IC45....I posted this awhile back. It shows and details the process in which niobium is processed. Most likely, due to the size of our mine(20+ years)the infrastructure to process the niobium will be built on site and working year round.
The link details IAMGOLDS niobium mine and how much they are able to produce per year. Hope this helps with your question. Jim
Tks IC. In response to yours, can answer as follows:
First, in Oilcan's post following yours, he gave a link regarding another Niobium mining operation, which indicated that that mine processed it's ore on site (most likely how we would do it) and production in 2001 came to 4,250 tons. That is miniscule in terms of shipping arrangements (I had asked the board previously regarding the processed tonnage we might be producing, and in the absence of a hard answer from someone more knowledgeable, I'll assume we will process our ore on-site and that our figure will be roughly similar). That probably means we'd be making about 500 tons/month, which could be shipped out in maybe a dozen to two dozen containers a month. This is so easily accommodated by the container market that it doesn't even warrant further discussion, and if we do ship in container sized lots, port logistics is not any kind of concern. Probably, freight would be booked with a shipping company who would drop off a box at our place and come and pick it up a day or two later, and that'd be pretty much the end of managing it for us, if we sold CIF. Selling FOB, we wouldn't even be this involved with shipping. Container company takes the loaded box and they truck it to a port somewhere with container cranes, it gets loaded in about two minutes once it's alongside the ship, and it goes to some port on the receiving side where the box is unloaded onto a chassis on the receiving end and driven over the road to an ultimate delivery point (probably directly to the steel mill) and it's all over. In this case, seasonality is not going to be an issue to shipping. The box would probably go to Montreal or overland to some US east coast port like Newark or Baltimore, which have massive container ports. But basically, once the shipping company takes the box off our hands, it disappears into their system and gets delivered at the other side in a few weeks time.
As to your specific points -
1) Locks at Sault St Marie (Soo locks) - these locks connect Lake Superior and (I'm pretty sure) Lake Huron. We probably won't be shipping through them even if we sold to a North American steel producer. The Soo locks seem to close a month later than the St. Lawrence system locks. (A small aside: A local maritime society (the grunt club - see this link: http://www.gruntclub.org/gclub_history.html ) holds a kind of end of year dinner coinciding with the usual time that the St. Lawrence Seaway system closes for the year. This has gotten to be quite an event over the years, with over 1,000 shipping industry people attending, and copious amounts of alchohol consumed.) Anyway, I'm doubtful in the extreme that we would have anything to do with shipping through the Soo locks - our stuff would only go through them if we were going by water from Ontario to somewhere in Lake Superior, and I don't think there's any steel mills up there. My guess on shipping to a north american buyer/user is that we would use trucking or rail shipment to get it there. Or just sell FOB mine and let the buyer worry about it (that way you don't even need a shipping department).
2) Mining in winter - someone else will have to answer that, but I would be surprised if we didn't, once we were set up.
3) I am pretty sure they would process the ore on site (you don't want to pay to move dirt, and the buyers probably wouldn't want to deal with the tailings either). Oilcan's post following yours indicates other niobium miners process on site, and we probably would as well. FYG, iron ore is usually processed into an intermediate product (briquettes), which I think are 80% iron, so it's quite common to concentrate the product before shipping. Copper and zinc are similarly reduced to some form of "concentrates" prior to shipping. Again, it's far more efficient to process and ship mostly the end product you want instead of shipping mostly dirt. The difference between metals and coal is that coal doesn't require much processing beyond digging it out to put it in a final useful form.
Hope this helps.
BTW, Oilcan mentioned something about a "good job" last Friday - that was in reference to a protest against our FDA for not approving a biologic immunotherapy (Provenge)for advanced prostate cancer even though the FDA's own advisory committee overwhelmingly recommended it's approval last year. The same committee found unanimously that there was no safety concerns with this cancer treatment. You can find out more about this compelling story of a governmental bureaucracy run amuck (the FDA) here:
I was outside Memorial Sloan Kettering, home of Dr. Howard Scher (one of the key players in last year's sabotage of approval of Provenge), handing out fliers asking why the FDA would withhold approval of something it's own advisory committee judged to be both safe and effective.
If y'all think I'm not happy with moojer, believe me, I'm REALLY pissed at the FDA and Dr. Scher and a few other people for this little escapade. Sorry to be OT, but it's become an obsession for me.
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