TRANSCRIPTION OF FINANCE NEWS NETWORK INTERVIEW WITH VENTURE MINERALS LIMITED
(ASX:VMS) MANAGING DIRECTOR, HAMISH HALLIDAY
Clive Tompkins: Hello Clive Tompkins reporting for the Finance News Network. Joining me from Venture Minerals to discuss its upgrade to its Mt. Lindsay project is Managing Director, Hamish Halliday. Hamish welcome back, can you start with today’s announcement?
Hamish Halliday: The size of the resource itself is very significant – a 100,000 tonnes of contained tin-tungsten metal is a major deposit on a world scale and I think over and above that is the grade as well is very key, at a combined grade of 0.81 tin equivalent. That’s basically double your average tin project or tungsten project worldwide. So it’s a significant scale project and it is a very good quality grade on a world scale.
Clive Tompkins: What about access to the actual resource?
Hamish Halliday: The majority of the resource is contained within the top 200 metres and so all of those resources will be amendable to open pit mining. And that is a key point because an enormous amount of resources of tin and tungsten around the world are underground narrow mines, whereas we’ve got 20 metre wide zones that are all sitting in the top 200 metres.
Clive Tompkins: Can you tell us about the first schematic here with the priority exploration targets?
Hamish Halliday: Sure, I mean the real key to this project has always been the ultimate scale of the tenement packages as far as opportunities for more of these systems. So far we’ve drilled out 2.6 kilometres of skarns and delivered what is a world class resource, but we’ve got ten/twelve times that that we haven’t even looked at yet, and some of the ones that are of immediate priority are No. 1 Skarn and Waterhouse Skarn, which are immediately parallel to the zones. And then further out from there is Reward where we’ve already drilled one hole and had 70 plus metres of tin mineralisation. So the chances of us delivering more and more resources on the southern part of the project is extremely good and we will continue to target those areas with three drill rigs indefinitely, certainly over the medium to long term on that.Shifting back out even more on scale, there’s the whole western and northern margins of the Meredith Granite where we’ve identified another 20 odd strike kilometres of skarns which we know already contain tin-tungsten and magnetite mineralisation within them. So from a scale point of view this project has the potential to deliver some serious long term mine life. And then when you add in the infrastructure advantages of having a sealed road within 2km’s of the project that run straight to a rail line that runs straight to a port, all of which have spare capacity, all of which are Government owned and are obviously looking for business. So the infrastructure is second to none and that is an extremely important point. Discoveries like this are very rarely found close to such good infrastructure. Add in hydropower, with three hydropower stations within 17km’s of the project and you’ve got a fantastic start to any mining operation.
Clive Tompkins: Development and time frame - you mentioned that you’ve got three rigs permanently on site and you’re going to get some results back in the medium term. What is the medium term?
Hamish Halliday: Where we’re having results stream from those drilling programmes ongoing, so you know, every month we’ll expect to see results coming through. The rigs are targeting multiple - skarn areas, some of them specifically for tin, some of them for tin-tungsten magnetite. What we’re looking what for and what we’re prioritising Clive, is the higher grade zones that we’ve already identified and an example of that would be the Reward Hole where we had nearly 10 metres at a percent tin in the first drill hole. Now those sorts of intersections are fantastic and if we can get more of those, then we can load those high grade, near surface tonnes into our current resources. None of those exploration hits are in this current resource but they will be put into the resources over the next few months, so that’s the stream of news flow from the drilling.
Clive Tompkins: Okay and then this is all with a view to pre-feasibility study?
Hamish Halliday: Yeah, the sort of process from here on in is a fairly consistent drill-out programme for the pre-feasibility study. Now we haven’t formally started that yet and we were in the phase of doing a scoping study update at the moment, which will come out in the next month. And then on the back of that, we’ll commence a pre-feasibility study which will be completed by the fourth quarter of this year and that will provide us with a platform to go straight into a feasibility study.I mean if you stand back and look at where the project’s at now Clive, it will be a mine. It’s just a case of how big and how long it will take, and you know, the specifics of whether we can go after the tin first or the tungsten, or how we actually schedule it. I mean those are the issues we’re sorting out now, we’re well over the point of having enough tonnes. You know the resources are there, it will be a mine and it’s just a matter of time.
Clive Tompkins: And then the sixty-four million dollar question – funding?
Hamish Halliday: Funding I guess from the exploration and pre-feasibility stand point is all done. We’ve 12.3 million in the bank and we’re very efficient explorers so we make that go a long way. So we’ll get all the way through to completion of pre-f/s with cash reserves left over. From that point onwards we need to decide how we want to fund the feasibility study itself and we already have multiple offers to assist us with funding that. And then the next step from that point onwards is the fund of our allotment. Now you’re dealing in commodities that have a lot of companies within that space that look to fund these projects and these include off-take partners to other mining companies in the same space throughout Europe, Asia. And we’re definitely in discussions with a lot of those groups to work out whether there’re some funding strategies we can utilise there. And then obviously the equity markets are there for us as well, to see this project’s strong enough to hold debt as well. So there are many opportunities for funding and generally speaking the performance of the company and that the mar cap of the company will drive which direction we go and that’s something we’ll work on for the next twelve to eighteen months.
Clive Tompkins: Hamish thanks for the update.ENDS
