Re: RDR - Reed Resources
June 12, 2008
Time Moves Slowly Along The Rabbit Proof Fence, But After Forty Years The Barrambie Vanadium Project Is Finally Coming Good
By Our Man in Oz
www.minesite.com
THIS IS A HEALTH WARNING! Older investors taking heart medication should read no further. The names in this story from Australia could lead to palpitations. Vanadium is the first that will get Alzheimer patients in Bournemouth nursing homes scratching their thinning hair. Ferrovanadium is the second, and may cause rheumy eyes to flutter. Barrambie is the third, and that one might even cause a few geriatrics to fire up their motorised wheelchairs and start the long drive up the M3 to see their London brokers. Put all those together, and 30 years after everyone thought it was dead, with a silver stake through its heart, the infamous Barrambie vanadium project in Western Australia is breathing again. And this time it might actually move off the drawing board and into production.
Reed Resources, one of Australia’s better connected explorers, is the latest owner of Barrambie, a remote resource that claimed its first headlines in the early 1970s, for all the wrong reasons. Back then Barrambie was the key asset inside a company called Ferrovanadium which was run by a delightful but somewhat bent chap by the name of Peter Briggs. As part of his fundraising efforts, Briggs, who famously brushed up his tennis while serving time as a guest of Her Majesty at a low security prison, invited American investors into Ferrovanadium. It was an Aussie first, but it ran off the rails when the Yanks claimed there were discrepancies in the reports on the resource at Barrambie. Heavens above! What will they expect next from Aussie miners?
Roll forward in time, through the 1980s and 1990s. Booms came and went. Briggs faded from view, but remained as lively as ever in the Perth social scene (we have a soft spot for chaps who simply forget to pay their tax). But, of Barrambie there was not a word spoken, even when the price of vanadium, a steel hardening metal, rocketed up at the start of the China-led 21st century resources boom. Other Australian vanadium projects had come and gone. Agnew Clough built the Wundowie project (and closed it). Precious Metals Australia developed the Windimurra project (and closed it, and is now re-opening again). Australia and vanadium always seem to struggle together, if not for technical reasons then because the price moves up and down faster than a Brett Lee bouncer.
David Reed, once one of Australia’s best known stockbrokers, reckons that this time the much maligned Barrambie is ready to achieve its long dormant potential. During a pleasant chat with David, and his son Chris, in their West Perth office, Reed senior reminisces about the discovery of Barrambie by another old-timer. “It was Hector Ward who found it,” Reed says. “Every time I walk into the Albion Hotel [in the seaside suburb of Cottesloe] old Ron Sheen reminds me about what a great discovery it was and how it will be developed, one day.”
Blowing the dust off Barrambie will not be as easy as blowing the froth off a beer in the Albion. But it will be being aided by vanadium prices that have been driven higher by Chinese buying, and by renewed investor interest in the project. Last week a syndicate of professionals pumped A$12 million of fresh capital into Reed Resources to “advance” Barrambie. That support has help the company maintain a track record as one of the better performing mining stocks on the ASX over the past few months. While other companies have been falling, and floats have been postponed, Reed Resources has steamed on up from a price as low as A64 cents early in April to recent trades at around A$1.10. That 72 per cent rise in 10 weeks speaks loudly about the level of confidence in this latest attempt to resurrect Barrambie, located, according to Chris Reed, “119 kilometres down the rabbit-proof fence from Windimurra”, a measuring tool remarkably similar to that other well-known Australian distance-measuring device: “as the crow flies”.
Adding to interest in Reed Resources is an assortment of other assets, including the small but profitable Sand Queen gold mine, the Mt Finnerty iron ore project which is being explored in joint venture with Portman, and a potentially very interesting nickel project in the re-awakening Wingellina area of central Australia, close to where BHP Billiton is continuing the work of WMC at the Nebo/Babel nickel-platinum project. Those other assets, however, pale alongside Barrambie, currently taking up 50 per cent of management time at Reed Resources, and 80 per cent of the quarterly cash burn. That’s largely down to a fierce drilling programme aimed at obtaining fresh resource data because none of the original assay results from the 1970s can be used for modern resource calculations.
The great revival plan for Barrambie is essentially a variation of the plan proposed in 1974 by the American engineering firm, Ralph M. Parsons: drill up sufficient ore, crush it, grind it, and produce a variety of products, with the focus being ferrovanadium. Back then, the estimated cost of developing Barrambie was A$225 million, but that included a slurry pipeline to transport product to the coast for export. Today, Barrambie’s estimated capital development cost, subject to the completion of feasibility studies, is around A$256 million. That money will pay for a project producing 20 million pounds of vanadium pentoxide at a forecast cost of A$2.67 a pound, a country mile below the ruling world price of around US$16 a pound. For this exercise an Aussie dollar is roughly the same as a US dollar, which is another “back to the future” experience, because that’s what the exchange rate was like in the 1970s.
David Reed says that a major advantage Barrambie has over its near rival, Windimurra, is the ore grade. “Grade is always king in these exercises,” he says. “Our material averages around 0.82 per cent vanadium. Windimurra is much lower.” He says the next moves for Barrambie will be to finalise studies into the capital and operating costs of the proposed project in mid-August. This will be followed by “optimised” estimates in January next year, and followed up quickly by a final investment decision. If all goes well, first production could be as early as 2011 – perhaps even with Peter Briggs in attendance to see the first ferrovanadium roll out of the plant, 37 years after that original study found that Barrambie was ready for development. Time moves slowly along the rabbit-proof fence!