News

March 31, 2008

Tungsten Is The Metal To Watch, According To Andy Haslam At Vital Metals

By Alastair Ford

“We’re miners and we want to go and dig holes in the ground.” So says Andy Haslam, chief executive of Vital Metals, which is perching nicely atop the Watershed tungsten project in Queensland. He’s quite clear that, in contrast to the many companies in Australia that look like they might now get left high and dry as money supply tightens, Vital will make it all the way through into production. Not for him the pattern of an equity raise in benign markets, followed by the addition of a few ounces or a bit of tonnage, followed thereafter by a quick fire sale. The key to that pattern is, of course, that markets are benign. That they are no longer so hardly needs stating, so it’s nice to see a company that ought to be in production by 2009, or 2010 on a more conservative scenario, which, if not fully funded all the way there, at least has options on the table. You wouldn’t want to be a grass roots uranium explorer in Australia right now, in company with around 400 others, unless you fancied yourself in with a serious chance of beating the odds. You might want to be in tungsten though, and especially if production isn’t too far away.

Vital is currently in the process of working up a bankable feasibility study on the Watershed property. At the moment, Watershed holds 21 million tonnes grading 0.26 per cent tungsten (WO3). That gives a contained tungstate content of 56,500 tonnes, or to put it in cash terms, an in-situ value of around A$1.25 billion, using a conservative price of US$200 per metric tonne unit (mtu). However, since those numbers were put together the company has drilled a further 19,000 metres across 159 holes,...