Savannah Resources Plc (LON:SAV) Chief Executive Officer David Archer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the Mutamba Mineral Sands project, final products for test marketing, the timeline for the PFS in Mozambique and the progress of other projects
Q1: This morning we saw the announcement that the pilot plant construction is now underway for the metallurgical test work. David, can you talk us through the highlights there?
A1: I think some of the key features are that we’re moving rapidly forward in terms of the valuation of the Mutamba Mineral Sands project. As you know, it’s a world-class deposit of heavy mineral sands and we’re very pleased that, as part of our joint venture deal with Rio Tinto plc (LON:RIO), the pilot plant is available to us and we’re doing a disassembled form. So, what we’re doing is putting it together, reassembling the plant and it’ll provide us with the products, a heavy mineral sand product that we’ll be using for the metallurgical and product test work. The construction work is now well underway, it’s a good time of the year with limited rain, so we’re expecting very little in the way of interruption and hopefully have a smooth course towards commissioning of the plant later this year.
Q2: Now, you mentioned the preparations of final products for test marketing, why are these needed?
A2: The part of the arrangement with Rio Tinto, one of the key features of the arrangement with Rio is that we a life supply and offtake With Rio Tinto to take product to their Richard’s Bay, mineral sands processing facility to the south of us, in the Northern part of South Africa. So, Rio is an end-use customer that is very interested in taking the product and valuating its characteristics so they’re best placed to be able to take on board the product and implement their offtake arrangement. So, it’s really part of the technical analysis of the product itself and the pilot plant itself will be producing the intermediate products which is the heavy minerals sands concentrate.
Q3: Finally, David, is there a timeline on the PFS in Mozambique and how are your other projects progressing?
A3: Well, we will be making an announcement around the pre-feasibility study very shortly and the plan is to have that completed in the early part of 2018 and that will be effectively the third stage of the earning process with Rio Tinto and upon delivery of the pre-feasibility study, that’ll increase our project equity in the project to 35%.
We continue to be very active on our other projects, particularly in Portugal where we’ve completed something in the order of 16 holes on our site, lithium project in northern part of Portugal. We have a series of lithium deposits on existing granted mining leases and we’re still hopeful that with this drilling and the results and the assay that will come from that, that’ll help move that project very quickly towards a development decision. Equally, in Oman, we’re working on economic evaluations of a project development there so we’re very busy on a number of fronts.
I think shareholders can expect a series of update announcements over the coming weeks. We’ll also tune them in on progress on each of those 3 very exciting projects.
