"Xstrata is a global diversified mining group, listed on the London and Swiss Stock Exchanges, with its headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. Xstrata’s businesses maintain a meaningful position in seven major international commodity markets: copper, coking coal, thermal coal, ferrochrome, nickel, vanadium and zinc, with additional exposures to platinum group metals, gold, cobalt, lead and silver."
This is the tagline at the end of an Xstrata press release concerning Raglan. Take out the coal and the remaining five major interests are copper, ferrochrome, nickel, vanadium and zinc. Sounds like NOT territory has all the bases covered, including the additional exposures of pge's,gold and lead. I know a lot has been said about which major would be interested in NOT but with the strategy and branding that Xstrata has, I am sure they are doing detailed analysis.
Some interesting facts about Raglan are that they have high grade ore in the 3% Ni range and large reserves in the 1% range. Sounds familiar. Falconbridge/Xstrata have spent hundreds of millions in exploration since the mine opened in 1997 and have been hugely successful. Goes to show how elusive an orebody can be. Raglan is now touted as the worlds largest producer at 50,000t of nickel metal per year. This may be a bit dated now. However, they are in the middle of nowhere, built a mine, concentrator and housing for a flyin staff of 500, built a 24MW deisel generating station, 28 million liter tank farm etc. They ship over a 65 km all weather road. store up to 100,000t in ore sheds waiting for the short shipping season. The ore is shipped all the way around to Quebec City and then by rail to smelter. This can be repeated at NOT for Nickel/copper. Power for the ferrochrome presents another problem, but this company has experience in finding solutions. It will be very interesting when we get the assays we hope for.
I know that much is being made of the apparant posturing that the NOT BOD are doing towards mining themselves. I hope they are just posturing because the timelines for a small exploration company to develope this themselves would be lengthy and they would have to prove themselves as producers before we would get a true share price optimization. Therefore, in my opinion we need assays, two majors in the hunt and huge return on our investment in the short term.
