FINNAUST MINING PLC ORD 0.01P (LON:FAM) Managing Director Roderick McIllree caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the recent announcements made by the company, the significance of the 2016 work programme announcement, their expectation for main target areas and what’s next for FinnAust
Q1: Now it’s been a while since your last update to shareholders but it’s pretty clear you’ve been busy, can you give us a brief overview of the last three or four announcements the company has made?
A1: Yes sure, I think the last time you and I spoke Giles was probably sometime in June, since that point we’ve had close to four or five pretty significant announcements. I think the first one, early June, was the appointment of Royal IHC to formulate a wet mining solutions for us and that programme continues to go well, they’re a great group and they’re based in the Netherlands. In addition to that, we appointed some metallurgical specialists who are based down in Australia, they have some pretty deep and broad knowledge and experience in the mineral sands and the ilmenite space, having these two guys on is critical in our optimising process flow sheet which is underway and we’ll sort of speak about that in a little bit more detail in a minute. I guess the big one really for the company was the granting of what was Greenland’s first off-shore exploration licence for minerals and this I guess was an important step for the company because as you and interested parties are aware the ore body sits both in the raised above the sea level and in the shallow marine environment, probably out to 1km or 2km from shore that ranges in depth from sort of 2 metres to 15 metres, something like that. Now that took a little bit longer than we thought it was going to because unfortunately there was an enormous amount of work that had to be put into that by institutions and regulators to ensure that the correct precedent was set for these types of licences in Greenland moving forward but that’s all in place now. Hot on the heels of the granting of that off-shore licence, as you’d expect Giles, was the approval of the environmental work programmes and the Terms of Reference and the base line studies so those two events actually fit quite neatly together and one obviously is a function of the other one so those two activities were really well received, I think, by shareholders and certainly by us in the company because it means that the project now can move forward in its assessment as a whole project whereas before that issue of that off-shore licence we only owned really half of the project. The second last one, notwithstanding today’s announcement, is the approval of the work programme for the 2016 activities up in Thule, Pituffik, that has been underway now for the best part of 6 or 8 weeks, the results that we’re getting out of there can be seen in today’s announcement Giles, some pretty compelling stuff I would have thought, it’s going well.
Q2: The results do look pretty good to the uninitiated can you expand a little bit more on the significance of the announcement today for everyone?
A2: I think what we always knew that this project and there’s was an enormous amount of historical literature that goes back almost 100 years on this project, it’s been studied over many campaigns over many decades, I think for the first time this year we’ve really uncovered this true scale and nature of this ore body. I think for the first time we’ve demonstrated in the pictures if readers pull up the pdf version of that announcement and look at the pictures of the back of the vibracore results that we’re getting off the back of the Kisaq, you’re looking at the trenching results where you’ve just got after going down 30cm or 40cm of top cobble still ilmenite rich material, probably 20% ilmenite in those brown layers there but then you get down into an almost pure ilmenite system that we’re really just uncovering at the moment. So I think a lot of work needs to be done but we’re certainly heading in the right direction, I think it’s even surprised us just how special this material is.
Q3: Now, can you tell us a little bit more about the main target areas and what you expect they’ll deliver from the work that’s underway there?
A3: I guess there’s been a couple of extra ones that we’ve identified this year as well whilst we were on site. We’ve always had the raised, drowned and active beach environments, they were kind of always there, I think what we’ve found now is that further south towards Interlak which is the main feed, I guess tributary main feed horizon for this material that then sort of separate and spread out over these marine terraces by wave action, is that there’s a very very large delta that comes down from these titanium rich basalts that have been eroded over a couple of thousand years. That’s a new piece we’re sort of doing a bit of work on that at the moment, I mean that could be many many many hundreds of millions if not billions of tonnes just in that marine delta, work needs to be done on this to determine its grade characteristic but I think it certainly looks like it’s sort of a similar material probably of a lower grade however. I guess the other points that we’ve found there is the drowned beaches have come up and they now look like being very significant volumes of what is ultimately high grade ilmenite so I think these work programmes are all going very well, we’ve actually completed the planned work early and we’ve expanded the work programmes up there significantly, probably adding another 50-75% on the overall programme, number of holes and vibracore holes. So I think the results are going to be pretty pleasing, SRK obviously do the site visit and I think it’s fair to say that they were pretty impressed with the project and what’s on offer up there as well so I think all in all it’s going very well, they’ll be a lot of news coming out of this towards the back end of this year and certainly early into the next year that will just continuously come from these both analytical and resource and permitting type activities so it’s all good.
Q4: It does indeed sound positive! I was going to ask, what’s next for FINNAUST MINING PLC ORD 0.01P in terms of work and news flow?
A4: The next things we’re focussed on now is metallurgy and offtake, I think that we’re comfortable internally such that we know that ultimately we will prove up a very large volume of high grade ilmenite here so we’re focussed on optimising the metallurgy, you can expect some updates on that over the next 1-2 weeks. We are also looking at a couple of acquisitions that are of interest to us, obviously the focus will always remain on Pituffik, for its cash flow potential and it seems like its potential profitability, but we are doing several other things at the moment that I think will be of interest when and if they’re announced in the not too distant future so we’re getting some good results on all fronts.
