Ivanhoe Mines Ltd (IVPAF)

[JB3729]

Friedland at the Mines and Money Conference -

Drilling at Kakula with seven rigs in the last 90 days, delineated about “45 million equivalent ounces of gold,” Friedland said. An initial resource for Kakula should be out shortly.

Remarkable: 45 million equivalent ounces of gold, at $1,300 an ounce for gold, would be $58,500,000,000 worth of copper delineated in the last 90 days.


http://www.northernminer.com/news/friedland-sees-growing-demand-platinum-copper/1003777946/

Friedland sees growing demand for platinum, copper
Posted By: Salma Tarikh September 30, 2016

Robert Friedland, a renowned mining financier and promoter, took the stage at the recent Mines and Money Americas conference in Toronto, to highlight the growing need for platinum and copper, as rapid global urbanization continues. Both are among the metals that his company, Ivanhoe Mines (TSX: IVN; US-OTC: IVPAF), intends to extract.
“I am not here to depress the gold bugs in this room. I’m just here to get you excited about copper and other metals that we need in our new society,” Friedland said.
The executive — whose successes include selling Voisey’s Bay, a large nickel-copper-cobalt deposit in Labrador, to Inco for $4.3 billion in 1996, and discovering the large Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold project in Mongolia in 2001 — noted that there would be about a billion more people living in urban environments by 2030. As a result, more people will be living in cities filled with “toxic smog,” he said, citing 6.5 million people die a year from air pollution.
To combat air pollution, Friedland noted the automotive industry plans to use more platinum to manufacture hydrogen-powered cars and more copper to produce electric cars, in an aim to reduce carbon dioxide emitted from traditional vehicles.
Honda’s new hydrogen-powered Clarity Fuel Cell, uses an ounce of platinum, Friedland said, noting other car manufacturers, including a portion of the Volkswagen Group, will follow suit in making greener cars.
Meanwhile Tesla’s Model 3 employs a copper induction motor, the executive said, adding newer electric cars will contain larger amounts of copper and no expensive rare earth metals. (The latter was a sector typically dominated by Chinese suppliers.)
“I’m glad we finally killed this rare earth thing,” Friedland commented. “Don’t worry about the Chinese squeezing our testicles,” he added. “We don’t need them any more.”
According to the mining entrepreneur, rare earth metals, along with lithium, will fall out of favour in the application of new technologies. “Most lithium miners will also end in tears,” he predicted, citing drones fly longer when powered by hydrogen fuel cells as opposed to lithium-ion batteries.
Strengthening his case for platinum, Friedland said China is spending $32 billion over the next four years to expand its hydrogen-powered tram system to address its air pollution problem.
Platinum is also conveniently a metal Friedland plans to extract at Ivanhoe’s large Platreef project in South Africa. The platinum, palladium, nickel, copper, gold and rhodium project sits on the Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex, some 280 km northeast of Johannesburg.
“The orebody is as thick as an eight-storey building,” Friedland said. It is also flat, high-grade and shallow, making it easy to mine.
The company expects to build the underground mine in three phases. It would initially process 4 million tonnes per year, before doubling that in the second phase, and then expanding to 12 million tonnes per year in phase three.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivanhoe is developing the large Kamoa copper project, where in August it made the even larger Kakula copper discovery.
Drilling at Kakula with seven rigs in the last 90 days, delineated about “45 million equivalent ounces of gold,” Friedland said. An initial resource for Kakula should be out shortly.
After highlighting the potential at Kamoa-Kakula, Friedland described Chile’s aging copper mines, including El Teniente, as “little old ladies lying in bed waiting to bed.”
Elsewhere in the DRC, Ivanhoe is working on the Kipushi zinc-copper project.