News

March 09, 2010

Beowulf Gets Down To Some Serious Work On The Economics Of Its Swedish Iron Ore Projects

By Alastair Ford

The speculation about the future iron ore price goes on. No sooner has no less an institution that Nomura put out a note saying that it expects iron ore prices to increase by 70 per cent, than analysts across town bid the rise up another 10 per cent to 80 per cent. And one hitherto unknown organisation, Olivetree Securities has forecast a swathe of profit warnings across the European steel sector as higher iron ore prices eat into margins. Meanwhile industry consultants CRU hedge their bets by setting a range: the price rise, reckon the CRU number crunchers, will come in at between 50 per cent and 75 per cent. Fairfax offers a range too: between 60 per cent and 80 per cent. One thing’s for sure, at any rate – the iron ore price is going up.

This is good news for tiny Aim-traded Beowulf Mining, which has plenty of the stuff under license in Sweden, and which, following recent steady progress, could be up and mining within three to four years. The company has several projects on the go, and not all of them are iron ore, but the two most advanced, Kallak and Ruoutevare, most certainly are. The latest conceptual study on Kallak envisages mining 10 million tonnes of 39% iron ore per year over a life of 15 years, delivering a total...