Amur Minerals Corporation (LON:AMC) Chief Executive Officer Robin Young caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the final phase drill results and the impact to the preliminary economic assessment, expected news flow and the latest Russian activities
Q1: Robin, you recently announced the third and final phase of your drill season for 2015, can you walk us through the significance of these drill results?
A1: Yes, I’d be happy to. This year we actually completed 5,800 metres of the 6,000 we had planned to drill so we obtained our statistical objective and with those 5,800 metres, we’ve been able to really confirm the continuity of the grade and the core structure itself. What’s really important in this is it allows us to re-categorise resources and in particular, those that we drilled out in the Flangovy area itself, which is part of the Flangovy/Maly Kurumkon area. Concurrent with that, what we’ve been able to do is identify a high grade ore zone which is continuous over the length of the Flangovy area and it continues onward into the Maly Kurumkon zone. In Flangovy, it’s deeper so it represents a pretty suitable underground target even though we can open cast mine it according to numbers that we’re seeing. So what’s going to happen now is that we’re going to be able to redesign and re-estimate the resource area itself, we also expanded the resource, we stepped out another 400 metres eastward towards the Gorny area, where we believe these deposits could actually link up, so we’re pretty pleased that we’re also able to add onto the resource itself. So we do have the ability to expand further to both the east, the west and down dip on this mineralised structure, right now it contains about 45% of our total metal and we anticipate that will expand, some this year, in that we have a good prospective character for this deposit moving forward.
Q2: So what impact does this have on the preliminary economic assessment results?
A2: The impact on the preliminary economic assessment is that it gives us another chance to go back and take a very hard look at underground versus open pit opportunities in the Flangovy area in particular. It’s going to allow us to be much more definitive in our modelling and to increase the accuracy of the results, when it comes to calculation of things like operating costs and total metal recovered and by doing that, it’s going to allow us optimise a production schedule especially in this area. By the looks of it, we’re going to be able to move underground production forward which will be higher in grade and which will also be classified, maybe classified as an indicated resource instead of an inferred resource. By moving metal forward into the production process, it’s going to impact the EBITDA where we’ll be actually recovering more tonnes of nickel earlier in the process so it’s going to give us an opportunity to also reset economic parameters such as the current lower metal pricing that we’re seeing and identify those portions of the zones that should be mined first to support the operation.
Q3: I know there’s always a lot going on but what can investors expect to see in terms of news flow over the coming months for Amur Minerals Corporation?
A3: We’ve been active on a lot of fronts. We’d like to release information in coherent packages and by doing so, that way we can provide a good solid full story, we’re hesitant to release partial results because that can be misleading and could be misinterpreted. So for instance, with the metallurgical test work that’s ongoing right now, we’ll be issuing those results as we advance and instead of issuing something that’s on a piecemeal basis, by doing this then we can give people a good solid opinion as to what we’re seeing. Presently, the metallurgical work is being done on the Kubuk and the Flangovy area, we’re also working on like the water licence assessment where we need to determine how much water we need to be using over the life of the operation and per year to ensure we have enough available water for both technical purposes and also portable purposes. We also now have identified enough mineralisation that we can select a proper bulk sample and move that bulk sample into test work, starting next year and allow us to define the specific plant design itself. So we’re working on the technical side of things plus we’re establishing an interim long term plan and programme right now. The drill results have significantly altered what we plan to do next year.
Q4: Finally then, what can you tell us about the latest Russian activities?
A4: We’ve been divided into two area, one is located in Khabarovsk where our field office is and there what we’re doing is we’re already working on next years’ plans for drilling, to have a successful year we have to have everything ready but 1st March and be here for the ice road and transport to the site so we’re setting up the required consumables such as fuel, additional drill steel bits, who the personnel will be and especially the qualified skill sets of those people that will be working on the project itself. So that is primarily what they’re working on at this point in time, they’re also working on all these other additional test work programmes that I have mentioned earlier. We also have, what we call, the Moscow component where we’re working the Far East Development Fund, we’ve had an ongoing relationship with them for several months now, and we’re continuing to work with them as with regard to obtaining funding from Russian/Chinese sources and also to work on how we’re going to handle and treat the major cost items that we’re focussing on such as power and road access itself, so we’ve been pretty busy with the Russian sector itself. So in conclusion, we’ve had a really good year on the exploration drilling, it’s impacted our results, it’s impacted the PDA, we’re addressing other areas to advance the studies and we’re also working with various Russian authorities and our staff to make sure we have a successful drill season next year and that we can kick off our good solid engineering work so we can begin moving down the path of having defined a definitive feasibility study.
