Base Case PEA can only get better
posted on
Jun 01, 2015 10:01PM
Hydrothermal Graphite Deposit Ammenable for Commercial Graphene Applications
Lets look at all the things that likely can only get better from here and lets see how much they add to the NPV.
1) Recovery 75% could easily go up to 90% or higher (at 90% that increases the NPV by 20%)
2) Pricing is still an open question as we have at least one targeted end use not identified. Even if we just go back to the number in the RE ($8500 vs $7500 in todays PEA release and this would be easy to do by targeted another high value use or more toward LiIon battery use, this increases the NPV by 13.3%)
3) Extending the mine with underground extraction. The PEA used less than 50% of the indicated and inferred RE and the RE is open at depth (so doubling the amount of extracted material increases the NPV by 200%)
4) Some graphite companies use an 8% discount rate as their base case for their PEA and in any case as ZEN does a PFS and FS the discount rate will drop. (Using a discount rate of 8% instead of 10% which was in the PEA NR today increases the NPV by 33%)
5) it should also be noted that todays numbers were all in US$ and the current exchange is $0.80 US to $1.00 C.
So with some very likely changes the NPV of ZEN could easily go from $US 615 million (pre-tax) to
$US 615 million x 1.2 x 1.13 x 2 x 1.33 / .80 = $C 2,773 billion or from $C 12.60/share to $C 45/share. None of the above increases are much of a stretch IMO and some could certainly improve more especially the selling price and the extractable resource, remember its open at depth.
So if you think that people, institutional investors, miners and others are not going to take notice of ZEN think again, but remember that all overnight successes took a while.