News

November 11, 2008

Long-Term, Prairie Downs Has Exciting Potential In Vanadium; Short-Term It’s A Good Job That Mine Development Work Is On Hold

By Our Man in Oz

It’s not often that you can look at an emerging base metals miner and think how fortunate it is that a commitment to a mine development hasn’t been made. But a perfect example of what might be called a financial near-miss comes from the experience of small Australian explorer, Prairie Downs Metals. A few months ago, Prairie Downs Metals came close to proceeding with development on the Prairie Downs silver-lead-zinc project near BHP Billiton’s big Mt Newman iron ore mine in Western Australia. If it had, Prairie Downs, both the company and the mine, would be struggling to make ends meet in an extraordinarily depressed market for all metals. Instead, the company has been able to re-organise its affairs and continue with a resource upgrading exercise and an exploration programme which continues to reveal tantalising indications of additional mineralisation, and all with enough cash parked in the bank to ride out the global financial storm.

“The downturn has certainly prompted us to wind back our drilling programme, but not lose sight of the potential,” says Prairie Downs director, Alec Pismiris. He explains that the primary objective of current work is to boost the high-grade component of the orebody. “We’re targeting a resource to support a minimum of five years of high-grade production,” he says. “Conceptually, we can see expanding the resource from 1.6 million tonnes to between two and 2.5 million tonnes of material grading...