Potential mine for Mokopane

MOKOPANE – The Bushveld Igneious Complex (BIC) spans over the North West, Limpopo, Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces and will propel the company from a junior explorer to a junior miner. Bushveld’s primary focus is on developing its vanadium assets in the Mokopane area.

According to Anthony Viljoen (Bushveld Executive Director) the BIC hosts an estimated 20-billion tons of magnetite, vanadium and titanium-bearing iron-ore. Of this, the vanadium-rich magnetite layer makes up about a quarter of the world’s vanadium reserves and more then 30% of global titanium reserves.

“The development and coming into production of our vanadium assets would make us one of the largest producers of the commodity worldwide,” Viljoen highlighted.

Bushveld Minerals announced in March that it had secured a definitive sale and marketing agreement with Wogen Resources to assist in financing Bushveld Vametco’s acquisition of a 78.8% interest in Strategic Minerals Corporation (SMC) from Evraz. The company also announced that the five-year renewable agreement also provided working capital finance for Vametco Alloys.

The agreement will see Wogen become a global marketer and distributor of Vametco Alloys’ nitrite vanadium, or Nitro-van, production and provide financing to Bushveld Vametco Group. Viljoen emphasises that he company is not neglecting its other assets, but as a project developer, the company has been prioritizing its vanadium assets.”

“Tin has been one of the better-performing metals on the London Metal Exchange [price wise] over the past two years. However, there is no dedicated tin mining company listed on the London Stock Exchange currently and we believe there could be an opportunity for us to list our tin assets in a separate Bushveld-controlled entity as one of a number of options.”

The Mokopane project is based on the old Zaaiplaats tin mine, which was at one time the second-largest tin producer in South Africa. The company has drilled out a measured resource of 18.4-million tons of opencastable contained tin. The asset is located on the northern limb of the BIC and comprises one prospecting right covering six farms of about 13 422 ha.

Viljoen points out that, within the licence area, there are a number of further targets for opencastable disseminated tin resources that have been identified. Bushveld Minerals has explored and drilled two of the targets, Groenfontein and Zaaiplaats, on which a scoping study was based, and the results were released in September 2014.

He said: “The company’s targeted projects offer favorable cost-curve positioning; “pragmatic”, relatively low capital expenditure; and a near-term production profile. The Bushveld is also developing a number of ‘strategic partnership’ capable of accelerating projects to production.”

According to Viljoen it boasts Bushveld’s technical team of in-depth expertise on African geology and has played leadership roles from identifying and developing early-stage projects to developing them into operational mines.Nonetheless, he says: “The company will in the coming few months make announcements on progress made on its Mokopane and Marble Hall tin projects and how it aims to create value for these assets.”

redaksie.bosvelder@nmgroup.co.za