News

May 07, 2009

Marengo Mining’s Yandera Copper Project In Papua New Guinea Is Shaping Up Well, And Exploration Is Yielding Promising Results Too

By Alastair Ford

Almost as soon as his flight from Papua New Guinea touches down in Australia, Les Emery gets onto the phone to update Minesite on Marengo Mining’s Yandera copper project. There’ve been some choice developments lately, not the least of which is that the copper price has come back strongly from the pummelling it took late last year, to the extent that at the current US$2.00 level, it’s already trading at US$0.50 above Marengo’s base case assumptions for Yandera. That, says Les Emery, now puts it firmly inside what’s termed in the Yandera models as the “optimistic” price range. Work on the definitive feasibility study there is ongoing of course, so nothing is written in stone. But in comparison to the dark days at the back end of 2008, a period of unremitting gloom into which Marengo, with less than fortuitous timing, delivered a highly auspicious update to the resource numbers on Yandera, the world looks a very different place.

The Chinese are buying copper. One London broker - who wil remain nameless due to recent bouts of shyness - has recently theorised that the Chinese are stockpiling copper as a deliberate diversification out of the US dollar, switching, as it were, from the dollar into copper as part of a long-term investment strategy. Certainly the recent revelations about the prolonged heavy Chinese buying of gold over the last few years show that watching from the sidelines while the Fed prints money...