V.BM - soon to split into 2 publicly traded stockshttps://www.stockhouse.com/Bullboards/MessageDetail.aspx?s=RS&t=LIST&m=28825968&l=0&pd=2&r=0
Stock closed at
.12 today.......52 week high of
.14 and low of
.05.
Yamana Gold - T.YRI owns 10 % of the stock and Baker Steel Resource Trust (Trades on London Stock Exchange -- the LSE) owns 20 %......30% of outstanding shares owned by 2 firms.
Shareholders vote this Friday......November 12th.......to approve or reject the plan to split into 2 separate companies.
Continental Precious Minerals (T.CZQ) has allowed BacTech Mining to work on its oilshale deposit in Sweden containing 2.83 Billion Tonnes of material.
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July 29, 2009
BacTech Flirts With The Oil Shale Business, While Work On Its Cobalt Tailings Project In Ontario Continues
By Alastair Ford
An intriguing announcement from BacTech prompts Minesite into putting in a quick call to Ross Orr, the company’s president and chief executive. Continental Precious Minerals, a TSX-listed company that’s not short of a bob or two, has commissioned BacTech to investigate the potential for deploying bioleaching technology on oil shales. BacTech’s no stranger to the bioleaching process – it owns patented rights to bacterial oxidation technology that’s used for treating refractory gold and base metal-bearing ores. This technology has been successfully deployed in the past, and work is currently ongoing on its application to two gold projects the company acquired from Yamana last year, and to a cobalt tailings project, also acquired last year. But this is the first mention anyone’s made of oil shales.
Oil shales, of course, go in and out of fashion, depending on the oil price. Several of Canada’s major players are irrevocably committed, it’s true, but the wisdom of that commitment seems relative to whether oil’s at US$50 or US$120. Currently the price is creeping up again, reaching towards US$70, and recent commentary from BP suggested to market watchers that between US$60 to US$90 per barrel is currently a sensible price range. It’s far too early to tell whether the bioleaching of oil shales as envisaged by Continental Precious Minerals and as practiced by BacTech technicians will be a game changer. Ross Orr is quite candid about that: “We don’t know one way or another whether it will work”. But it’s surely an intriguing proposition.
For a start, the deposit Continental is proposing that BacTech goes to work on is, at 2.83 billion tonnes, no small undertaking. “Our goal in the whole thing is probably to get a royalty”, says Ross, and that just might turn out to be a very nice income stream indeed. That said, the Canadian traders didn’t seem that interested, and the market’s generally nonchalant attitude towards the company continues. Perhaps it’s understandable – a company that promotes itself as a technology proposition is always going baffle those sections of the market that prefer a straightforward drill and blast proposition. So, the value-add of the bioleach can also be the discount factor, as there will always be people wanting proof that it works from one project to the next. After all, refractory gold projects in Papua New Guinea are hardly an enticing prospect on their own.
But two leading lights in the bioleaching field, Dr Chris Kennedy of Toronto University and Dr Paul Miller, BacTech’s vice president of technology and engineering, think that testing the application of BacTech’s bioleaching capabilities on Continentals’ oil shale is a worthwhile exercise. According to BacTech’s own explanatory notes, black shale deposits are polymetallic by nature, with a variable proportion of sulphide components which may lend themselves to treatment using bioleaching to remove those same sulphide components and liberate valuable metals. The metals, including uranium, molybdenum, nickel and vanadium, are generally encapsulated or trapped in organic matter and are present as small-sized particles. The initial period of testing how Continental’s shale reacts to BacTech’s bioleach will last for about four months, according to Ross Orr. And at the end of those tests, we’ll know, he says, whether it’s a go or a no go.
In the meantime, we’re likely to have seen progress on the Ontario cobalt tailings project by then. BacTech is hosting a visit by Federal government officials on 13th August, in its bid to gain approvals. The company has just finished drilling the tails to verify old data. It also extracted two tonnes of material which will be used to conduct feasibility work on. “Everything will be done by June of next year”, says Ross confidently, “and then we’ll go into construction mode”. With any luck, by then BacTech will also have managed to bring a partner on board to share with costs and to share the load operationally.
With an operational cobalt project up and running, BacTech would be in a strong position to pursue speculative ventures like an oil shale bioleaching process. Ross Orr has other ideas, though. The tailings project falls into the category of Cleantech, so it looks as though the cobalt will be spun out into a separate operation aimed at cleantech investors and focusing on cleaning up tailings. The plan for the mining company is to acquire another gold property to become the lead project while work in Papua New Guinea is ongoing. One gets the feeling that Ross is tantalizingly close to signing a deal on this, but that he’s just not quite there yet. Watch this space for further announcements – there may be one or two over the coming months.