 Welcome back to investor intel. We have a new guest today old company new guest. Say hello to Nick Erner from Alcane Resources Good day. Hey, guy. Very well. How are you today? No, really good really good really good. Thanks. Where are you today? I'm in Perth where our company's head office is and I'm just about to fly out to Singapore tonight to the medal events conference Were you planning on coming up to Toronto for the mining show in March? Perhaps perhaps the furthest quarter of next year is Pretty fluid at the moment because we think we'll have a fair bit going on corporately at that time Good. Well, let's talk about that. We sat with Ian at the clean tech metal show last May when he gave us an outline of the company Being a gold guy from Northern Ontario. I'm always very interested in the gold project But there's more to Alcane than just gold. So let's talk about Dubrow Yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah, so a Dubrow project is Pretty well developed in that we've got the government permits all squared away Which is a pretty big challenge in most Western jurisdictions But that's a big project of that will be producing zirconias zirconium hafnium niobium and a whole suite of rare metals including yatrium all the way Most of the magnet metals will come out of this out of this plant Now there was a lot of excitement about hafnium at the clean tech show last May and I honestly I have a science background It was the first time I heard anything substantive about hafnium. So what's the magic with hafnium? look people are excited about hafnium because there's two sort of Diverging uses for it one is that people looking at particularly on computer chips as an incredibly fast silicon replacement on Computer chips that's one area. So there's a fair bit of technology going on in that space much much more and I understand to be perfectly honest and then the other thing is on turbines and particularly jet turbine engines People putting hafnium into their alloys to lower the amount of distortion And with thermocreep that's occurring in those engines and so that's an existing use right? That's not a new use That's existing it's an existing existing use and I think as far as we can ascertain it So use where people are wasting for a decent stable supply If you think of these aerospace companies and indeed some of these technology companies No one wants to introduce a metal into their product range where they're going to have supply shortages They need that problem like a hole in the head, you know, right? They they want a stable supply of a metal before that they can start to add into their long-term products Right, so I was curious about the hafnium, but you also have zirconium and what else in that deposit? well, we have zirconium and then we have a whole range of Rare earth metals and we also have niobium Which is in short supply and people are saying the use will increase with electric vehicles Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right So that's Dubrow Let's do the gold project now. I did the gold is near and dear my heart. How's the gold doing? Yeah, really well, we've been we've been really excited about the productivity. We've got out of that plant You know, unfortunately, it's a small it's a small resource, right? And we finish our open-cut mining there about this time next year. So we'll be we'll be finishing mining in the July August September quarter Next year in 2018 right and then at the moment we're doing a hollywood drilling for extensions under it looking really promising And we're saying to ourselves, okay, do we or don't we go underground there now or do we build up more of our regional exploration? We've got quite a lot of great tenements around it But we build up the resource base then go again. We've got an excellent capital infrastructure there You've been in revenue. You haven't really had to do that large financing because the gold has been paying for some of the other operations Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. So we've got a bit over 50 million Australian dollars You know very really close to Canadian dollars in the in the bank at present We've got no significant outflows. We've got more revenue coming in over at least the next 12 months from the gold business And we've financed all the environmental permitting You know continue to do extensive pilot work on Dubbo and we've done a lot of engineering You know more than $10 million engineering feed study bankable level Monetarization studies. So yeah, we've done that out of cash flow and And continue to do explore it because at our heart we're a company that explores Fines deposits and slowly brings them into production or sells them, right? Now you're relatively new to the company. How did you come to join Alcaine? Yes, I joined Alcaine four years ago as the company was about halfway through construction of the gold business The company was becoming an operator again from from being exploring. So my background is all about operations construction commissioning You know turnaround stuff and so that's how yeah, yeah, I'm a chemical engineer I've been in the game now for over over 20 years and yeah, a big chunk of my time was actually spent for Western mining and then you've got taken over BH Bill and that the big Olympic Dam Copper Gold deposit in South Australia and Yeah, and so, you know when I met Ian Chalmers, you know, we just had one of those happy intersections of You know right place right time right to the skill set So it's been a lot of time in open-cut and underground gold But as well as that I'd spent a lot of time in solid extraction advanced metal extraction, particularly with uranium leaching roasting, smelting, all courtesy of the Olympic Dam and so yeah, really fit it in nicely with the Dubbo project as well So you're able to take that knowledge with you But you I thought you were more recent to the company You just said you've been there four years Yeah, four years. So I was the chief operations officer beforehand and basically formed the company's operating division again and And then also picked up all the project and engineering work and do a lot of the government liaison and Important but sometimes complex a little bit frustrating I had that kind of day today at the office a thousand little things not one of them important on the room But God help you if you forget any one of them Yeah, exactly. It's hard to commission a plant. So what's on the horizon? Yeah, look the really really big thing for us is squaring where the financing for the Dubbo project We have some product development We're doing we've got we continue to refine our products to make them more appealing on matching with customers in particular in the Specialty Zirconia space and that's we're doing continues and work on half team But the big thing is our project Sits ready to execute. I could I have the permission if I have the money I have the mission to start construction tomorrow. So I could do that. What is your product for the for the construction? Well our original our original project if we go for fully permitted which we would process a million tons per hour Or was 1.3 billion Australian dollars so a billion us and we've spent a lot of time in the last year working on how to modularize and stage build that capacity so that our financial risk for ourselves and investors can be built across four trains and at the moment we're looking at a 650 or 700 million dollar Doing first half in two stages so that most investors want to see us Come into production Produce successfully Establish a market for our products and then get the right remnant market and things that are okay now I can put more money and then we'll have it up after Exactly exactly so our big focus is getting on that first bit of funding Which is the first half of that six fifty seven hundred million bucks laying down one train commissioning it proving it and then and then going again and obviously the the shift of do we sell a part of the project? Do we do equity? Do we do that? That all changes depending on? You know the revenue percentage and which stage of that ramp up you're in well Alcane is always at the top of our list I have all kinds of respect for mr. Chalmers found him educational entertaining and if you come up for the clean tech show And maybe we can have a beverage together That'd be great always came looking forward to it. Have a good day right. Thank you very much