Canada invests $70m in Seymour Lake lithium project in Ontario
The lithium mine operated by Australia's Green Technology Metals could become the province's first lithium producer.
On only the second day of trading in Western Potash Corp. common shares on the main board in Toronto, investors were already abandoning the stock in droves. The junior player in Saskatchewan’s potash industry ended Wednesday down 5.5% after an analyst downgraded the stock.
Western Potash is in the pre-feasability stage of its Milestone Project in the south of the province where it hopes to mine almost a billion tonnes of potash using steam.
The company listed on the venture exchange in May 2008 and graduated to the TSX main board on Tuesday with 160,945,183 common shares outstanding in the Mining category. It is worth $222 million.
The Financial Post asks whether Western Potash is being run off the rails by the big players in Saskatchewan and quotes the research note of Robert Winslow, an analyst at Wellington West Capital Markets:
“In our view, Western Potash’s prospects are increasingly challenged as greenfield mine resources become more scarce with the larger, well-financed competitors securing the equipment, logistics capacity, and labour needed to bring new production to market.”
At the end of April Western Potash released an updated resource estimate on Milestone that showed 944 million tonnes of recoverable potash. The deposit would be mined using the solution mining method, where steam is injected into the potash deposit to dissolve the mineral. Andrew Topf News Editor MINING.com spoke to John Costigan, VP of Corporate Development at Western Potash about the project in May.
