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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ralfph who wrote (4743)	6/20/2003 9:44:18 AM
From: kidl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

Thanks Ralph. Tried to find out Titanium prices myself. No luck so far. Rocket posted numbers on Stockhouse. Not sure if they make sense. Rock value: $400 / ton Pot. Res.: 50 Mil. tons Cheers, kidl

To: ralfph who wrote (4743)	6/22/2003 1:57:03 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

Mineweb ... it aint the holes in the orebody ... Is Rio here telling the truth? The Australian experience says maybe not really, as their Aus. market is expanding. The Chinese and CIS supply says maybe.. but what is in it for Rio to tell the truth? Kerr McGee in the States produces 4 million tons of pigment per year and sees a firm market.. Worldwide Sulfate plants are closing due to the environmental problems associated with the iron-sulfate waste product. Chlorination of synthetic rutile and rutile is now the preferred process. It is a complex issue.. What Rio may really be talking about here in the part on TiO2 is competition and reduced market share.. we have heard gloom songs from these kind of monopolists before.. but there has to a grain of truth in it.. "The short and medium term outlook for Rio Tinto Iron and Titanium, which produces titanium dioxide feedstock, is equally unappealing. At QIT in Quebec executives said the market was significantly over-supplied with a growing number of producers and a consolidating list of customers. Over-capacity was 20 percent at present and likely to last until 2006-7. The Rio division has been cutting output in an attempt to protect the price but, since many of its contracts are likely to mature before the five years is up, prices are likely to fall. Davey says there are three or four years of price pressure ahead for this business. Analysts were told that the 50 percent owned Richards Bay Minerals in South Africa, another titanium dioxide feedstock producer and where BHP Billiton (LSE:BLT) has the other half-share, was also operating at below full capacity. This might look surprising as Rio Tinto is one of the lowest cost producers, but the company has only five major customers and there is no spot market to sell excess [titanium dioxide] production, Bird points out. Rio dominates world supply of titanium dioxide and made it clear it intends to stay that way. It has potential projects in Mozambique and Madagascar the latter already the target of environmental campaigners but the management sees little possibility of any development before 2007. Rio's Borax division also dominates its particular business, contributing half the world's supply of borates from its mine in California’s Mojave Desert. The market outlook for its products is again uninspiring. Rio is expecting borate demand to grow at slightly less than gross domestic product in the industrialised countries as substitutes are found for borates in two of the main markets: detergents and fibreglass. To partly counter this, Rio has been focusing on reducing costs and the management reckon they are on track to achieve a 20 percent cost reduction over the next two years. At Iron Ore Company of Canada, in which Rio has a 56 percent stake and is operator, cost cutting is also the order of the day and the division is targeting C$100m of sustainable reductions or 20 percent of the present cost base to be fully effective in the 2005 financial year." The thing about Borates may not be completely true either if borates become the fuel of choice for H using fuel cells. KOH type fuel cells can run on borates and are 75% efficient. They were used in the NASA Apollo series rocket missions. EC<:-}

To: ralfph who wrote (4743)	6/22/2003 7:53:40 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

There appears to be a large deposit on the FNC ground. There is no spot price for titanium dioxide. I quoted a speculative price of 70 cents per pound US in another post. That is for the pigment. The pigment may sell for close to $1.00 CDN in quantity. There are three products, ilmenite, synthetic rutile, and the refined oxide product called pigment. In Australia, the prices for ilmenite are about 80 dollars AUS per tonne, for synthetic rutile about 470 AUS dollars per ton. Pigment sells for over 2000 AUS per ton. There are two main refining processes for pigment and they are the sulfate process and the chloride process. Both have iron waste products that must be disposed of, but the sulfate process is the more problematic and volume intensive. Both processes depend on cheap power, and cost and availability of such reagants as oxygen, chlorine and acid. It would help to be near markets, power, and have the mine site near the smelter, or on have both on tidewater, as the waste of the smelter/refinery should report back to the mine site. "Synthetic rutile" is what is needed to make pigment or TiO2 pure. Natural rutile is also known and make a minor ore of Titanium dioxide. It is found in beach sands and is easily concentrated by gravity methods. Anatase is another naturally occurring form of TiO2 which is used in different applications of the oxide. EC<:-}