Generation Mining (GENM.C) is rapidly advancing its Marathon Palladium project as just a few weeks after having published an updated resource estimate, the company has now engaged P&A Mining Consultants to complete a Peliminary Economic Assessment by the end of this year. We expect the PEA to be base don the more conservative pit outline of 116 million tonnes containing a total of 2.74 million ounces palladium, roughly 850,000 ounces of platinum and almost 650 million pounds of copper.
We will run some of the numbers by ourself shortly just to get an idea of what we could reasonably expect from the PEA as it will be interesting to figure out how the NPV and IRR will change compared to the feasibility study completed by Micon in 2012. The capex will very likely be substantially higher than originally anticipated, but as the palladium price is much higher as well (and we obviously wouldn’t use the spot palladium price for our base case scenario), the economics will probably still look better than in 2012 when the palladium price was trading at just a fraction of today’s price.
Disclosure: The author has a long position in Generation Mining. Generation Mining is a sponsor of the website.
