Zak Mir Interviews
The Trinidad assets will do that for LGO. Not might, will. It’s a matter of time. We’ve announced that we are doubling the number of rigs at the Goudron field. Hopefully, we’ll have that sorted in the next couple of weeks. Neil Ritson, the CEO, is in the country trying to resolve that at the moment, which is good for the field. There is a lot of oil in this field. What is a lot of oil worth? I can point to a number of companies, but I’m not going to on this forum, that have no production and have “a lot of oil” that are valued in the hundreds of millions. Goudron is a big underdeveloped field that was drilled with the wrong technology sixty to seventy years ago. Technology has moved on and what we’re finding in this latest set of drilling, the first holes in Goudron for thirty-five years, is that there is a lot more oil down there than even we thought when we look at the logs compared to what we have in the resource base. Neil Ritson indicated that with what we’re finding with new techniques and technology, we’re going to look at significantly increasing the store, which obviously flows through to reserves.
Zak: Moving along from Leni, Rare Earth Minerals. David: What’s your charting show, Zak? Zak: I don’t know if I could have done a 0.45p on the last round as you did, but it was pretty close to the 200 day moving average at that time so it was a good opportunity. I’m looking for 1.5 pence myself so I think we’re about half a penny away from that. On the fundamentals side, what I find interesting with this company is that you’ve got properties in Mexico, Greenland and in Australia and, from my research which is maybe not exhaustive, China seems to have the major resources in that area. David: And they still do. They control 95% of the rare earth market. Zak: Right, so how much of a contribution can Rare Earth Minerals make?
40 | www.financial-spread-betting.com | July 2014
David: It’s a long way down the track. If you look at what Rare Earth Minerals is its really two plays. It’s the lithium play in Mexico, which is without doubt the largest asset within the group, and then you have the rare earth site at Yangibana, Australia, which is being paid for by Hastings so it doesn’t require any funding from us and they are drilling there at the moment. I would expect the drilling to be completed within the next week or two. Yangibana is a known rare earth occurrence. Australia has good mining governance and Greenland has always been an area of interest. We’ve got a huge amount of ground around that Kvanefjeld uranium rare earth deposit and you know the exploration team actually sit on the ground on the 17th of this month so that’s not that far away.
“The Kvanefjeld deposit is the largest rare earth deposit in the worlD.” The Kvanefjeld deposit is the largest rare earth deposit in the world. The only issue they’ve got right now is how the Greenland government handles the concept of uranium and thorium within that massive sort of billion tonne resource. The interesting thing about what we’re looking at in Greenland, particularly where we are going to start our exploration efforts, is indications that we have quite significant rare earths without the uranium and without the thorium and that is going to be our first exploration priority target. So that’s the Rare Earth side which I see as exciting. The lithium side is going to blow the lights out big. Zak: Right. David: I mean I’ve said publicly I’ve been a mining engineer now for too many years. This to me is a world class deposit. It’s a simple quarry. I’ve been involved in complicated mines, complicated metallurgy. Copper, gold, silver, nickel, coal, you know? This is a simple quarry. The metallurgy’s solved.