Platreef QWERTYUIOP,
Officially, Platreef has probable reserves of 15.8 million oz Platinum and Palladium, along with various accessory and base metals. That’s for a 4 Mtpa mine. An interesting feature of the Sept 2017 feasibility study is that although reserves were calculated at $2415 for one oz each of Pt + Pd combined, the economic analysis section used more realistic metal price assumptions of $2075 combined. This means the study used more stringent metal price assumptions for the economic analysis to arrives at NPV. This makes anticipated cash flows and net present value more relevant to investors. All metal price assumptions are on target except for nickel, which has been weak.
But that’s not the whole story. At the 3 g/t cutoff there are approximately 28 M oz combined Pd and Pt as indicated resource, and another 28 M oz combined inferred resource, which has a lower degree of certainty. In essence we’re looking at 55 M oz of PGMs, together with valuable accessory metals such as gold (4.5 M oz) rhodium (1.9 M oz currently $2400 oz) as well as 1.67 billion lbs copper and 3.3 billion lbs nickel. That’s indicated and inferred resource at the 3 g/t cutoff, which must be converted to reserves. Inferred resource must first be upgraded to indicated. The mine is highly scalable and can increase throughput from 4 Mtpa up to 12 Mtpa, more than tripling cash flow and project NPV.
I’m very interested in what BMO has to say about their visit to Platreef yesterday. This project is an interesting sleeper in the IVN pipeline.