Transcript
We’re very proud to release recently the Scoping study into the Flanagan Bore Project. Our Manganese project up in the North Wastern Pilbara.
It’s a culmination of about 15 months work since we listed on the stock exchange.
We’ve had a couple of drill programs out there.
We’ve got an indicated resource of 104 million tonnes at 10.5% manganese and that’s the basis that forms the foundation for the scoping study.
And the results have really been outstanding in terms of delivering what we were hoping it would deliver but also de-risking the project as well.
As part of that scoping study was understanding the resource and that’s being drilled out to indicated resources now.
It’s a fairly high level of confidence in terms of classification and also the metallurgical test work.
So we’ve had the benefit of learnings from other manganese companies in the area and using a different technique, probably more of a conventional processing technique where we’ve selected dense medium separation which is more off the shelf, more conventional and again, that helps de-risk the project.
We’re also looking at doing more on ground activities as well as we advance the project as we move through towards a definitive feasibility study and the important part of that is understanding the environmental situation out on site.
And we will be embarking on flora surveys, fauna surveys really important to delineate a water supply for the processing and we’ve got some targets that we’ll be drilling as well hopefully at the end of this year.
The key metrics of the Scoping study were very robust.
It has an NPV, a pretax NPV of $134 million, an IRR internal rate of return of 67%.
So that’s all pretty healthy.
And I do think the assumptions that we’ve used in a scoping study we’re reasonably conservative in terms of the commodity pricing and also some of the OpEx costs as well just particularly in the environment that we’re working in now where we’re seeing market increase in access to people and also diesel costs is just being a simple one.
