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Equinox mulls uranium plans, listing Posted: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 [miningmx.com] -- EQUINOX Minerals, an Australian firm developing Zambia’s 150,000 ton/year Lumwana copper mine, is considering listing another company to mine uranium it also discovered. “Certainly it’s one of the options that we are considering,” said Craig Williams, Equinox CEO. He was speaking in an interview at the Emerging Mining Congress in Zambia. “We’ve made no secret of the uranium we’ve found. But we haven’t been promoting it as the focus is to get the Lumwana copper mine producing,” he said. “Our technical team has been solely focused on this.” In an presentation earlier, Williams said the company had identified about 22 million pounds of uranium at Lumwana, occurring in various high-grade veins. It would be selectively mined and stockpiled. When the uranium was first discovered at Lumwana, the uranium price was about $11/lb. “Mining it just broke even,” he said. “But at a price of $36/lb, there’s a great deal more potential.” However, Equinox was throwing its efforts into developing the copper mine that, at its peak, would produce 188 000 tons/year of metal. Construction of the plant was scheduled to start mid-2006, and commissioning was planned for late 2007, the company has said. Although uranium mining was planned for later, Equinox had tested producing it in a pilot plant. “We’ll revisit the 2003 pilot study and bring that up to a bankable level. Then once we’ve achieved that we’ll consider whether to float a uranium producing company. Other players have already expressed an interest in the uranium and a whole range of other permutations,” Williams said. About 63% of the uranium resource was contained within the known Lumwana pit, but there could be many more pounds of material in the company’s 20,000km2 tenement holdings. Equinox did not believe the uranium discovery (nor its cobalt reserves) had been factored into its value which had, nonetheless, improved seven fold since the company’s $125m equity raising programme. Volumes increased to about 4 million shares per day compared to an average of 171,000/day in 2005. The improvement in the market capitalisation of the company had also thrown it before generalist fund management firms that like to invest in $250m businesses for their small cap products, Williams said. If the company can gain recognition for its uranium, it may keep the resource within the existing entity, rather than creating a new one.
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