RE: Not invested, but...9 Aug 2021 08:33
Bill Gates-backed KoBold funding Bluejay battery metals mine in Greenland
An Aim-quoted mining company with rights to explore in Greenland has struck a “transformative” deal with a group backed by Bill Gates to drill for metals used in electric vehicle batteries.
Bluejay Mining said that KoBold Metals, backed by the Microsoft billionaire’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, would fund up to $15 million of drilling in its Disko-Nuussuaq licence area using its “data-led exploration techniques”. In return KoBold, which is based in California, will take a 51 per cent stake in the licence, which spans nearly 3,000 sq km of central west Greenland.
Bluejay believes that the Disko project could contain huge deposits of copper, cobalt and nickel — metals that are in increasing demand for use in batteries.
Breakthrough, chaired by Gates, counts many of the world’s most prominent billionaires among its investors, including Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin’s founder, Jack Ma, the chairman of Alibaba, and Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder. KoBold’s other big shareholders include Equinor, the Norwegian state oil group.
Kurt House, KoBold’s chief executive, said that the Disko region had experienced “the rare convergence of events in Earth’s history that could have resulted in forming a world-class battery metal deposit”.
Bluejay has no revenues and reported a £2.5 million pre-tax loss last year. Its biggest shareholders are Sand Grove, M&G and Roderick McIllree, 47, its chairman. It also has a significant retail shareholder base. Its primary focus has been its Dundas project in Greenland, where it wants to mine ilmenite, a source of titanium dioxide, a white pigment used in paints and paper.
Bluejay bought an initial interest in Disko from Cairn Energy in 2017 and has expanded its position. It had planned to drill at Disko last year, but was derailed by the pandemic. McIllree said it was hoped that drilling could commence next year and he shrugged off concerns of opposition to mining in Greenland, saying that it was “one of the pillars that Greenland sees as being the financial part of their independence” from Denmark.
Bluejay’s stake in Disko will be further diluted if it does not match KoBold’s investment after the initial $15 million. McIllree said that the largest potential ore body would require “an enormous amount of capital” to develop, but that if the drilling confirmed a discovery then “our ability to fund this will be very simple”.Monday August 09 2021, 12.01am, The Times
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