I'm stuffed to the gills with gold right now -- YRI, SNN, ADM, SCM, ARU, BUF.U, CBR, CKG, EPM, EPM A warrants, GIX, GGN, MTO, NMB, PG, and PMV -- so I am looking elsewhere. REE developer Lynas got away from me yesterday, so I decided Tantalum and Niobium right here in BC is a better bet right now.
Blue River tantalum mine to have strong local focus
clearwatertimes.com
By ROBERT MANGELSDORF
Aug 06 2007
One of the largest mineral exploration projects of its kind in the world is taking place north of Blue River.
Commerce Resources Corp.’s Blue River Project is looking to open a tantalum mine not far from the tiny mountain hamlet, and last week the company held a series of open houses in Blue River and Valemount to get to know the communities they hope to work with in the future a little bit better.
Commerce Resources Corp. Director Shaun Ledding said he couldn’t be happier with the turn out.
“We’ve been very pleased with the support for the project,” he said. “Some of the locals [in Blue River] are even investing.”
The company owns the mineral rights to more than 400 sq. km of land on the eastern flank of the Monashee mountains, just north of Blue River. While that may seem like a large area, says Jenna Harding, head of technical services for the firm, only a handful of sites spread over the area have been identified as having potential, and currently, exploratory drilling is taking place at a single site.
“We’ve got some geology that looks very interesting,” she said. “But we are still a long way off from actually pulling anything out of the ground.”
So far, the company has invested $2 million into the exploration project and has seen it’s stock rise from only 11 cents per share two years ago to more than $1.30.
However, it will still be years before geologists will be able to determine whether or not a tantalum mine will be economically feasible, and even longer until Commerce Resource shares start paying dividends.
Harding said the project is looking to have a strong local focus.
“We heard from people here [in Blue River] that they feel they’re community is dying and they need jobs,” she said. “We have a corporate policy to buy locally and hire locally whenever we can. Its just good business to hire locally, not only do you not have to house and feed your workers, but it’s far better for the community.”
Harding said the open houses held last week were important, in that the community “knows who the heck we are.”
Tantalum is a rare metal used to make electronic components called capacitors, which are used in a variety of high tech consumer devices, such as mp3 players, cell phones, and video game consoles. In 2004, Sony ran in to major problems when it couldn’t produce enough of it’s new PlayStation 2 video game consoles to keep up with the Christmas season demand due to a shortage of tantalum capacitors.
It’s non-reactive hypoallergenic qualities also make it ideal for use in medical and surgical implants.
While tantalum prices hover at the $30 per pound range, companies will often pay $65 to $70 per pound for long term supply contracts, guaranteeing them a reliable source of the material. In 2000, prices spiked at more than $200 per pound due to a tantalum shortage caused by skyrocketing cell phone sales.
Tantalum is found in a type of rock called carbonatite, which is similar to limestone. Of the 500 sites in world where carbonatite is found, Harding says 14 of them lie within the Blue River Project claim.
Currently, the majority of the world’s tantalum comes from the Sons of Gwalia mine in Western Australia.
However, the firms financial collapse in 2004 has sent processors and manufacturers scrambling to find a new, reliable source of the metal.
One such source is in Africa, where the Democratic Republic of Congo holds an estimated 80 per cent of the world’s tantalum reserves.
However, more than four million people have been killed in a bloody civil war over the past ten years there and various rebel groups vying for control exploited tantalum mining to help finance the war. This has led to boycotts of companies such as Nokia who used Congolese “blood” tantalum in their cell phones.
These factors, Ledding says, are just some of the reasons the Blue River Project is attracting the attention of tantalum buyers.
“Buyers are looking for ethically sound tantalum sources, and socailly, politically we’re very stable here,” he said. “It’s Canada, after all.”
Ledding, who grew up in Barriere, says the location of the mine is also a selling point.
The Upper Fir site, where 17 test holes have been drilled so far, is less than 2 km away from power lines, the CN railway and the Yellowhead Highway, making the site very accessible and far closer to the North American market than Australia or Africa.
Commerce Resources Corp. stock is traded on both the TSX Venture Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. |
