Why did Anglo American agree to the JV?17 Mar 2024 17:44
Jarvy recently highlighted a part in one of the investor calls where John Meyer congratulated Nick on the JV and asked what it was that persuaded Anglo to agree to the "unprecedented" deal.
To me the answer is pretty clear. What was the first thing that Anglo did when the exclusivity period was announced prior to the deal? They took the soil samples which Arc had previously taken to map the whole license area and had them re-assayed to determine the copper-scandium ratio. This is absolutely key and despite me banging on about it, something which I think many shareholders still don't fully appreciate. The copper-scandium footprint which directly mapped the Sentinel deposit is also present in several locations across Arc's licenses. This is directly pointing to where the hydrothermal brines which leached the copper and other minerals has reached the surface. It's basically a big treasure map "X" saying here be copper! This method relies on the soil at surface being representative of whats below it, ie, there hasn't been too much mixing due to flooding etc. Why is it that other companies in the area are not employing this same method? Simple, the Kalahari Sands cover much of the land to the South and West of Arc's licenses... so companies like (for example) African Pioneer cannot use this method, instead having to rely on other EM surveying and drilling to test anomalies.... much more expensive and time consuming. Even FQM trident area is partly covered by Kalahari sands so they were unable to completely map the licenses in the South.
https://tinyurl.com/crkz25va
The soil samples on Arc's licenses are at a lower resolution (1km crossline and 500m inline) compared to Trident area (300m crossline by 300m inline) but the correlation is clear to see, and as David Wood said in his SEG paper on the method:
"Down-sampling of the data demonstrates that the patterns in the data that are indicative of mineralisation processes would still be very obvious even at a sample spacing of 1× 1 km. Indeed, a deposit the size of Sentinel still shows up very clearly on this sample spacing. A 1 × 1km survey over the same area would have cost less than $100,000. It is better to define the footprint of the system and then look for the orebody within that footprint."
We have footprints all over our licenses.
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