Neometals Limited (ASX:NMT) Managing Director Chris Reed discusses the company’s lithium and titanium projects and metals processing IP.Neometals Limited
(ASX:NMT) is a project developer based in Western Australia. So we have globally significant resources of lithium and titanium. What we try to do is to bring good human and financial capital to those businesses, a processing technology that can lead to lower Opex and Capex. And attract big partners in to execute our projects. We’re happy taking risk with the drill bit or in the test lab, but when it comes to the execution of monetisation, we try to bring in very strong partners. And we’ve done that certainly with the lithium project and we look to do that with the titanium project.
Mt Marion lithium project is located about 40 kilometres southwest of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia. It currently has a JORC compliant resource of 78.8 million tonnes at 1.37 per cent lithium oxide. So we are currently commissioning the project with first exports planned for this month. We have an MoU with Mineral Resources Limited
(ASX:MIN) for a downstream lithium processing plant, which we plan to locate close to Mt Marion near Kalgoorlie. We are in a stage of doing, planning a frontend engineering design. We hope to have that ready for a final investment decision in the third quarter of next year.
The Barrambie titanium project is located about 65 kilometres southeast of Meekatharra. It has a resource of about 48 million tonnes of TiO2, grading about 20 per cent TiO2. At this stage, we’ve completed a prefeasibility study on that and we’re now in the optimisation phase, before starting a DFS hopefully towards the end of next year. The technology that we are using for the Barrambie project, we’ve licensed from some Canadians. We have the exclusive rights to that. We are going to commercialise that technology with the aid of Sedgman, the engineers. So basically, Sedgman are going to introduce the technology to their clients and they get a point of the exclusive EPC Engineer, for the technology.
The company is in excellent financial shape. As of 30th September, we had about $65 million in cash on the balance sheet and listed investments of about $11 million. No debt, and cash flow commencing from the Mt Marion project, hopefully early next year. So certainly in 12 months from now, we’d like to be included in the ASX 300. That would be one of my short-term targets, to have Mt Marion operating at steady state production and looking at potentially an expansion. The longer-term horizon, we’d like to have a market cap of over $1 billion, to continue to share the money that we make with our shareholders, which is one of our important values.
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