antlizzie, nice to hear from you, same here I am a long-termer, and I don't play around with margin so I can wait for better time.

Despite all the naysayers who have been screaming "grade is king" without looking at anything else, NGC has a good potential. In fact it has been ranked as the leader of the pack for production in about a year. It's certainly true that grade is king for precious and base metals since everybody pays the same price for essentially the same product. Gold is gold, but for an industrial metal, graphite is a different beast. When a graphite company is avaluated for its economic viability, all kinds of factors such as grade, flake size distribution, chemistry, metallurgy, etc. must be taken into account to come up with the verdict if a project is economically viable. It a detailed analysis that must be carried out by an independent and qualified firm and it must be signed off by a qualified person, a PGeo (that person's neck and the firm's reputation are on the line). A minimum requirement is a PEA, without that a company is not supposed to run around with capex and other predictions such as larger deposit than shown by an NI-compliant tech report since this would violate security rules.

NGC has lower grades compared to some others, but it has a superb flake size "footprint" and purity. The plan envisaged for Bissett Creek woul have a mill located within about 0.5km from the open pit (NGC CEO Greg Bowes said "more like a quarry" in a recent BNN report since the deposit is very near the surface...you can pick up some samples at the Bissett Creek site as souvenir, if you are around the neighbourhood. It's about 15km from the Trans Canada Hwy, Hwy 17, just a few km west of Stonecliffe, Ontario). The product coming out of the on-site (0.5km haulage of rock to the crusher) mill would be up to 98% purity which is ready to truck either to Toronto or Montreal for shipping away. This level of purity would fetch top dollars and would be expected to be significantly above the price of $1700/tonne assumed in the PEA (for a profit of 1700 -1000 = $700/tonne, even with a talk about reduction of some 12% in the price of graphite. But all graphites are not equal, there are low quality/purity graphite and there are high quality graphite. The high purity products should not be affected by price fluctuation due to the increasing demand for such products for high-end batteries and energy storage systems (for e-cars, etc.). In addition, the profit margin would increase significantly if spherical graphite and the 99.99% products are factors in (NGC has done a full suite of lab tests, by independent laboratories, to provide support for the potential sucesses, including the upgrading processes).

As long as the capex is within the "industry-standard" range, the economic viability will come out in the wash when the final bankable EA is issued. In other words, this up-coming FEA report (scheduled to come out in a few weeks, end of June?) will say it all, weather or not the project is considered viable, i.e. making some reasonable money for all of us.

Without such document based on a rigourous approach, it would be senseless to throw numbers around.

Bubble?: First I don't see a burst at least in a few years, even if there is a bubble, since it would take that long for wannabes to get to a level to be considered as potential "junior producers" (minimum of 3 years, since it would take at least 1 year to build a mine/mill complex). Second, in the graphite business, if the company has a good products (high purity, spherical and 99.99% graphite) which are in good demand (niche market) then it would be better insulated from the bubble bursting. Or, it (and us) would just pause, and ride out the storm. (Confucius says: Don't invest/gamble with grocery money).

Cheers,

goldhunter