Thor Mining’s hard work soon to pay off
Thor Mining (ASX: THR, AIM: THR) has recently been the subject of a
research report by a UK broker, which concluded Thor has been a busy company
with “more of everything” in 2011.
The following is an extract from the
report.
Dual-listed Thor Mining (AIM, ASX: THR) has released its 2011 annual
report.
Approaching the AGM we put forward this review of Thor’s progress
this year. The best summary we can give is 2011 brought more of everything. More
exploration, more investors, more fund raising and a higher proportion of those
funds reaching the drill bit.
After a relatively slow 2010 and early 2011
(not just for Thor but reflected across the junior mining sector) the Australian
exploration season saw some significant activity across Thor’s
portfolio.
The greenfields exploration on the Dundas Project continues to
provide more drill targets from shallow geochemical calcrete and soil
sampling.
A little hiccup in the paper trail for Spring Hill was quickly
resolved and Thor took ownership of more of the 80% option over the brownfields
gold prospect. This paved the way for the drill to turn on the property and we
look forward to first assays from the program in due course.
Molyhil Mine
saw more drilling, both deeper and shallow step-out, which intercepted more
mineralization and that can hopefully be converted to more mineable reserves
which in turn would make the mine easier to finance and ultimately more
profitable.
The first part of the re-worked DFS was released showing the
revised CAPEX and OPEX estimates that will be used in the final report, expected
in the very near future.
It’s been a hard year for many junior miners,
especially so for those exploring for gold where the normal premium that gold
explorers enjoy to the price of the metal became a penalty in Oct 2008.
The lag between metal price and equity price has grown so that gold
equities are only worth around 80% of what they would have been worth had their
historic correlation with the metal price held.
It seems that fear even
stretches to gold proxies and that bullion under the bed is currently the order
of the day.
The current situation will change and normal service will be
resumed. Until then Thor has its thoroughly industrial, fundamentally driven
tungsten/moly mine to advance and judging by its drill returns on 25 Oct &
28 Nov the extra exploration looks to have paid off with some of the highest
grades of scheelite (WO3) and molybdenite (MoS2) seen on the project to date at
24.5% and 1.37% respectively.
These are high grades that, if even
partially reflected in the new resource estimate, have the potential to
significantly alter the life of mine economics.
More of
Everything in 2011
More greenfields exploration on the Dundas
project, first drilling at the brownfields Spring Hill Project, deeper and
step-out drilling at Molyhil to support the re-worked DFS and still to come, a
re-worked DFS and mineable reserve for Thor’s Northern Territory
tungsten/molybdenum mine.
All this coupled with regular visits to market
and to potential customers for Molyhil’s concentrate and Thor has been a busy
company while the continuing financial whirlwind has most of us rushing for
cover.
