Noront Resources

In no particular order, some observations, impressions, snippets of fact....

In Hamilton's preamble, and during his introductory comments, he twice mentioned Blackbird III.

When he discussed the financial viability of production at Eagle 1 he assumed:

• last October's metal spot prices
• no external (e.g government) contribution to infrastructure
• no updated resource estimates (which we later were told to expect)

Mungall described the large ultramafic blob as a layered ferro-gabbro. Not sure what to make of that yet, but that description also describes some deposits at Bushveld.

Unfortunately, the .pdf slides are not accurate depictions of what we saw in the powerpoint version of the presentation. There was some important imagery that I can't reproduce here. However, this portion of a slide may show the location of Blackbird III. It may be the southern band of chromite, shown by the dashed line below BB I and II. Mungall said something like "we followed the gravity anomaly, and we're hitting chromite all over this area".

I liked Mungall's closing remarks. He said there was "lots more to discover". They're using novel airborne geophysics, and deep-penetrating ground surveys. The latter were specific to Ni prospecting at Eagle 1 and AT12. I like the nickel focus, and I like the innovation these guys are using. I think Dr. Mungall is having a lot of fun right now.

Back to Hamilton.

• said "they'd get in line with (chrome) producer who knows something"
• not likely to use equity (share-based) financing going forward
• other Ni discovery info to be released over next 6-8 months

There were also a number of slides missing from the .pdf uploaded to the Noront website. They weren't really important, I guess, as he said most of what they showed. But the graphics did give a visual impression of the proportion of the individual markets in global chrome consumption. He's right to be thinking Western Europe and Asia. More on that later.

He started discussing Ni/Cu as the "sweetener" to get infrastructure in place. Then he said something about Noront already drilling on the "blob", and that we'd be hearing results "shortly". Between this mention, and his earlier mention of Blackbird III, I'm not sure if they were slips, or intentional. But those are the only "hints" I got out of him. I did like his closing remark that we "are one hole away from fame and fortune."

About Cliffs. Hamilton said they are "meaningless" in the ROF. Just what is he thinking? The key step towards progression of any project in the ROF is infrastructure. Who cares how it gets put in place? It's like Hamilton thinks that Noront has to, or would benefit from, going it alone.

Quite apart from that, and I said I would come back to this, the idea of opening up a ferrochrome/concentrate market in Europe. The division of Cliffs that closed the financing with KWG is based in Holland. I think Cliffs might be a year ahead of Noront on this.

I have no idea what became of the guest speaker, Stewart McQuade from Samancor Chrome.

Lar