Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Red Metal (ASX:RDM), Managing Director Rob Rutherford
Lel Smits: Red Metal is advancing the pre-feasibility study for its wholly owned Sybella Rare Earths project near Mount Isa in northwest Queensland. Sybella hosts a large shallow rare earth system and a globally significant inferred resource base. Ahead of presenting at the Rockstars Mining Investor Event I’m joined by its Managing Director Rob Rutherford to discuss Sybella’s scale, its potentially simpler processing pathway and the milestones investors can expect next.
Rob, welcome to the Stock Network.
Rob Rutherford: Welcome, thank you. It’s good to be here.
Lel Smits: Now Sybella offers exposure to magnet rare earths. What makes this deposit stand out from other Australian rare earths projects? And also Rob, can you outline for us why its location really near Mount Isa matters?
Rob Rutherford: Well, it’s a unique geological deposit. It’s a large granite hosted deposit.
It’s about 12 by 3km footprint, starts at surface, has a zero strip ratio. But the most important thing is that it’s actually an unusual mineralogy. It’s a soluble rare earth mineral in a non-acid consuming granite host rock.
So that allows us to heat leach this project and that makes it very different from whatever’s in the market at the moment. Most of the Australian deposits treat a mineral called monazite, which they’ve got to heat up to 800 degrees Celsius to process. And we don’t have that situation.
We can leach ours with ambient temperature and pile it up in heaps and leach it. So it’s a very different processing route to all the major deposits that have been mined in Australia at the moment. And yeah, so that’s what we think is going to be its real key advantage.
Lel Smits: Fantastic. Now the PFS is underway alongside further metallurgical test work, geotechnical studies, also resource drilling. Rob, what’s been achieved in de-risking the project so far? And also, what are the key catalysts that investors should watch?
Rob Rutherford: Well, we’ve done about two years of metallurgical work to this point.
We’ve outlined, we’re concentrating on the area we call the carry zone, which is about over, just under a billion tonnes of resources. And what we’re out doing a PFS level study at the on about a 20 million tonne a year heap leach proposition. We did some very definitive column leach tests, which got about 70% to 78% of the rare earths out.
And that’s really crystallised in our mind that we’ve got a real project here. So that’s kicked it off for us. And the thing to look out for as investors is the PFS, the results from the PFS level study.
If you look at Meteoric, they got their study up to a PFS level study, they had a market cap of about 500 million. We’re only 50 million at the moment. So we think when we show the world that this project is real, and that’s what the PFS level study will do, we think that’ll really crystallise some value in the stock.
So that’s the one to watch. And that’s due out probably in first quarter next year.
Lel Smits: Well, Rob, I appreciate the update from Red Metal. Also look forward to hearing more when you appear at the Rockstars Mining Investor event in Sydney this month.
Rob Rutherford: Thank you. My pleasure.
Ends