Stja, I agree that Conglin may be interested - as well as...

Stja, I agree that Conglin may be interested - as well as others.

A little while ago I started to wonder what might happen after the dust settles on the BMG litigation. The possibilities as I see them are:

1 - some one else steps into the current JV.

2 - CAP buys back Hawsons and either finds a new JV partner or sells Hawsons entirely.

3 - BMG does not continue with JV and no one else is interested (whilst I think unlikely, this is a possibility).

I used to think that Ample Source stepping into the current JV was the most likely scenario. While this is still an option, I now think 2 is the most likely and CAP buying back Hawsons opens this up to other interested parties, including but not limited to Ample Source.

In an ideal world, I’d like to see CAP partner with some one who has the finance to move Hawsons forward as well as the expertise and experience to take it from a resource to a producing mine. The three candidates that come to mind are BHP, Rio and Vale. The sentimental part of me would love to see BHP make a home coming back to Broken Hill. But perhaps Rio or Vale might like to boost their ego by having a mine in their rivals birthplace?

I then thought whether these big boys would actually be interested in a magnetite project of the size of Hawsons. However, then I read about the 50/50 JV between BHP and Vale on BHP’S website which states “The Samarco operation in Brazil has an annual production capacity of more than 21 million tonnes of iron ore pellets and one million tonnes of concentrates. Our Samarco operations include open pit mines, a concentration plant, two pellet plants, port facilities and a 396 kilometre concentrate slurry pipeline between the mine and the pellet plants”. I then thought there is lots of similarities there with a potential Hawson’s project so maybe a Hawsons sized project is not out of the question for them.

Link to BHP website (quote under "Assets")- http://www.bhpbilliton.com/home/businesses/ironore/Pages/default.aspx

I appreciate that these may be some out there thoughts, but thinking big (or dreaming as the case may be) never hurt anyone. Do you own research and make your own decisions - I'm just sharing some more of my research. Always interested in others research too.