News

November 19, 2008

As Soon As The Funding Is In Place, Gippsland Will Be In Pole Position To Sell Its Tantalum Into A Rising Market

By Alastair Ford

One thing about non-terminal traded metals is that pricing can always surprise you if you don’t constantly keep up to date. But although there’s an opacity in these markets that anyone who isn’t an industry insider would be justified in calling completely impenetrable, for those who are in the know it’s quite easy to keep up to speed. So who can name a metal the price of which has performed strongly over recent months? The answer at the moment, perhaps, would be not many people at all. But one man can. He’s Jack Telford, chief executive of Gippsland, and the metal in question is tantalum, which is now trading at between US$46 and US$48 per pound, up by almost a third over the last two years.

Gippsland holds a fair amount of tantalum on its Abu Dabbab project in Egypt, a total of 44.5 million tonnes of ore, to be precise, of which over 30 million tonnes is in reserves grading an average of 255 grammes per tonne tantalum pentoxide, with an additional 0.109% tin. There’s an additional 98 million tonnes on the company’s Nuweibi project, a relatively short distance to the south west, although the resources here are all in the JORC indicated and inferred categories. Still, is nice to be...