Mike Drew –Ram Resources

While we were at the Greenland Day conference The Roadhouse took the opportunity to catch up with Ram Resources managing director Mike Drew.

Ram Resources was one of the earlier Australian miners to head to Greenland. When did you arrive and what attracted you to go?

We acquired the Motzfeldt project in early 2010. What attracted us was first off, the potential of the project, which is always important. The second was that we really liked Greenland as a mining jurisdiction.

Could you give us a quick snapshot of the Motzfeldt project?

Motzfeldt is very much a true multi-element project in that it contains tantalum, niobium, zironian and rare earths.

It’s one of those projects that from which we could potentially produce three or four different products.

Each one of those would contribute individually to the project’s operating costs, and importantly each one, with the exception of zircon, is on the critical materials list.

Each also has a different economic driver. Tantalum is electronics and alloys, niobium is high-strength low-alloy steels and rare earths is electronics, alloys, chemical catalysts etcetera.

So, hopefully we could be in the situation where steel is down so niobium is down but electronics and catalysts are going strong, therefore so are rare earths.

Source: Company presentation

Greenland is obviously a mining-friendly country, so is that an advantage for a foreign mining company coming in to work there?

We think so. The BMP (Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum) does a lot of work directly promoting the industry. It’s always encouraging when people genuinely want you to operate within their borders.

Also, from a mining perspective, in Greenland you only need to deal with the BMP while here in Australia for example, it is possible that you have to deal with a number of different government departments.

You basically only have one rubber stamp process to move through?

Exactly, it is nice too, compared to larger mining jurisdictions, that these people know everybody’s exploration licence area, they virtually know all the miners individually, you can approach them whenever you need to seeking advice that they freely give.

You are waiting on some assay results at the moment to come back from the lab. Where did that drilling take place and what news do you hope, or expect, to recieve?

We drilled seven holes this year. That was all conducted on our Aries prospect, which is the main target at Motzfeldt.

What we are hoping is that enough information will come from that to enable us to put the first JORC complaint Inferred resource on the table.

That’s a big leap forward as that confirms the project’s viability. What it won’t do is close the project off. It won’t restrict it as we still have plenty of drilling to be done along strike.

So Aries is the main prospect. You have identified another two in Voskop and Drysdale, what’s happening with them?

We are hoping, in 2012, to go back to both those targets to get a drill rig in there and drill a few scout holes.

What would you hope to be able to tell us at Greenland Day next year?

By Greenland Day next year we would like to be in the situation of being able to have our first resource on the table and have done some basic metallurgy that suggests we can recover a product.

That would allow us to also look at what the economic driver metal is. That might sound strange, not yet knowing what the economic driver metal is, but our preliminary view, at this stage, is that the tantalum, niobium and the rare earths will all contribute around 30 per cent to 40 per cent each, so there won’t be a dominant mineral.

That potentially means we may be able to have an economic project of tantalum or niobium on its own, because they occur together, or the rare earths on their own.

We’d like to prove that basic economics and get a rough scoping concept around the project, follow it up and then potentially, at the next Greenland Day be talking about Voskop and Drysdale  in the same manner that we are now talking about Aries.