Several years ago a group with these ideas shared the foresight with COMESA and shouldered the financial risk to progress this industry. That effort is off the drawing board – AAX has the building blocks identified; the foundations laid; proven Mineral Resources defined; and the suppliers of key materials and sites of future raw materials identified. The influence on well being of the continent and the planet makes every person a stakeholder, and it will succeed.

 

What is needed next is a Bankeable Feasibility Study on the back of which all things will be fundable and this industry will develop rapidly to its full potential. It will eventually stand-alone in the market place as a competitive industry but it needs initial protection to leave the crib.

​

Firstly, an estimated $5 million is required to complete the Definitive Feasibility Study (“DFS”) – the cost breakdown detail of which shall be made available on request. This DFS can be executed and reported on within twelve months of securing funding. The DFS programme will include:

• Geological work, drilling of coal and phosphate resources for further Mineral Resource delineation and to create a bank of physical samples for processing and beneficiation test-work; 

• Process design and test work, assessment of existing facilities (e.g. a dormant Nitro-chem plant in Kafue), in-field cropping trials;

• Negotiation and finalisation of provisional sulphuric acid offtake agreements, provisional contracts with TAZARA and ZRL for rail transport. 

 

The DFS shall be convertible to a full Bank Feasibility Study (“BFS”) through the deployment of a recognised international consulting firm such as Hatch to verify the DFS – and in turn that BFS offers automatic conversion of defined Resources to Mine Reserves and these are Collateral-Ready Assets.  The estimated costs of this BFS are $10-$15 million and it could be completed within 6 months of completion of the DFS.

 

The mining and industrial complexes to handle all products, minerals and by-products will be an investment between $250-$500 million, dependent largely on scale of plants and whether a modular design approach is feasible to allow scalability.  If all goes according to plan, the nett positive effect on balance of payments / trade deficit could be in the order of $400 million per annum by 2021, with a growth rate towards several billion dollars per annum thereafter.