Ferro-Alloy Resources Limited (LON:FAR), the vanadium producer and developer of the large Balasausqandiq vanadium deposit in Southern Kazakhstan, has announced the appointment of Liberum Capital Limited as a joint corporate broker alongside Shore Capital Stockbrokers Limited effective immediately.
Ferro-Alloy Resources operations are all located at the Balasausqandiq deposit in Kyzylordinskoye Oblast in the South of Kazakhstan. Currently the Company has two main business activities:
a) the high grade Balasausqandiq vanadium project (the “Project”); and
b) an existing vanadium concentrate processing operation (the “Existing Operation”)
Balasausqandiq is a very large deposit, with vanadium as the principal product together with several by-products. Owing to the nature of the ore, the capital and operating costs of development are very much lower than for other vanadium projects.
A reserve on the JORC 2012 basis has been estimated only for the first ore-body (of five) which amounts to 23 million tonnes, not including the small amounts of near-surface oxidised material which is in the Inferred resource category. In the system of reserve estimation used in Kazakhstan the reserves are estimated to be over 70m tonnes in ore-bodies 1 to 5 but this does not include the full depth of ore-bodies 2 to 5.
There is an existing concentrate processing operation at the site of the Balasausqandiq deposit. The production facilities were originally created from a 15,000 tonnes per year pilot plant which was then adapted to treat concentrates and expanded. Further expansion is being undertaken which is expected to result in annualised production capacity of around 1,500 tonnes of contained vanadium pentoxide plus significant by-product molybdenum.
The strategy of the Company is to develop both the Project and the Existing Operation in parallel. Although they are located on the same site and use some of the same infrastructure, they are separate operations.
