Jonathan Downes – Ironbark Zink
ONE OFF THE WOOD: The Roadhouse sat down with Ironbark Zinc managing director Jonathan Downes this week to catch up on all the company news from the northern hemisphere.
You have released some good news recently regarding a $50 million facility from Glencore.
The Glencore facility is an interesting new model for the company where we have been able to take advantage of what is currently a tough market in which to raise funds.
We now have the means to grow the company on a corporate level, like all junior companies want to be able to do, through acquisitions if and when they become available.
We hold the view that the world is going to recover one day and we want to be considered as a major mining house when that happens.
How important is that deal for Ironbark?
Glencore has been on our company register for around five years, so we do have a long relationship with them.
I like to think that we’re going to be able to grow a symbiotic company whereby, ultimately, we will be a vehicle that will end up running a number of mines, growing the company into being a large entity – while Glencore allows us access to capital that most junior companies could only dream of.
Hopefully then, they will get what they want, we will get what we want and, most importantly, our shareholders will get what they want.
We hope to be able to grow that relationship and grow a company that one day will hopefully be a household name.
What does the facility mean that Ironbark is able to do now?
It provides us with credibility as well as strength, beyond any junior company that I can think of, with a large war chest, effectively to go and build a large company.
It would be hard for other companies to do what we are doing without the support of a major company, like Glencore, because to access $50 million is hard work, especially in the current environment.
What’s happening up at the Citronen project now?
All the work that is currently happening is engineering work. We completed a lot of drilling this year so now we are just finishing off the new resource numbers and we have mining engineering firms working on the new mining schedules.
That’s all happening now because basically the exploration season in Greenland is closed for the northern winter.
That’s right; we only have an eight month exploration season there.
It’s not due to the cold temperatures but it is dark, which means we can’t get aircraft in and out of our project area because our airstrip is not lit.
When we are operating the mine however, we will have a fully equipped camp and fully lit air strip and will be working all year round.
You say you are crunching the new resource numbers. When do you anticipate being able to release that?
We hope to be able to release that to the market in about maybe six weeks’ time.
We expect that it will also have an impact on the new mining schedule, so it is shaping up to have been a very successful year for us.
Why Greendland?
From an Australian perspective it probably is difficult to grasp but it just happened to be where this giant project was located.
We acquired it in early 2007 and one of the appealing aspects about it was that it was very large but we didn’t really know how big it was.
Since we acquired it we have nearly tripled the resource and it is still open in every direction.
One year some 36 per cent of our drilling was conducted outside of the known resource and it increased by 38 per cent.
So where we drill we find more and it just gets bigger and better. That was one of the main appeals really, the scale of the project.
Have you had any encounters of the close type with any wildlife?
To celebrate one of the end of one of the seasons our technical director Adrian Byass set up a sausage sizzle, which did result in a polar bear sighting.
It appears they like the idea of a sausage sizzle just as much as an Australian geologist does.
The next time we sit down and have a chat what would you like to be telling me about Ironbark?
I would like to be able to show you, with greater clarity, where the $50 million facility will be spent and that the greater strategy for the company is starting to unfold.
I would also like to be able to tell you how we have progressed the Citronen project, and I am confident that I will have much news to report on both those fronts.