RE: Any change for a smelter?Great Joe!
I knew I could trust you, very nice.
Comments herein:
- First, I'm sorry to say that your SWN concentrate figures are incorrect. They are for contained metal, and UG increases that amount. 1.62 mt is a good number to use for hybrid mine plan.
"2.Benchmark Capital Cost in the order of $ 200 million"
-Benchmark for what capacity?
“$267 million. A spokesman for Udaipur, Rajasthan,-based Hindustan Zinc told AMM that the 100,000-tonne-per-year zinc“
This must be for refined zinc. It's enormous capex and implies 2B+ cost for a smelter that SWN needs.
“ US$100 million, which includes a payment of US$13 million for zinc related inventories.
The Nordenham plant, which is located near Bremerhaven in northern Germany, has an annual production capacity of 133,000 tonnes zinc metal,”
This looks better, implied capex $600M.
“Brook-Hunt, the most respected metals consultants, said this aquisition cost compares very favourably with any brownfield or greenfield smelter. Works out to US$690 per Metric Tonne of installed capacity of refined zinc metal ingots”
I understand $690 was for this deal, not a benchmark price (Correct if I'm wrong). Using that price, SWN's smelter would cost about $550M
“TCs correspond to the deduction made by the smelter from the payment
to the miner for the conversion of concentrate into saleable metal. The
higher these treatment charges are (the higher the deduction from the
payment to the miner), the lower the purchase price of raw material ”
-As of smelter take, base TC/RC, and price participation, they are all income for smelter to handle opex, amortization/deprecation etc. We can't make any assumptions about the actual opex of running one. Certainly it won't match TC/RC exactly. It's safest to assume that running their own smelter doesn't decrease overall smelter charges (smelter take included).
“ An estimated long term average treatment charge is $US170 per tonne of concentrate. ”
Many use $200+/t by now.
I think we still need more smelter references ... but we're getting there, so thanks.