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Canadian Blue-chip Industrial Forum
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Diamond & Specialty Minerals Summary - 21stDiamond & Specialty Minerals Summary for May 21, 2019 2019-05-21 19:31 ET - Market Summary by Will Purcell The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Tuesday was a mediocre 73-76-151 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose three points to 612 and polished diamond prices fell 0.2 per cent. Dermot Desmond's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD), which recovered from an April low of $1.08 to reach $1.65 in mid-May, drifted lower again today, dipping nine cents to $1.37 on 564,000 shares. The company's 49-per-cent interest in the Gahcho Kue mine, 250 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife, is doing well as to tonnage and grade. Unfortunately, rough diamond prices are barely half of what the company had been expecting, so its stock is far below its 2016 high of $7.18. Michael Mulberry's American Battery Metals Corp. (ABC), down four cents to 33 cents on 194,000 shares, has doubled the size of its Temple Mountain vanadium project in Utah to 870 hectares. The new staking follows word of encouraging geophysics completed this spring, work that has prompted the company to plan a 10-hole drill program on five anomalies. Mr. Mulberry, president and chief executive officer, said earlier this month that the company is "currently in the process of finalizing the drill permits." (In other words, the drillers are waiting for bureaucratic approval or the bureaucrats are waiting for the permits to be filed; on Howe Street, one is never sure.) Mr. Mulberry is excited to have significantly expanded the company's land position at Temple Mountain, which now covers the entire trend highlighted on the geophysical survey. He says that American Battery Metals now has a "commanding land position" within this "highly prospective mineralized belt" -- sufficiently commanding and prospective that he is still looking forward to the drilling. (That, of course, means that the company still has not received its permits.) The company acquired an option to earn a 100-per-cent interest in the Temple Mountain project in February from Geoxplor Corp., a private Arizona-based company. At the time, Mr. Mulberry touted historical assays from drilling that yielded up to 4.97 per cent vanadium oxide and 1.83 per cent uranium oxide. The area saw mining from the early 1910s until 1968, with much of the action occurring during the Second World War. In fact, an estimated 1.3 million pounds of uranium oxide were mined to support the Manhattan project in the 1940s. Nikolaos Cacos's Blue Sky Uranium Corp. (BSK), down 1.5 cents to 15 cents on 765,000 shares, will drill some blue-sky targets at its Amarillo Grande vanadium and uranium project in Argentina to bolster what it already has on the project. The property covers a 14,500-hectare prospective trend that hosts the Ivana deposit. Ivana received a preliminary economic assessment earlier this year, but Mr. Cacos, president and CEO, says that Blue Sky is "continuing exploration with confidence in the potential for discovery of additional deposits" that will add value to the project. Mr. Cacos says that Blue Sky is seeking to "systematically identify and delineate mineralization potentially extending the Ivana deposit" to the west, as well as at two other targets. The first target, appropriately called Ivana West as it is just a few kilometres west of Ivana, but the company's geography appears a bit off with the two other targets: Ivana Central is about 10 kilometres northwest of Ivana, while Ivana North is about 20 kilometres northwest of Ivana. Blue Sky listed an inferred resource of 23.9 million tonnes averaging 0.037 per cent uranium oxide and 0.019 per cent vanadium oxide in February. The dream sheet supported by those modest grades contemplated a $128-million (U.S.) mine that would run for 13 years at 6,400 tonnes per day, averaging 1.35 million pounds of uranium oxide and 460,000 pounds of vanadium oxide per year. The bottom line was a discounted net present value of $135-million (U.S.) after taxes, a modest result that Mr. Cacos undoubtedly hopes to bolster with more rock and perhaps better grades. Morgan Good's Delrey Metals Corp. (DLRY), unchanged at 20 cents on 678,000 shares, has new assays from a phase 2 sampling program at its Star, Porcher and Blackie vanadium prospects in northwestern British Columbia. At Blackie, Delrey's sampling returned assays of up to 0.513 per cent vanadium oxide and at Porcher, the assays ranged as high as 0.422 per cent vanadium oxide. At Star, the results needed promotional massaging: Delrey said that the highlight at Star was that some samples returned up to 61.2 per cent iron, a sly way of avoiding mention that the best vanadium oxide grade came in at just 0.1 per cent. Mr. Good, president and CEO, says that he and his crew are very pleased with the phase 2 sampling, as the assays not only show excellent continuity with the phase 1 geophysical anomalies, but they "include some impressive vanadium, iron and titanium grades." He lauded the company's systematic approach to exploration over the first two phases of work, although investors had best step carefully, lest they become trapped in the thick layer of gooey fudge accompanying Delrey's next plan: Mr. Good says that the work so far has him "optimistic we will be in a position to initiate our phase 3 work program." If Mr. Good's optimism pans out and the work is initiated and pursued to completion, Delrey could have drill core assays from all three properties later this year. Sandy MacDougall's Alba Minerals Ltd. (AA), down one-half cent to nine cents on 39,000 shares, will focus its effort on the La Sal West project in Utah, one of six prospective uranium and vanadium properties in Colorado and Utah that it agreed to acquire two weeks ago. La Sal West is near the old Rattlesnake mine and the La Sal complex, where Energy Fuels Inc. (EFR: $3.69) is running a trial vanadium mining program. Mr. MacDougall, Alba's chairman, thinks that with Energy Fuels refurbishing the old La Sal and Pandora mines, the time is ripe to develop, or at least promote, La Sal West. Mr. MacDougall is enthused with vanadium's potential despite global prices for vanadium having been highly volatile, by which he means they were as low as $2.40 (U.S.) per pound three years ago, as high as $35 (U.S.) per pound last fall, and are now closer to the former than the latter. He says that with La Sal West and the five other acquisitions, Alba "is well poised" to be a competitive force in both the uranium and vanadium markets. (The art of poising requires one to be completely still -- not an uncommon inaction on Howe Street. Indeed, Mr. MacDougall and Alba have yet to lay out an exploration plan for La Sal West or the other prospects.) |
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