Hello Fishercat (again).

One more thing about the Metalysis Titanium article you’re referenced. In paragraph nine it states, “The world uses 140,000 tonnes of titanium yearly, at a value of $4 billion.” Let’s think a little about those numbers.

The article was published by ThomasNet News, located in New York City. So, apparently, the dollars are USA dollars. At the moment, the Canadian dollar is trading at an approximate five percent discount to its USA counterpart (CAN$100 to US$94.92 to be exact). US$4 billion is approximately CAN$4.2 billion (CAN$4.214 to be exact). Using round numbers (as the article does), in Canadian dollars, we get roughly $30,100 per tonne for pure metallic Titanium.

For my part, I use as my source for market prices “InfoMine,” located in Vancouver, BC (with offices, as well, in the USA, Peru, Brasil, South Africa, Australia, and México). The latest price InfoMine posts for non-paying subscribers is dated 20 August 2013. It is CAN$7,067.73 per metric tonne for “Ferro Titanium,” which is the usual way Titanium is traded on the spot market.

As I detailed in several earlier posts, Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) prices move in tandem with Ferro Titanium prices and are almost exactly double (give or take one percent or so). The same market logic applies to Ferro Chromium and Ferro Vanadium vis-a-vis the oxides without the iron.

Besides Titanium Dioxide our Magpie resources also contain huge saleable quantities of Chromium, Vanadium, and Iron. I explained how to add this up in an Agoracom posting I put up on 5 July 2012.

http://agoracom.com/ir/Fancamp/forums/discussion/topics/537431-magpie-ferro-titanium-ore-112-56-share-at-2-of-market/?message_id=1697016#message_1697016

Converting Ferro Titanium to Titanium Dioxide (and deducting the value of the Iron in the process) gives us a value (rounded off) of $14,135 in Canadian dollars per metric tonne for Titanium Dioxide (compared to $30,100 for metallic Titanium). By weight, metallic Titanium accounts for 60 percent of Titanium Dioxide (TiO2). Using the lower TiO2 market numbers, according to Magpie’s June 2012 NI-43-101, Fancamp’s 46.72% ownership gives us (combining the Indicated and Inferred resources) in Canadian dollars (as of 20 August 2013):

Titanium (TiO2) = 48.58 million tonnes x $14,135 per tonne = $686,678,300,000
Chromium (Cr2O3) = 11.23 million tonnes x $4,82 per tonne = $53,926,460,000
Vanadium (V2O5) = 1.34 million tonnes x $52,180 per tonne = $69,921,200,000
Iron (Fe2O3) = 260.73 million tonnes x $133.65 per tonne = $34,846,564,000
Market value of Magpie at one percent of its in-situ resources = $8.65 billion.

In my 5 July 2012 posting (and in another one), I gave two percent as a middle-of-the-road in-situ valuation to Magpie of the market prices. Since then, the market prices of mineral exploration companies’ stocks have gone far South. So, now, I’m using one percent as the new very rough but new very realistic and depressed norm.