Jim Sims' response to Walterc regarding permitting/financing.
my mail to jim
a poster on ihub claims that financers will wait to the big financing until permits are granted . is this correct ?
Walter—
This is not accurate. Permitting for a project like NioCorp’s Elk Creek Critical Minerals Mine is one of several elements of the overall risk profile that financiers consider when making large capital investments. There is no hard-and-fast rule about the level of permitting required prior to financing. One case in point was Molycorp’s Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility in California. More than 500 individual permits were required by that development, and the overwhelming majority of those were obtained after Molycorp completed its IPO on the NYSE in July of 2010. (By the way, Molycorp’s highly successful permitting processes were led by none other than Scott Honan. Not a single permit that Scott and his team were able to obtain for that California project was challenged by a third-party entity, which is highly unusual for large mining and mineral processing projects in the U.S. today).
NioCorp’s Elk Creek Project is highly unique in that it has such a low permitting risk profile. All NEPA-level permit processes for this project are already complete. That sets this project apart from virtually all other proposed greenfield mining projects in the U.S. of this size and scope.
Permits that are required under the federal NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) regime can introduce a significant degree of risk to a project. Many mining projects in the U.S. have been halted or seriously delayed because of lengthy reviews under the NEPA process, and because of litigation brought through that process by various third-party advocacy groups. I know of several proposed mining projects in the U.S. that have been waiting for years – some longer than a decade -- to complete their NEPA-level permitting processes.
At the Elk Creek Project, we have all of that behind us. This is thanks to Scott and his team of engineers who successfully designed the Elk Creek Project in a manner that avoids the environmental impacts that require a project to go through NEPA-level permitting processes. This fact has served as a compelling element of the attractiveness of this project to prospective capital investors.
I regret that we sometimes see individuals make authoritative-sounding public statements on these topics, such as the one you reference. These individuals clearly do not have on-the-ground experience in the mining development space, much less C-level experience in developing greenfield industrial projects. I continue to advise caution to all NioCorp shareholders about things that are said by anonymous individuals in generally anonymous internet bulletin boards. Investors should, as always, rely upon their own homework and due diligence with regard to their investment decisions, and not rely upon heresay floated by parties whose motives are opaque and not always aligned with the interests of long-term equity investors.
Of course, investors who have questions on the Project can always contact me, and many do.
Jim Sims
VP External Affairs
NioCorp Developments Ltd.
jim.sims@niocorp.com
