Spring has sprung, bringing with it green shoots for ASX-listed fertilizer developer PhosCo and its fast-growing Gasaat project in Tunisia.

With gold, copper, and more recently rare earths stealing the resources limelight, PhosCo has had to work hard to be heard in investment circles.

The world of fertilizer has been up against one of the great precious metal bull runs of all time. But as the sector’s true believers say, no fertiliser means no food. And we all know what comes next in that one.

The usual filler of these column inches, Barry FitzGerald, noted just a few weeks ago that PhosCo’s then share price of 7.1c gave it a market cap of just $32 million.

FitzGerald opined that the “modest market cap does not match the big-time potential of its phosphate project in Tunisia”.

The market now seems to share his view, with PhosCo shares rising to 8.4c earlier this week on news of another whooping phosphate drill hit at the new KM discovery at Gasaat.

But as good as the result was, this was somewhat of a support act for the real show which came yesterday in the form of a $1.8m grant to PhosCo from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to advance Gasaat.

And in what was a show of immense belief in the project, PhosCo Managing Director Taz Aldaoud agreed to invest a further $1.1m in his company by exercising options well ahead of their expiry date.

News of the grant saw PhosCo shares double to a high of 17.5c at one stage before profit takers stepped in.

PhosCo says the funds will be used to optimise Gasaat ahead of a BFS.

Much of this will involve drilling and calculating a resource on the KM discovery, which it says could provide a big boost to the Gasaat economics thanks in part to its low strip ratio and close proximity to the planned processing plant.

Drilling at KM has been delivering consistently thick high-grade intersections and Aldoud is understandably keen to include it in an updated scoping study.

It seems the market is starting to share Aldoud’s view of the global-scale opportunity emerging at Gasaat which, like its rare earths peers, offers the added attraction of providing the western world with a reliable (read non-Russian, non-Chinese) supply of essential fertiliser.

While providing PhosCo with a welcome dollop of readies, the real underlying message from the EBRD grant is that the agency sees Gasaat as a project which stands to deliver huge economic and social benefits for Tunisia. In other words, it’s the real deal.

This statement will reverberate well beyond Tunisia’s famous Mediterranean shores and is sure to be heard loud and clear by the handful of global fertiliser giants looking for acquisitions big enough to move their needles.

Lion Selection Group managing director Hedley Widdup, whose company owns ~16 per cent of PhosCo, has made no secret of the fact that he sees Gasaat ultimately becoming part of a global stable.

Mount Ridley/Nimy

News of a maiden gallium resource lit a fire under the share price of Mount Ridley Mines this week as the market tried to digest just what it may be worth.

The inferred resource at the company’s eponymous project near Esperance came in at 838Mt grading 29.3 parts per million gallium. The company says this equates to 24,584t of contained metal.

If this figure leaves you scratching your head, take heart from knowing that the wider market also had difficulty valuing it.

This was evident from the Mount Ridley share price, which rose steadily over the next three days from 0.5c to 2.5c for a market cap of $20 million, as investors slowly got their heads around valuations.

With gallium well and truly ensconced on the US list of critical metals, and rightly so given its key role in high-technology and defence applications, the reaction was understandable.

Like many of its peers on this now hawked-around list, the gallium market is completely controlled by our friends in China. This explains in part why investors had so much trouble valuing the Mount Ridley resource. There simply isn’t a liquid market for this stuff, to say the least, and therefore it is near-impossible to assign a price to any valuation model.

All this brings us to the question of Nimy Resources and the impending gallium resource at its Block 3 discovery in WA.

Nimy says it has outlined high-grade gallium over a large area close to the surface with assays exceeding 300gpt. The final touches are now being put on the maiden JORC resource, which will open the door to further offtake and funding discussions.

Comparisons in the critical minerals space are inevitably difficult and in the case of Mount Ridley and Nimy, absolutely worthless. Both companies have rare earths in the mix while Nimy also has early-stage copper and gold exploration.

But detail aside, the market’s understandable appetite for Mount Ridley would be encouraging the Nimy troops to put their numbers in the table.

Sentinel Metals

The gold price pullback may have taken some of the heat of the sector, but investor appetite for well-priced opportunities remains strong – as evidenced by yesterday’s powerful debut of new USA-focused gold float Sentinel Metals (SNM).

Sentinel pulled in $10 million from investors through its recent IPO (50m shares at 20c) after what was reported to be a stampede for the stock, with the offer closing well oversubscribed.

The stock opened on Thursday morning at a healthy 40 per cent premium to the issue price before closing 55 per cent up at 31c on healthy trading volumes, perhaps reflecting the company’s attractive valuation and “big-end-of-town” management team.

Sentinel features highly regarded mining executive Mark Williams, of Red 5 Limited fame, as Chairman and former FMG and Rio Tinto executive Matt Herbert as its Vancouver-based Managing Director.

Williams made a name for himself turning Red 5 from a struggling Philippines gold miner into a leading WA mid-tier gold producer through the ambitious purchase of the King of the Hills and Darlot gold mines in WA – a platform that ultimately led to $2.2 billion merger with Silver Lake Resources to create Vault Minerals, now an almost $5 billion company.

Williams and Herbert have teamed up in Sentinel to bring the advanced Columbia gold project in Montana, USA, to market. Columbia boasts a sizeable Inferred Resource of 920,000oz of gold at 1.3g/t plus a chunky exploration target and is located just down the road from Sandfire Resources’ recently permitted Black Butte copper project.

Sentinel has more than 45,000m of historical drilling and trenching to work with at Columbia, including some big, high-grade intercepts such as 12.2m at 11.6g/t Au and 132.6m at 2.01g/t, within a large low-sulphidation epithermal gold-silver system with plenty of upside.

The reported MRE has been constrained using a US$2,200/oz pit shell, defined over a 2km strike length and to a depth of 220m, with the mineralisation remaining open at depth along the entire 2km strike extent.

The company will focus on a combination of in-fill and exploration drilling to upgrade and expand the current resource, as well as exploration to unlock a big prize, potentially at depth. 

Herbert said Columbia offered a compelling combination of a large existing resource, simple geology and exceptional exploration upside.

“Montana is a great place to do business, backed by both Federal and State governments that provide regulatory support for new mining ventures,” he said.

With a market cap of just $20 million at the 20c IPO price, investors seem to agree.

*Regular columnist Barry FitzGerald has gone fishing, though the only thing he is likely to catch is a cold. In his absence, a long-time journalistic peer of his, Gerald FitzBarry, has penned the column.