Harvest Minerals (LON:HMI) debuted on London’s Aim market on 7 September, following a solid pre-listing marketing effort over the summer and riding on the coat-tails of an impressive news release from its Arapua potash project in Brazil.
The first trade went through just before 10:00am priced at 0.97p, slightly higher than Friday’s closing price on the Australian Exchange, where Harvest also has a listing.
Interest has been building in the UK as Harvest directors Brian McMaster and Matthew Wood have made a concerted effort to showcase the potential of its Brazilian suite of assets via a series of presentations and road show meetings organised by the company’s UK broker Mirabaud.
No money was raised in conjunction with the Aim listing itself, but now that the quote is in place a significant fundraising is expected shortly.
Mirabaud has already expressed confidence it can bring in sufficient funds to move Harvest significantly along the development path at the leading Sergi and Capela projects and to make further progress at Arapua, which is rapidly coming along behind.
At Sergi the company is on the cusp of completing a scoping study, following the release of an inferred JORC resource in July that showed the project to contain 62mln tonnes of sylvinite grading 25% KCl.
The overall potash resource, including carnallitite, rings in at 105.3 mln tonnes.
Meanwhile, the latest results from Arapua have revealed the presence of what the company calls “large areas of highly mineralised potassium rich rocks”.
Among the better results showing from on-site hand-held XRF analysis were 20 metres at 7.24% potassium oxide (K2O) and 3.6% phosphorous pentoxide (P2O5) and 13 metres at 5.27% K2O and 2.62% P2O5.
All of the eight holes that were drilled intersected mineralisation and all were still in mineralisation at the end of the holes.
Further work is required, but at this stage Harvest is confident it can produce what it calls a “very competitive” direct application natural fertiliser (DANF) rich in potassium, phosphorous, calcium and magnesium.
The plan now is to conduct further drilling with a view to calculating a JORC resource for the project and moving into the feasibility and marketing phases.
“These results are very welcome, given the company’s strategy of developing a commercially acceptable DANF product alongside the pre-development of its Sergi and Capela potash projects,” said Harvest’s executive chairman Brian McMaster.