Gold and lithium developer Prospect Resources has cemented an agreement with Hong Kong-listed Sinomine Resources Exploration, which will see the development of the Arcadia lithium project, in Zimbabwe.
The two companies in November inked a conditional placement and framework agreement under which Sinomine will invest A$10-million through a share placement, priced at 5c a share. It has also agreed to an offtake agreement at the Arcadia mine for 390 000 t of spodumene concentrate and more than one-million tonnes of petalite concentrate over a proposed seven-year offtake period.
Prospect on Wednesday announced that it had completed the A$10-million share placement, which was priced at 6c a share, with Sinomine taking more than 166.6-million shares in Prospect.
Prospect told shareholders that in addition to the placement, certain terms under the conditional offtake agreement had also been favourably renegotiated in respect of the pricing formula, which had seen the Arcadia project’s net present value increase by about $61-million to $401.5-million.
Further amendments included the requirement for Sinomine to prepay $10-million under the offtake agreement, with these funds payable on the installation of a ball mill at the project.
Furthermore, Prospect has also reduced the offtake volumes to be supplied to Sinomine to about 70% of the earlier-agreed volumes, with offtake volumes now classified as tonnes of spodumene, petalite and lithia units, giving Prospect the flexibility to alter supply quantities of spodumene and petalite provided the total lithia units supplied are satisfied.
The surplus is expected to give Prospect flexibility to negotiate offtake terms with other lithium downstream customers and enable the company to divert additional spodumene and petalite volumes to a proposed company-owned, lithium carbonate facility.
Meanwhile, Prospect has also cancelled the build-and-finance component of the original transaction, enabling the Australian firm to dictate the build timetable and process.
The company said that taking control of the build process for the process facility and mine would enable construction to start in a shorter period of time and potentially bring forward revenues.
All the necessary mining licences and environmental approvals to start the construction of the mine, process plant and tailings dam are already in place.
A scoping study into the Arcadia project established a mineral resource estimate of 23.4-million tonnes, at 1.42% lithium oxide and 123 parts per million tantalum pentoxide, which could support a potential mine life of between 15 and 25 years.
The completion of the mine finance is expected to occur in the second quarter of this year, with the company hoping to enter into its first engineering contracts during April.
- Mining Weekly
