St George Mining Ltd (ASX:SGQ) has been given governmental support to establish a tech centre and its other projects in Brazil. The company also recently secured A$72.5 million via equity placements. For the full rundown executive chair, John Prineas, joins Proactive.
Highlights
- St George Mining has received governmental support to establish a technological centre in Araxá, Brazil.
- The St George Technological Centre will be based at a local university in partnership with CEFET.
- It will host a pilot plant for metallurgical and downstream processing studies, supporting the Araxá Project.
- The centre will also serve students and other industrial research users.
- St George retains exclusive commercialisation rights for five years for any IP developed at the centre.
- The company can also benefit from other third-party IP created at the facility.
- A 10,000m drill program is underway at Araxá, with 3,000m completed and assay results pending.
- The program aims to both upgrade inferred resources to indicated and expand the overall mineral resource.
- The current resource is already comparable in size to the Mountain Pass deposit in the US.
- A significant resource upgrade is targeted by the end of the year.
Proactive: John, we're now talking about the St George Technological Centre in Araxá in Brazil, including construction of a large-scale pilot plant. Tell us more about this milestone, and what it really means for Araxá and St George.
John Prineas: Yeah, we've come up with what I think is a win-win solution for both St George and the local community there. We want to have a pilot plant like any other mining project. And we've decided to set that up within the local university, the university in Araxá. So it'll be available for metallurgical studies, downstream studies for St George, but we'll also give it a wider mandate, make it available for student studies and other industrial applications for metallurgical studies. So we're really contributing to the local community, to the research and potential for sustainable mining, as well as taking care of our own downstream studies.
Proactive: John, in addition, you will have access rights to commercialise any intellectual property you develop at the centre for five years from commissioning. That's quite a plus for St George.
John Prineas: Absolutely. We're sharing this technological centre with other companies and obviously the students. Anything we develop is ours 100%. So we could commercialise it and it could very well have an application to other mining projects, various mining projects in the region. We're also going to share in any other IP that's developed by use of the technological centre as well. So yeah, it's a great bonus for St George to have this privilege.
Proactive: And Araxá, as we all know, continues to evolve and unfold with quite a few updates. We know you're in the middle of a drilling program there. So at this point in time, how are things going?
John Prineas: We're into about 3,000 metres of more than 10,000 metre drill program. Some more assays coming soon. We've started the diamond drilling, which is very exciting. We haven't announced any results yet, but they should be coming very soon. It's a great drill program aimed at achieving two things. One, converting a lot of the inferred resource into indicated — that will underpin the economic study. But also, more importantly, expanding the size of the resource. So we are drilling along strike to the east, west, and north. We're very confident that we'll increase the size of the resource. It's already as big as Mountain Pass in the US — which just had billions of dollars spent on it by the Department of Defense — and we think we can significantly increase in size. Bigger resource upgrade by the end of the year.
Proactive: We'll soon look forward to having more updates from you on Araxá in the coming weeks. This was St George executive chair John Prineas, Thank you so much for joining us at this late time.
John Prineas: Thank you very much.