RE:RE:My thoughtsWell if Wyloo etc buy enough shares for control, it may not have be a official take over offer, so they don't have to make a better offer to the other shareholders.
BHP has said they will withdraw the offer if they get less than 50%.Maybe maybe not.
Then over time Wyloo etal can buy the remainer of the shares cheap over time. Any narrative about debt being called etc will just lower the price and no one else will bid.
OR
another option that Wyloo etc have 51% and BHP have 40% and they do joint venture.
BHP then maybe then moves on KWG, to consilidate the camp.
THIS DEPOSIT IS TRULY A COMPANY BUILDER.
BHP knows this.
I like this description of the deposit I found on the internet. Showed some the long term potential.
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When chrome-containing chromite was discovered in an area of northern Ontario known as the Ring of Fire, China’s state-owned steelmaker, Baosteel, made a strategic investment in Noront Resources. It’s a Canadian exploration company with significant mining claims in the Ring of Fire.
To thinking geologists, the discovery of chrome in the Ring of Fire has the potential to be truly enormous. The chrome found there thus far is apparently more concentrated in larger contiguous volumes than anywhere else on earth. This was, presumably, a powerful motive for Baosteel’s investment and its interest in Noront’s future production.
It is hard to visualize how very large the discovery might prove to be. The mineralization is in a number of layers sandwiched into rock that precipitated from magmas deep in the earth’s crust feeding a volcanic mountain chain some 2.7 billion years ago. The sandwich itself is 15 kilometers long and 500 meters thick.
The forces of mountain building pushed it up into a vertical position and was then engulfed by granite magmas bubbling up in the crust. The mountain chain was eventually ground down to its current level over the next two billion years, and then the area was invaded by a shallow sea which covered it in limestone that served to protect it from being completely ground away by continental glaciers that have occupied North America for most of the last 2.5 million years. It is fortuitous that it was not eroded away and that portion which remains could be as deep as it is long. However, mining can’t presently be done much below 3 to 4 kilometers.
But then, 3.5 kilometers is equivalent to the height of about fifteen of downtown Toronto’s landmark Commerce Court West towers stacked on top of each other. (Each such tower measuring 784’H x 110’W x 220’D) And 500 meters thick is the same as 15 of those stacks standing shoulder to shoulder from Bay Street east to Church Street.
And 15 kilometers long is the equivalent of almost 224 of those 15-wide-and-15-tall stacks of towers butting up to each other from the corner of King and Bay in a straight-line north to Finch Avenue. Were the towers all solid rock like the intrusion, the total mass would exceed 70 billion tonnes.
The ‘meat’ in this rock sandwich is chromite, the mineral that contains chromium oxide. In some places it’s quite thick, more than 100 meters. Drilling done thus far has discovered it in parts of the top two or three ‘towers’ in a number of adjoining stacks along the middle two-thirds of the intrusion sandwich’s length. In each of these discovery locations, how far down the chromite occurrence extends remains to be determined. But the professional opinion has been published, as allowed by the rules, that it could go deep!
Very strict rules govern the interpretation of what might be in the rock surrounding the drill-holes that have thus far been completed. Those rules permit publishing the opinion that the parts of those ‘stacks of towers’ found so far at the north end, collectively host over 180 million tonnes of measured and indicated resources containing more than 31% chrome oxide (Black Thor 137.7mT at 31.5%, Black Label 5.4mT at 25.3%, Black Creek 8.645mT at 37.41%, Big Daddy 29.1mT at 31.7%) and that more than 32 million adjacent tonnes can be described as inferred resources having just under 30% chrome oxide. (Black Thor 26.8mT at 29.3%, Black Label 0.9mT at 22.8%, Black Creek 1.61mT at 37.78%, Big Daddy 3.4mT at 28.1%)
At the south end, over 20 million tonnes can be described as measured and indicated resources having just under 36% chrome oxide (Black Bird 20.46mT at 35.76%) with an adjacent 23 million tonnes of inferred resources having 33% chrome oxide. (Black Bird 23.48mT at 33.14%)
Nearby, another almost 86 million tonnes can be described as inferred resources having 34.5% chrome oxide . (Black Horse 85.9mT at 34.5%) Those resources are held by several different Canadian mineral exploration companies including Noront Resources, Probe Metals, Bold Ventures and KWG Resources.
The +340 million tonnes that have thus far been identified to host chrome oxide is less than one-half of 1% of the total possible mass of the intrusion that could perhaps be made accessible to mining. If just the chrome-oxide ‘seen’ thus far in that small fraction, could be extracted and reduced to a usable alloy, the alloy would contain some 174 billion pounds of chrome metal.
By comparison, the entire world presently consumes only about 9 billion pounds of new chrome metal production annually. The current price of chrome (in ferrochrome) is an anomalously low US$0.90 (CA$1.18) per pound; a year ago it was US$1.45 (CA$1.90); in 2007 it spiked to almost US$3.00 (CA$3.95).