This year's Resourcing Tomorrow conference shows the mining sector still has a bit of zing in it

It’s alive!

Mines and Money is back, reincarnated under the new, PC brand name of ‘Resourcing Tomorrow’, and proving that rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated. 

After Day One, it was clear that London’s biggest mining conference was once again able to live up to its own billing, having ceded significant ground to those entrepreneurial types at the 121 Conference in the past few years.

This year, the buzz was back.

Not in a big way, because these are still troubling times for many in the mining sector. 

But it was there, nonetheless. 

For one thing, the event managed to fill out the floor at its traditional venue, the Business Design Centre, something it hasn’t always been able to achieve lately. There hasn’t been much in the past few years that’s been more dispiriting for mining folks than to  wander around a Mines and Money conference and know that booths have gone unsold and unfilled, that space has been elongated, and that the atmosphere of emptiness is as good a metaphor for the state of the sector as any.

This year, though, the empty feeling was gone. 

We aren’t back to the heyday of the early part of the century, when Mines and Money was new, the world was young and hundreds of fortunes had yet to be made. But the crushing comedown that followed Covid is past. 

People with money showed up. The meeting system functioned smoothly. Lots of networking was done by lots of people, and you could hear it all merge together up in the balconies that surround the main hall – activity.

Just how much of that activity will translate into newsflow that we’ll ever see is another matter, of course. The ratio between the gold price and gold equity valuations has never been higher. Other subsectors of mining don’t even have the benefits of a strong commodity price to fall back on.

But there were a couple of notable themes this year that did seem to gain traction. 

One, lithium companies may be down, but they’re not out. Before the conference opened Savannah Resources (SAV) Follow | SAV announced a letter of intent for US$270 million in financing for its Portuguese lithium project. That was another step in the right direction for a company that’s managed to buck a pervasive trend this year – it’s share price has actually consolidated higher. And the new chief executive, Emanuel Proença, fresh in from Portugal that morning, was keen to point to a major reason why – even with lithium prices on the floor, the project will still make money.

Another with recent funding news was Aftermath Silver – and don’t google ‘Aftermath Resources’ by mistake because you’ll fall straight down a survivalist rabbit-hole. Aftermath Silver is the one that showed up Eric Sprott’s calculus, and to such advantage that he came in for several million dollars without even asking for a discount. Ralph Rushton, the driving force behind Aftermath Silver, says that the key word here isn’t silver, or even resources, but manganese. Manganese hasn’t been a metal we’ve conjured with much lately, given that even regular staples like copper and nickel are struggling to gain any real price traction. But manganese, says Rushton, is the forgotten metal when it comes to electric vehicles. Aftermath has plenty of the stuff at its asset in Peru, and where Sprott leads, others will surely follow. Like Savannah, Aftermath has had a good year – it’s share price has roughly doubled since last January.

Other notable names and faces knocking around were Harry Adams from KEFI, who gave a booming speech in the presentation area, and Chris Eager, from Resouro Strategic Metals, a man who hit paydirt twice in the old days with Asia Energy and Monterrico, and who’s coming back round for one final go, and serial entrepreneur Tony Williams, who’s had plenty of successes in the past. Also looming large was William Slack, late of Ocean Equities, and these days director Enduro Metals and CAA Mining, as well as one of the prime movers of the new private equity house LHC.

And, of course, the team from Central Asia Metals pitch camp every year in the most strategic location in the conference, just at the top of the steps as everyone comes in, and always snag the most interesting delegates as a result.

Central Asia always used to have the best freebies, too, although on the subject of freebies, there wasn’t much of that about this year. The innovative stand that was promoting all the Cornwall companies gave away an interesting looking rope bag that had some rock salt in it, but that was about the highlight. Still, the beers at the end of day one were free, which is the main thing.

In the main arena, Robert Friedland was good value, although some of the later panels were a bit soporific, droning on in monotone about ESG, which some people think may be yesterday’s news, now that Donald Trump has been elected. Jamie Strauss of Digbee, London’s leading ESG consultancy would no doubt disagree, though, and to be fair he did look pretty busy all day. 

But on the subject of ESG, by far the most interesting stand was the History of Colonial Mining in Africa, manned (womanned) by a PhD student from Exeter/Surrey University. The photos of old times were good, although the horrific ones had been blurred in the name of art, or impact, or at least some of them had. A staking map of Kimberly was billed as horrific too, but nonetheless remained there in all its ghastliness for all to see. But it’s good to see this kind of context being brought to a sector that is held in ill-repute more than most others.