Investors warming to red hot coal market
Oracle Coalfields: Developing Pakistans largest ever coal mine
Oracle Coalfields (PLUS:ORCP) is on the precipice of bringing into production Pakistans largest ever coal mine.
The PLUS-listed firm has been working on the Thar Coalfield for the past four years and it now has a series of hurdles to negotiate in the next year to 18 months before the mine gets up and running.
Regency Mines (LON: RGM), which is led by AIM dealmaker Andrew Bell, is a cornerstone investor in Oracle, after it bought 18.5 million shares, or 20.04 percent of the company, for 5.5 pence each back in December.
The Thar project is located around 380 kilometres from Karachi in Sindh Province. Here Oracle plans to excavate lignite coal, which is brown in colour and has lower calorific value than the thermal coal that goes for export from places such as Indonesia. Its the sort of stuff that is found in abundance in Victoria, Australia and Germany.
Oracle has a measured JORC resource of 1.4 billion tonnes and proven reserves of 371 million tonnes.
It plans to develop the mine in two stages. First it will get the mine up and running with over 100 million tonnes in the proven category, while in the second phase it will prove-up another 200 million tonnes which will provide scalability over mine life.
The mines production has already been earmarked to target the coal-hungry domestic power generation market. The emerging coal producer is set benefit from the large amount of demand in the electricity in Pakistan, where power generation capacity has failed to keep pace with the developing nations massive population growth.
This means that in major conurbations such as Karachi, population 18 million, utility firms have to deliberately shut down power generators - something often referred to as load shedding - this can lead to outages of up six hours for some homes in the city. In Karachi the estimated daily power shortfall is between 2-3,000 megawatts.
Thar is expected to begin coal production in 2012.
http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/24521/investors-warming-to-red-hot-coal-market--24521.html