Former ruby company bullish on ‘truly remarkable’ vanadium project
Date: Oct 23, 2018
NEW Energy Minerals is looking to initially spend about A$10 million and build a small scale vanadium-graphite mining and processing operation at the “truly remarkable” Caula project in northern Mozambique.New Energy, which used to be a ruby hunter called Mustang Resources, said it had been told a successful pilot plant operation would have greater benefit to it when it comes to seeking the funding for a full-scale operation than a bankable feasibility study “given its ultimate ‘proof of concept nature’ and its capacity to create saleable graphite concentrate and saleable vanadium concentrate”.
The pilot plant will produce 10,000-15,000t per annum of graphite concentrate and 14,000-18,000tpa of vanadium concentrates from 120,000tpa of mine ore for two years and is expected to generate total earnings of $22 million over that period (EBITDA).
A full scale operation will cost nearly US$160 million and will process 1.5 million tonnes pa for annual output of 120,000t of graphite concentrates and 204,000t of vanadium concentrates.
Earnings over the duration of the 24-year project are put at $3.4 billion.
New Energy is capitalised at a little over A$10 million.
