and running one is less than the value we lose from just selling concentrate, then it'd be a no brainer.
I'm not sure whether we will ever get to the point of producing enough PGMs to make it worthwhile though. Our growth over the next few years seems more likely to be coming from expanding into other metals rather than significantly increasing PGMs to the point where our own smelter would be benifical.
According to WHI rhodium is on average 8% of our PGM basket. Also need to factor in the arragements at windsor where Northam get a %.
But still, the rising prices are a healthy addition to the bottom line. And platinum looks like its could be back to a decent value soon after many years of depressed prices, which is really going to help as that makes up the majority of the basket
I think there’s a good chance future deals will be along similar terms or better. Owners of tailings have choices to make, leave that material sitting around with rising prices, spend a lot of cash on trying to develop their own reprocessing solution which may or may not work, or take a % for doing nothing other than letting us do all the work with proven success.
Yes pretty reassuring to see the SP consolidating around this level. It certainly makes a change from seeing the SP stuck in the 3-4p range not so long ago. Not sure when the next move up will be, but I doubt the likes of jupiter would be investing at 13p in a non-dividend paying stock if they didn't think there would be further growth in the near future.
No harm in being optismistic dorfan. But will be quite a few of us here that have seen it all before, Tjate getting hyped as a magic cash cow that'll make £B's, while the real story and what will make the money is the tailings
The timing does seem odd, and difficult to know the reasons. Perhaps he just feels he's had enough, perhaps he's got his eye on something else. If he's decided to go, announcing now before the drill together with news of a placing would have less of a negative impact than announcing shortly after drill results.
Taking a glass half full approach, perhaps he's seeing a good opportunity for an exit after the drill. It would not go down at all well if directors sold up after one bit of good news after a the failures.
Guzz, I think after the placing DW will hold about 1%.
So when he leaves, it looks like he'll be free to buy or sell without disclosing. If he's going to be selling, it'd obviously be in his interests to sell at the best possible price, so I'd say probably won't be a distressed seller. Its not as though he hasn't had a comfortable salary for the past few years.
My thoughts as well Nelson.
Two factors have really ended any doubt for me on whether we will ever see JLP develop Tjate.
1. WHI gave zero value to Tjate last year. They have better insight and understanding of future plans than any of us.
2. The updated NPV that was buried in the 2018 Annual report.
Value will be unlocked when we sell it. I can't see a tailings deal will work, anyone putting in the cash required for developing a new mine now will see what we've done with tailings and do much better with recovery in the first instance. Where we're getting value from tailings is from historic tailings where metal recovery wasn't great, or from sources like Hernic/Windsor where the initial recovery is for Chrome and the PGMs get left behind in the tailings.
Approx 300,000oz per year was the initial plan I believe, covering only part of the possible resource.
Plenty of information out there, but you have to go back a few years. Not much has been said since the mining licence was granted, as priorities have shifted to more profitable ventures which don't cost £100's millions to do.
Mickie, yes Tjate could produce a lot of PGMs. But the issue here is cost, it'll be a deep level mine. Even if we develop it, we'd never be able to produce PGMs at anywhere near the same cost per Oz as we get from our surface opperations. And if PGM prices fall we'd have a large loss making mine on our hands (which is probable will happen at some point over a 20-30 year life of the mine). Unlike at the moment, where if PGM prices fall, all it means is we make less profit rather than a loss.
We'd be better off selling Tjate and using the cash to expand the surface operations, these are more profitable and much lower risk than deep level mining. I have little doubt this will be CB/LCs thinking, and they'll sell when the time is right and a decent enough offer is on the table.
Yes if it was a director they'd have to disclose the directors dealings differently.
So we have an employee below director level willing to put in £180k of their own cash. Seems like a vote of confidence to me.
Only mentions options on here, no mention of warrants:
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/JLP/exercise-of-options/14853490
gshivers, not sure on what the current plan for lead is, apart from it'll follow zinc. At one point, it was to be the 3rd stage of the project, after vanadium, but I think the last I remember seeing on V was that'll now be last.
See the RNS from Aug 2019 when we bought Sable
https://www.lse.co.uk/rns/JLP/completion-of-acquisition-in-kabwe-joint-broker-nnq9zvl1ebevxty.html
Lead - "initial targeted capacity of 11,000 tonnes per annum of lead contained in a high-grade concentrate "
The same RNS also said:
"Phase 1: Upgrade and commissioning of the copper refining circuit with a targeted capacity of 3,000 tonnes of refined copper per annum" and
"The Kabwe Refinery process flowsheet offers flexibility with two separated fully equipped electro-winning circuits able to produce either high grade copper or zinc with only minor adjustments. The Company can allocate this refining capacity either to both metals individually or a combination of the two metals depending on the prevailing market conditions to maximise returns."
Clearly things have moved on since then and plans have been much changed and expanded for copper.
That's my understanding as well Johah. When copper was first mentioned, it was more a side show to Zinc, and would be something we could be producing before the Zinc parts of circuit were fully opperational. (Sable being already set up to produce copper when we bought it). Afterwhich, Copper and Zinc production would be interchangable, but not necessarily both at the same time.
Clearly things have moved on a lot in the short time since we bought Sable. We now have huge resources of copper material which dwarf the zinc/lead tailings at Kabwe, and Sable is now needed to produce copper full time.
But then we still have a Kabwe tailings, and there's been no indication that Zinc won't be produced. So I think its reasonable to assume the plans have changed to expand Sable to enable zinc prodcution at the same time as copper production.
It is claimed star zinc has silver, CB has been keen to talk about in the past. If the silver price keeps going up, wouldn’t be surprised to see GLR put out an RNS to remind people.
But it’s interesting what’s happening with the Reddit short squeezes. A randomly organised collective taking on the hedge funds to force them to close short positions at huge losses sounds far fetched, but stranger things have happened.