Bacanora Minerals - Hatch Come Onboard

I must confess that when the RNS was released telling us that Hatch are to be the engineering consultants for the Sonora Lithium Project and the Magdalena Borate Project I didn't jump with the same excitement as some regular bulletin board posters did. 


Nevertheless, when I followed the "DYOR" adage and looked into them, I too began to quake with excitement! 


With more than $35 billion in projects currently under management and having operated in 150 countries, Hatch have invaluable experience in both borate and lithium plant design.


Most importantly however, is that the very high speed at which Hatch operates means that the there's the potential for the Lithium plant to be up and running by late 2015 or early 2016.


Now, I refuse to sign up to ShareProphets for a number of reasons, so this would be potential extra reading for some who want to go into more detail, but this is a quote from the article that I've lifted from elsewhere:



"Bacanora, steered by chief executive officer and experienced mining figure Shane Shirclff, has had pilot plants working for a year, according to Orr-Ewing, and, provided an expected £70 million financing can be fixed, hopes to have Sonora, where water is abundant, in production by the end of 2015 at an annual rate of 35,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate, with costs less than a third of recent prices of around $6,000 a tonne.
...
Orr-Ewing says the company will still have cash after the two feasibility studies, but envisages augmenting liquidity with forward sales deal. He adds ‘we may do a placing, in the $3 to $5 million (£3.7 million) range, but not until mid-2015."
http://www.shareprophets.advfn.com/views/8542/bacanora-signs-up-key-consultancy

Further to this, here are some tidbits of a conversation someone had with Kiran Morzaria on Twitter, which effectively follow the same train of thought:



Shane Stephens ‏@Sstephens95 Oct 22

@RareEMplc galaxy res from pfs to construction in under 12 months, shows potential given required urgency


Rare Earth Minerals ‏@RareEMplc 21h21 hours ago

@Sstephens95 Agreed - "Hatch moved this project from a concept design to a completed facility in less than three years".


Shane Stephens @Sstephens95

@RareEMplc hatch have the required experience aswell - hopefully see some big moves in the coming months. Thanks.


Rare Earth Minerals ‏@RareEMplc 20h20 hours ago

@Sstephens95 Yes they do - I know the team well met them at Lithium Conference this year thought they would be ideal for BCN. 



To conclude, it looks like the appointment of Hatch as engineering consultants could well have been the beginning of an accelerated program to deliver production earlier than the 2017 that was expected. Even if this is true, we can't expect the 50,000 tonnes per year that could be processed from a full scale plant, but based on the movements of other companies like Western Lithium Corporation, starting small and working up seems to have become popular within lithium mining.


All the best,

The Masked AIM Trader


UPDATE! 

It transpires that there was a wrongly changed error between the information that I received for an ADVFN bulletin board and the the information actually available on SharePhrophets. The production year is still expected to be 2017.

My apologies,

The Masked AIM Trader