Neptune Minerals Share Discussion Threads

[mattybuoy] 21/12/2006 12:30

OK "ours" might be a bit over-enthusiastic ... :)

Still, good news nevertheless.

[rapier686] 21/12/2006 12:11

Wow - though "ours" seems a little premature - they're applications rather than granted licences. Maybe someone else we know will be competing?

On the other hand, perhaps Nautilus might have agreed to give Neptune a free run at Conical Seamount in exchange for quid pro quo in the Bismark Sea?

Also glad to hear Kermadec 07 is shaping up at last.

Bit late to be telling us of Justin Baulch & Chandra Wijeratne - the website's had them up there since I started looking into Neptune.

[calmtrader] 21/12/2006 10:22

If this stock mirrors nautilus i'll be very happy

[mattybuoy] 21/12/2006 10:01

Good news today.

Conical Seamount is ours!

[mattybuoy] 08/12/2006 18:13

Hi Rapier.

I hadn't noticed about the exploration director. The two companies probably do talk to each other, I would imagine. Informally that is, about tech issues and so on.

Nautilus are becoming so stuffed with cash they could probably afford to JV with Neptune for exploration, if that's what they wanted. Neptune's cash will be looking a bit thin after this Antipodean summer's exploration round ...

I haven't checked recently, but even with the recent "land grabs" I believe that Neptune's properties are comparable in size with Nautilus's. They have rights to basically the entirety of New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone.

It's just a matter of finding collapsed chimneys at a reasonable depth :)

[rapier686] 08/12/2006 16:03

Yeah, following Mattybuoy mentioning their existance the other day I bought a few this morning.

Largely on "far cheaper version of Nautilus" grounds. I realise they're yet to find something exploitable but Nautilus has shown that if they do it can look very, very attractive; now up to ~£150m enterprise value and still looking cheap on the assumption it all ends up working.

There are of course disadvantages to currently being second in the race, Nautilus accessing funds to allow it to bags and do something with huge land grabs whilst still moving things forward on Solwara. But there are probably advantages too, far easier to follow than to lead.

Even if they only find chimneys, capex doesn't have to be amortised over the one patch. It can hoover up one set, and up anchor onto the next. That to me was one of the lightbulb moments from David Haydon's 2020 presentation.

Oh and very intruiged to see explo director is ex-Nautilus. Anyone know any more?

[calmtrader] 08/12/2006 13:47

I see there's a few buyers sniffing around which is nice

[calmtrader] 04/12/2006 16:55

Thxs Mattybuoy

I have bought some NPMW for the gearing...if it comes off great if not £2k gone..

thats the type of risk /reward I like

[mattybuoy] 04/12/2006 15:32

calmtrader,

I was one of the people on that TMF thread.

The main reason that I and others favour Nautilus is that they are much further along the road. They have economic quantities of SMS to harvest, and a plan to do so.

Whereas Neptune have just so far found some "isolated" chimneys, which are not close enough together to form an economic resource.

That doesn't mean that Neptune won't find something though, which is why I have a small punt. Their licenses are HUGE ...

The next round of exploration is due to start either this month or in January.

[calmtrader] 02/12/2006 22:15

Alot of info on this and Nautiluson the below link..they all seem to favour Nautilus..IMHO i still think Neptune will come good.

[calmtrader] 13/11/2006 11:07

Does anybody know when the next exploration update is likely to be?

[mattybuoy] 31/10/2006 13:28

NPM just seems to be getting marked up in sympathy with the Nautilus developments.

The thing is, Nautilus actually does have what looks like a mineable resource i.e. a "field" of collapsed chimneys. Or at least that's my understanding of it.

Whereas NPM is yet to find an equivalent such field. They have only located standalone chimneys, which isn't enough.

The next round of exploration will be vital IMHO.

[wh0sthedaddy] 31/10/2006 11:55

nice rise on small volume...

anyone still here? interesting to see Anglo American throwing cash at Nautilus in Canada.

[wh0sthedaddy] 03/10/2006 08:51

interesting - off bloomberg:

Gold Rush Plunges Undersea as Barrick, Miners Scour the Pacific

By Peter Robison

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- David Heydon says the rock he dredged from a mile beneath the sea off Papua New Guinea looked like nothing more than a dull-brown fire hydrant. Inside were veins of copper and gold worth $300.

Two companies exploring the South Pacific seas with new remote-controlled robots are betting rocks like these will start an underwater gold rush for billions of dollars lining the ocean floor, reversing the prospects for a method of mining that has never been economical.

``We should mine on the sea floor, because it is the most common spot on the planet,'' says Heydon, chief executive officer of Vancouver-based Nautilus Minerals Inc., who recounted details of the dredging dive he supervised in February. ``It's just not the most common to us.''

With the prices of some metals, such as copper and silver, more than doubling in the past three years and land deposits dwindling, the modern day forty-niners are defying investor skepticism, untested gear and a history of failed ocean ventures to mount the first commercial exploration in a generation.

Nautilus and London-based Neptune Minerals Plc have raised more than $50 million and secured such partners as Barrick Gold Corp., the world's biggest gold producer, and Canyon Offshore Inc., a maker of undersea rigs.

They are trying to take advantage of surging demand for mineral wealth. Stockpiles of copper, needed for factories and houses in the emerging economies of China and India, have dwindled to about 150,000 metric tons as of March 2006 from 1.2 million tons in 2003, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Four of the five largest deposits are in Chile. Keeping up with escalating demand through 2020 will require adding 1.1 billion tons, the equivalent of about three more Chiles, to global supply, the agency says.

Metals Prices Surge

The squeeze pushed copper prices up 72 percent to $7,545 a metric ton on the London Metal Exchange this year through Sept. 29, while gold futures climbed 15 percent to $598.60 an ounce in the same time after reaching a 26-year high of $732 on May 12.

``The geological potential down there is awesome,'' says Tony O'Sullivan, who joined Nautilus as chief operating officer in May after tiring of the hunt for new strikes on land as head of base metals exploration at Melbourne-based BHP Billiton Ltd.

Ocean miners will have to overcome concern that excavation will harm the environment and prove too expensive to make the ventures profitable. Shares of Nautilus closed Sept. 29 at C$2, unchanged from their initial public offering in May, while Nautilus declined 41 percent to 14.75 pence on Sept. 29 from its initial share sale in October 2005.

Sentry Select Capital Corp. bought 1 million Nautilus shares, convinced that metals supply shortages are likely to persist. ``It's harder and harder to find large deposits,'' says Laura Lau, a fund manager at the Toronto-based firm, which manages C$8.5 billion.

`Substantial' Risk

That doesn't mean ocean mining is viable, says Paul van Eeden, president of Cranberry Capital Inc., a Toronto-based private investment firm. Major mines depend on churning up rock that yields a consistent grade of metals, and it's too early to say how uniform the material is on the sea floor, he says.

``The risks are substantial,'' he says. ``None of this has been tested.''

For Simon McDonald, an Australian geologist born in Tennessee who explored for minerals, oil and gas on three continents before starting London-based Neptune in 1999, history provides a road map: Start looking offshore, just as oil companies did when easily exploited deposits began drying up 35 years ago.

``At the moment, it's new and different, so people are skeptical,'' says McDonald, 44. ``But it's not going to be just a niche.''

Open-Pit Mines

In open-pit mines like Chile's Escondida, majority-owned by BHP Billiton, copper is so scarce that just 1 percent of the rock that's scooped out contains metal. Getting ore is a matter of scale: The largest mines, as much as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) wide, can be visible from space. McDonald says there may be richer concentrations on the sea floor.

In one patch the size of a few football fields that Neptune sampled off New Zealand, the copper concentration was 8.1 percent, more than eight times the level of Chile's Escondida. The surveyed ocean area contained 11.2 grams (0.36 ounces) of gold per ton -- almost three times the 0.13 ounce-per-ton concentration that Barrick reported for its flagship Goldstrike open-pit mine in Nevada as of Dec. 31, the company says.

The undersea deposits form along the 25,000-mile ``ring of fire'' that encircles the Pacific like a gold band, stretching from Australia, through the Sea of Japan, past Canada's West Coast and on to the tip of South America.

Ocean Deposits

At the sea floor, slabs of the earth's crust collide. Sea water mingles with the magma below and vents through cracks in the floor, forming plumes of superheated, metals-rich water called ``black smokers.'' They crystallize into chimneys as tall as 100 feet (30 meters) high that may contain gold, copper and zinc.

First discovered near the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador in 1977, the black smokers are the geological cousins of deposits mined on dry land for centuries in volcanic regions of Australia and Spain, which were under water millions of years ago.

Limited sampling by research vessels has turned up 200 of these ocean deposits, mainly in coastal waters owned by New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Japan and Indonesia, according to a report by the International Seabed Authority, which the United Nations established in 1982 to regulate sea mining.

Drill Tests

A typical deposit may contain 5 million to 10 million tons of ore rich in copper or gold -- worth as much as $7 billion at today's prices. Only 5 percent of the undersea ridges have been explored, so there are probably far more deposits, according to the report by the Kingston, Jamaica-based seabed authority.

Placer Dome Ltd., a Vancouver-based mining company later acquired by Toronto-based Barrick, invested $12 million in 2005 and 2006 to fund Nautilus's first tests. The company was founded in 1997 by Julian Malnic, an Australian writer of mining newsletters who acquired offshore exploration licenses from Papua New Guinea.

Nautilus went public on Canada's TSX Venture Exchange in May, raising C$25 million ($22.3 million). Neptune raised 9.3 million pounds ($17.6 million) on London's Alternative Investment Market in October 2005.

Barrick converted Placer Dome's investment into a 9.59 percent stake in Nautilus in August.

``Our Nautilus stake allows us to participate in the future upside,'' says Alex Davidson, executive vice president of exploration and corporate development at Barrick.

Abandoned Trials

During the sustained rally in metals markets of 1977 to 1980 some of the world's largest mining companies, including Inco Ltd. and Kennecott Minerals Co., spent $500 million combined to experiment with deep-sea mining, according to the International Seabed Authority.

Potato-sized rocks, rich in manganese and zinc, line the Pacific floor. A group led by Toronto-based Inco in 1978 brought up 800 tons from 18,000 feet of water at the equator, essentially vacuuming them into a ship through a pipe.

The trial was abandoned after prices fell and it proved cheaper to keep looking on land, says Ted Brockett, who worked on the Inco project and now runs Sound Ocean Systems Inc., a Seattle company that makes ocean-monitoring equipment.

``If the economics had been there, we'd all be out ocean mining by now,'' he says.

Robotic Miners

Today's undersea promoters say their approach is better because the deposits near black smokers are richer in metals. They can also rely on more advanced equipment developed by offshore oil companies.

Nautilus has made two sampling voyages this year, retrieving rocks with drills and robotic arms made by companies including Leidschendam, Netherlands-based Fugro NV, the world's largest surveyor of deepwater oil fields, and Canyon, a unit of Houston-based Helix Energy Solutions Group Inc. Canyon's robotic arms are attached to nine-foot-long submersibles tethered to ships and maneuvered with remote-controlled thrusters.

The deposits are located by towing another device shaped like a cruise missile. Equipped with a video camera, it sweeps the sea floor and measures temperature, salinity and magnetism.

Biologists are intrigued by the black smokers. The surrounding sea is rich in exotic life, from blind shrimp to three-foot-long tubeworms that weren't known to exist until the smokers were discovered, says Peter Rona, a marine science professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Shrimp, Tubeworms

He says mining should be allowed only after intensive study.

``We need sources of metals, but we need to do it in a knowledgeable and sustainable manner,'' Rona says.

The companies say they won't target active vents, only nearby mounds of metals-rich rock formed as long as 5 million years ago by now-dormant smokers. They argue that oil and gas companies already mine in the ocean and lay pipes and dig trenches in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

``The disturbance we'll do on the sea floor is less than the oil and gas industry,'' says Heydon, 50, the Nautilus chief executive.

At full production, two remote vehicles -- possibly a modified version of the wheeled rock-cutters used in coal mining -- would roll along the sea floor, grind 400 tons of ore an hour and send it to the surface through a foot-wide tube, he says. Water would be removed in a series of spirals, and the resulting ore barged to a smelter on land.

Avoiding Road Construction

Nautilus wants to produce 150,000 tons of copper per year and as much as 400,000 ounces of gold, valued at $630 million at long-term average prices, Heydon says. A 2002 study by WorleyParsons Ltd., a Sydney-based consulting firm, estimated the cost of setting up such a mine at $260 million. Heydon says it may not be that inexpensive, though it will cost less than a mine on land.

Phelps Dodge Corp. and other investors will spend more than twice as much, $600 million, to tap the world's largest undeveloped copper reserve, on rolling hills in southern Congo. The Phoenix-based copper producer says the new mine will produce 100,000 tons of copper a year after opening in 2008.

``It's becoming difficult to find terrestrial deposits that are of high quality,'' says David Coffin, a mining analyst who produces the Hard Rock Analyst newsletter in Vancouver. Coffin, who watched aboard the Nautilus ship in February as a robot recovered rocks, says he bought the company's shares. ``This is an idea whose time has come.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Robison in Seattle at [e-mail]

Last Updated: October 3, 2006 03:02 EDT

[mattybuoy] 04/9/2006 16:59

Final results are out today.

Average grades for the SMS chimneys are finally given. They are in themselves totally stonking, and add up to a rock value of more than $1,000 per tonne at current prices.

The question is, are there enough of these chimneys standing or lying around in one place to actually make a resource that's worth mining?

[mrdoran] 29/8/2006 22:21

Is marine mining the wave of the future? Published: 18/08/2006
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Record high metals prices have sent two firms scurrying into the ocean for copper and gold, but costs and environmental challenges may yet sink their plans.

Big miners have failed to keep up with buoyant metals demand from Asia so two small companies, Nautilus Minerals and Neptune Minerals, are betting on marine mining to fill the gap.

"Underwater mining is the future with the great demand from China and Asia making it possible, despite the higher costs," said Professor Anton Eisenhauer of the GEOMAR Research Center for Marine Geosciences at Germany's University of Kiel.

GEOMAR has developed mining submarines used in diamond operations outside Namibia by giant diamond house De Beers.

While offshore oil wells have been around for decades, sea mining for minerals is in its infancy. Copper prices doubling in less than a year and gold prices near record highs are helping it grows up quickly.

"Not many people realise that there is potentially another 200 000 tonnes of copper reaching the market in the next three and a half years," said David Heydon, president and CEO of Canada's Nautilus Minerals.

World number one gold miner Barrick holds a 9,5% stake in Nautilus Minerals, which is exploring off the coast of Papua New Guinea and aims to start producing in 2009.

"We are looking to produce between 300 000-500 000 ounces of gold and 100 000-200 000 tonnes of copper," Heydon said, adding there are also very high grades of silver and zinc in the ore.

One of the main attractions is the high metal grades.

"There is potential to find grades that haven't been seen for ages, the surface sampling from 2005 reached 12,5% on copper, 15 grams per tonne on gold per year," Heydon said.

The common grade for copper is 1-2%, according to Magnus Ericsson, director of consultancy Raw Materials Group.

"For gold, 1-3 gram per ounce is very high in open pits, and under the surface one might find 5 grams," Ericsson said.

By using mobile equipment it is possible to mine smaller deposits while a conventional mine must be larger to be viable.

"I can mine one out, pull the pipes up and move the ship to another area 200 miles away," Heydon said.

Neptune Minerals, listed on London's junior stock market is carrying out similar exploration activity in New Zealand waters.

Nii Allotey Odunton, deputy secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), controlling all mining activities beyond national jurisdiction, predicts high costs.

"The operating cost is the big problem, you bring the minerals up and then you move them into the shore to a refinery... all these costs have to be less than the aggregate you get from these metals," Odunton said.

In the 1970s, manganese nodules were mined in the seabed but in the end it proved too costly. On the other hand, diamond house De Beers' Namibian marine mining operations produced just over 900 000 carats last year.

But offshore diamond mining is not as deep (120-130 metres) as Nautilus's operations of 1 600-1 800 metres depth.

Neptune is exploring at levels between 120-1 800 metres.

Nautilus is in Holland and Belgium this week to talk to dredging companies which it hopes will do the mining for them.

ICH Holland Merwede, a market leader in the dredging industry, said that theoretically it should be possible to go down to 1 500 m but no one has the technology.

"We are seriously looking at it, but up until now we are always confronted with the fact that if there are ore deposits in the world that are cheaper to mine, we don't go to 1,600 meters deep," said Jan Dewit, responsible for sales of mining equipment below water at ICH Holland Merwede.

The oil and gas industry went offshore in the mid-1940s and today about a third of the world's oil comes from the sea.

A remote-operated vehicle (ROV), used in the offshore industry, goes beyond 3,000 m and could be deployed to the seabed in order to scoop and recover the raw material to the surface, John Mair, global technology manager at Subsea 7 one of the world's leading subsea construction contractors, said.

"The technology is not that challenging," Mair said.

But it all comes down to how viable it would be, he added.

Kristina Gjerde, high seas policy adviser to the Global Marine Program of The World Conservation Union (IUCN), said the biggest environmental challenge would be disturbing sediments.

"You would have to clearcut the area, you are not only breaking the bottom, but you are also stirring up the sediments which will destroy the flow and create stress on other organisms nearby," Gjerde said.

[captainfatcat] 28/7/2006 22:14

Noticed another interview on Wall strret reporter today bit better than the last but not much to inspire

[captainfatcat] 23/2/2006 21:33

WALL STREET REPORTER Interview With:
Simon McDonald
Managing Director and CEO

Dated February 23, 2006

[jpdm fortunemaker] 05/1/2006 14:25

Got out before xmas too thankfully and put profits into FOGL. ood luck to those still holding.
B4N
JP

[captainfatcat] 23/12/2005 17:12

Agree looks like this has a long way to fall

[dannythefox] 23/12/2005 15:10

Get the bad news out before xmas! I sold out. That said if there is any good news next year the share price will fly as it only takes a few trades to move the price either way.

[pugugly] 23/12/2005 11:47

Sampling results do not (imo) look good - Market has dropped price havily - Cannot see bottom at this rate -

[captainfatcat] 19/12/2005 09:53

Thanks for that mangal

[mangal] 19/12/2005 09:40

The warrants attached to this, NPMw, are now listed on :

[jpdm fortunemaker] 09/12/2005 12:32

Cheers, wouldn't be surprised if it was, Quite interested in the 35k sell. Buys circa 55k so bit surprised to see it tick up so much.