AUGUST 2022 recalls, “until I stumbled upon this fluorspar mining operation in Utah.” After coming across the Lost Sheep Mine, James reached out to Raul Sanabria, a contact he had met on a previous project who happened to be an expert in fluorspar. Together, they travelled to Utah to scope it out, “and we found fluorspar everywhere,” James says. “It was all over the entiremountain range.” James was drawn to the opportunity by the volume of fluorspar, but also by the quality of the ore. He remembers reading the reports and noting that the project was hardly developed but they were already mining. “That’s kind of unusual,” he explains. “When that happens, it usually means the ore is so rich that you could take it out of the ground and basically put it in a bag and sell it. That was the impression I got, and when we went down there, that was exactly what we found. The owners were essentially driving a loader into the base of a wall, taking the ore out, putting it into a bag, and the brokers were coming and picking it up. There was hardly any refinery process at all.” “At that point, I saw the possibilities from an engineering point of view,” he continues. “It was so obviously scalable. And because it was such a clean ore, I knew the capital costs wouldn’t be very significant. We wouldn’t need hugely complex processing facilities. We wouldn’t need smelters. We just needed a basic flotation plant on site, and that was it.” The fact that it was fluorspar was also appealing, as fluorspar is on the United States’ list of “critical minerals.” Previously, it was actually the only nonmetallic mineral that was 100 per cent imported. Because of that, a company producing it domestically would qualify for a lot of government assistance when it came to financing. Finally, on top of the other
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