FinnAust Mining Plc Ord 0.01p (LON:FAM) Managing Director Rod McIllree caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the completion of the geological model at Pituffik Titanium Project, utilising GEUS and up and coming news flow
Q1: Now FinnAust Mining have released news to say that you’ve advanced the geological model of the Pituffik Titanium Project. It’s quite a technical announcement, can you break this down for us so that people at home can understand it better?
A1: Yes, it does have a bit of a technical aspect to it. It’s something that obviously we’ve been working on with various parties, or various groups, within GEUS because there’s quite a lot of input into something like this as you could imagine.
It started with a helicopter-borne aerial photography using a high resolution camera and from a distance of 1,500 metres above sea level we’re getting something in the vicinity of 50cm pixel size so obviously a very high definition photogrammetry run over the raised beach environment. Each one of those photos was put into a 3D stereoscopic perspective such that the model actually is of a three dimensional aspect, that has been tied to, now, the off-shore seismic bathymetry and I would refer listeners back to the announcement of the completion of that work earlier in the year.
So now that we’re able to tie these two models together essentially what it does is for us a number of things, first and foremost it is very indicative I guess of the volumes of sediments because we can pull that horizon out as a separate layer and we can work with that. Now the second thing that it does do for us is it provides, as mentioned in the RNS, a platform for us to prepare all the work programmes moving forward, there is a bit of a sense I guess in the PDF version of the RNS, if interested parties wanted to look at that, the model can be seen in Figure 1 and we can dive down into that at any point along that 30 kilometre of coastline and as I mentioned before pick up 50cm resolution.
So it provides a platform for FinnAust Mining that’s enormously important in terms of the work programmes that we’re preparing, site locations, infrastructure, from the bathymetry perspective it allows us to identify the routes to take from the upcoming dredging process so all in all it’s a very important development and it’s a very important piece of kit to have on a project like this.
Q2: Utilising GUES continues to work in your favour, what else have FinnAust Mining got them doing for you that investors can look forward to?
A2: All of this is work programme or deliverables that came from the 2015 work programme and what that entailed was the bathymetry, the seismic, the aerial airborne and photogrammetry, there is a 3D model that we’re having prepared, a fly-through the entire project which is more for presentational and for investor interest but it will really give a sense.
One of the more interesting aspects of this project, and it’s a good aspect to have, is that the scale of the project I think can only really be understood from the sky, you don’t really get a sense of scale when you’re standing on the ore body, it needs to be taken from above and one of the things that will feed into this is the generation of that 3D fly-through, it will provide a very nice fly-through over the entire environment from 0 kilometres all the way through to 30 kilometres. So it just gives I think interested parties a better sense of scale on that, that’s due in the next couple of weeks, they’ve been working very carefully and closely on the metallurgy and the analytic side of this and the results we took from the project last year.
The metallurgy is progressing, we will hopefully have something out in the next couple of weeks that will give a sense of what this concentrate looks like, from certainly just a first pass, a non-optimised perspective, it seems as though everything is going to be ok on that front, it continues to appear as a very low impurity concentrate so that will probably conclude I guess the deliverables from 2015.
Now GUES are very active at the moment preparing for what is going to be a bigger and broader scale exploration programme in 2016. The benefits of really using GUES and I’ve mentioned this a couple of times is GUES provides all of the equipment that is necessary to execute programmes of this type in these environments and it saves the company an enormous amount of money. We are renting these pieces of equipment at very cheap rates, we have the GEUS technicians and the field technicians and the scientists from GUES on-site managing all of these aspects of the programme this year and more importantly I think what has been happening is GEUS and SRK have been working collaboratively with each other to prepare the work programmes that will deliver an initial mineral estimate. So it’s a lot happening in the background, I think that hopefully we’ll be in a position to start releasing some of this more technical and analytical work shortly, we’ve got a lot on, pretty busy.
Q3: You do allude to a number of up and coming news points, are you able to elaborate on these for listeners?
A3: Well I think one of the more obvious aspects for this project is at this point in time we don’t have tenure over the marine environment however FinnAust Mining have lodged, as mentioned in the RNS, those applications to assume those rights. That was done a little while ago, it’s not necessarily a price sensitive thing but it will, when it comes to fruition, lead to a much expanded licence, increase the amount of material covered by the company’s licences by a very significant amount and we hope to have more news on that in the coming weeks and months. So that is something that we’re sort of looking forward to, we also have the work programme in with the regulators along with the terms of reference for the EIA and the SIA, more news on that will be forthcoming in the next couple of months. All of these things obviously feed into the critical path of the exploitation licence which we’re still aiming to lodge early next year and all working towards that proof of concept bulk sample that is intended at this stage to deliver six 5,000 tonne parcels for parties that are interested in purchasing this material moving forward. So, as I said, there’s a lot of moving pieces of this at the moment and I think that as time progresses the news flow will reflect that so things are going well, it’s still going according to plan.
