Send this article to a friend
Print this page

» Palmiere calls Barplats exit "amicable"
» EastPlats sets out C$130m Barplats bid
» Elands offers to work with Barplats - David Salter, Elands MD
» Barplats backer in windfall cash-out
» Barplats targets 250k oz by 2007


Eastplats targets 700,00 oz output
Allan Seccombe
Posted: Thu, 01 Mar 2007

[miningmx.com] -- EASTERN Platinum wants to raise platinum production to 700,000 oz in the next seven years from its projects for which it might have to come to the market to raise capital. It does not rule out acquisitions, CEO Ian Rozier said on Thursday.

Eastplats will acquire the remaining shares it and empowerment partners do not own in JSE-listed Barplats to bring its holding in the company to 74%. Barplats will be delisted and Eastplats will list on the JSE, adding to its primary listing in Toronto and its presence on AIM.

“Other benefits will flow through the JSE listing and other corporate opportunities will be forthcoming because of it,” Rozier said.
other corporate opportunities
“There aren’t a lot of projects available in the same league as the ones we’ve acquired in the last couple of years,” he said of the Eastern Platinum acquisition of Spitzkop and Mareesburg.

“That’s because the big guys like Anglo Platinum and Impala have already got their hooks into some of these projects by joint ventures or offtake agreements. There’s not a lot of room in these projects for someone else to come in,” he said, adding the company’s growth would come predominantly from internal projects.

Eastplats has an aggressive growth target over coming years, exploiting some 70 million ounces of platinum group metal resources it owns in projects on both the Western and Eastern Limbs of the Bushveld Igneous Complex.

The Crocodile River mine, which produced 48,000 oz of platinum group metals in the six months to end-December 2006 will lift production to 240,000 oz within two years, Rozier told Miningmx in a telephonic interview.

The order in which projects will brought into production is the expansion at Zandfontein at Crocodile River, the Crocette project at another section at Crocodile River, then the Mareesburg opencast project. Finally, Eastplats will develop the combined Spitzkop and Kennedy’s Vale project, which will start with an open cast mine and then move underground.

Click Here to subscribe to our daily newsletter
Production is forecast to step up to 300,000 oz in three years, 500,000 oz in five and 700,000 oz in seven years, Rozier said.

Rozier declined to give a cost estimate of bringing these projects into production, but fair guess at developing the outcropping Spitzkop project rich in palladium and rhodium on the Eastern Limb near Steelpoort would be to look at the nearby Aquarius Everest South Project, which was brought into being at below $100m.

“We’d look for the same kind of numbers,” Rozier said.

There is an existing shaft system at Kennedy’s Vale, which is down dip of Spitzkop.

“We think it will be able to do more than 300,000 oz per year including the Kennedy’s Vale operation,” he said, which would take three to four years.

“We have on a fully diluted basis $250m in the treasury. Our shareholders would have to make a choice whether to exercise warrants to put a couple of hundred million dollars in the treasury or we’ll have to do a financing exercise which will be dilutive to them but if the stocks are the right price then we’d do that,” he said.