Transcription of Finance News Network Interview with Potash West NL (ASX:PWN) Managing Director and CEO, Patrick McManusLelde Smits: Hello I’m Lelde Smits for the Finance News Network and joining me from Potash West
(ASX:PWN) is its Managing Director and CEO, Patrick McManus. Patrick welcome to the Gold Coast Resources Showcase.
Patrick McManus: Thank you Lelde.
Lelde Smits: Potash West is currently working on taking your Dandaragan Trough project in West Australia’s Perth Basin, to production. At what stage is prefeasibility work?
Patrick McManus: In the last year, we’ve announced the JORC resource and the results of the scoping study based on that resource. And that’s certainly indicated that there is a viable project on the Dandaragan Trough. And we’re now looking to go into the next stage of prefeasibility work, which is basically building and operating a pilot plant to prove up the process.
Lelde Smits: So what timeline have you put on construction and commissioning the project, and what major milestones do you need to reach before then?
Patrick McManus: There’re probably three major milestones before we actually start construction, which could be in about 2016. One is to build the pilot plant, run that and from the results of that test work, complete a prefeasibility. From the prefeasibility, assuming it to be positive, we’d go on and do a feasibility study. That would be completed in about 2015 and we’d be then looking to raise money to actually do the pilot construction.
Lelde Smits: Now you’ve recently announced fresh greensands mineralisation. How did the results support or expand upon previous results?
Patrick McManus: One, there’s an exploration target in the Dinner Hill area of between one and 1.5 billion tonnes. So it’s about 10 times more than we’ve currently got as a JORC. And secondly, about 50 kilometres away we’ve got a very thick intersection of greensands, which underpins our belief that the resource in this region will be very, very large.
Lelde Smits: Last time we spoke in March, you had identified an opportunity to produce a better quality phosphate product. What does this process involve and when do you expect it would be complete?
Patrick McManus: What that would involve is actually the phosphate is present as rock phosphate nodules within the greensands. And the work we’re looking at, at the moment is basically to extract that rock phosphate prior to going into the K-Max process. That work’s still in progress, but it’s all looking very good and we expect to announce our findings on that, approximately September of this year.
Lelde Smits: Potash West has also flagged plans for running a pilot plant. How are plans progressing and when would you expect to see it up and running?
Patrick McManus: We’ve identified the process and the size of the equipment we need. We’re now looking for funding for that to get started and we expect that to be achieved, by the end of the year.
Lelde Smits: Finally Patrick, what do you expect will be Potash West’s biggest milestone over the coming year?
Patrick McManus: Certainly getting the pilot plant up and running. That will be a major thing and the results from that then will be generated, and then start feeding into the prefeasibility work.
Lelde Smits: Patrick McManus, thank you for the update to Potash West.
Patrick McManus: Thank you Lelde.
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