News

March 03, 2008

Thor Mining Waiting For Chinese Takeaway

By Rob Davies

Patience is a vital ingredient for small company manager and John Young, chief executive of Thor Mining, needs plenty. He told Minews that he is waiting to finalise the details of an offtake agreement with an unnamed Chinese company that will take the molybdenum and tungsten concentrate from his Molyhil deposit in the Northern Territories east of Alice Springs. This time last year his company all but had a deal with Hunan Nonferrous Metals Holdings in the bag, but the Chinese company pulled out in April 2007 after deciding that the deposit was too small. That meant the hunt for an offtake agreement had to start all over again. And after many visits to Beijing and much negotiating John is confident that an agreement will be signed in the next few weeks.

Hunan might think the deposit is too small but the reality is that there aren’t that many tungsten deposits to choose from. Molyhil has a mining reserve of 2.15 million tonnes grading 0.49% tungsten (WO3) and 0.22% molybdenum (MoS2), all of which can be accessed from an open pit. That figure was determined in August last year following an extended drill campaign which also increased the resource figure to 3.73 million tonnes at 0.51% combined tungsten and molybdenum.

While not...