State to let Canadians have Pobrdje boron mine – Letter of Intent signed with Boron One

The Canadian company Boron One Holdings has announced that its Serbian subsidiary, Balkan Gold doo, has signed a Letter of Intent with RKU Resavica regarding the renovation of the Pobrdje boron mineral mine in Resavica.

The potential cooperation is related to the development of the Piskanja boron project, which is already owned by the Canadians.

Boron One, which was called Erin Ventures until two years ago, discovered boron ore reserves with a gross value of more than USD 2 billion in the Piskanja area near the abandoned coal mines near Baljevac on the Ibar River in 2020 and intends to open the mine in the next few years.

The Pobrdje mine is located about 2.5 km from the Piskanja deposit in the Jarandol Basin in southern Serbia, and is operated by Ibarski Rudnici. In this mine, the state first began trial exploitation of borate ore in Serbia in the 1990s, and it has been operating as a boron mine for more than a decade, and the minerals found in Pobrdje include primarily colemanite, which is used to stop nuclear reactions in nuclear reactors and protect against radiation, as well as smaller reserves of howlite.

According to Tim Daniels, president of Boron One, part of the letter of intent concerns the acquisition of strategic mining assets of the Pobrdje mine that currently belong to Ibarski Rudnici.

– We are currently defining an agreement based on the Letter of Intent. This is an “elegant solution” to the problems of both companies, as well as the local community. Namely, Ibarski Rudnici and the Pobrdje mine within it, are scheduled to close in the next 18, and at most 24 months, because coal mining has reached the end of its economic lifespan, and the Serbian government has been keeping them alive in recent years more as a social component, because they do not know what to do with the several hundred miners who work there. As far as we are concerned, Pobrdje is a small mine, but it has a number of advantages because it already has a mining license and borate has been extracted there for more than a decade – said Daniels in an interview with the Canadian media group FTMIG.

He pointed out that Ibarski Rudnici has been operating for 100 years and that its assets can be used further:

– In Pobrdje, the land is of primary importance for Boron One. It is located near Piskanje and we would extract the ore to the surface there when we open the mine, and in addition, it already has access roads and all the necessary infrastructure, the railway is 200 meters from our deposit and is directly connected to the ports in Montenegro and Croatia, which means easy access to sea routes, as well as the river port in Belgrade from where you can reach the heart of Europe via the Danube. Pobrdje also has a highly mineralized boron deposit that we will continue to extract, and we would also have a trained workforce in the immediate vicinity, underground miners who will be unemployed in a year.

Daniels also expressed his intention for Boron One to modernize the Pobrdje mine and bring in new equipment that will enable ore to be extracted from lower deposits.

– This cooperation has great potential and places our company at the center of the borate business, giving us the opportunity to open a mine in Piskanja in the next few years. There are many parties interested in purchasing borates, and we are already negotiating with potential partners about entering the Piskanja project – stated the president of the Canadian company and concluded that the agreed joint venture cooperation with Serbia would be good for both the country and the workers.

Let us remind that Boron One, which was then called Erin Ventures, began talks with the Serbian authorities in 2017 about the commercialization and subsequent renovation of the Pobrdje mine.

At that time, it was said that Balkan Gold would have exclusive rights to all borate produced in the mine, at a fixed price.

It is also interesting that Erin entered the drilling program near Baljevac back in the 1990s, but it failed due to sanctions, and then returned in 2012, after Australia’s Rio Tinto gave up its concession in the area in 2010.

In addition to the Canadians, who declare themselves a company “committed to the decarbonization of the Earth through responsible boron mining,” in 2013 the Indian company Usha Industries was also interested in investing in the Pobrdje boron mineral deposit, which also announced at the time that it would submit a letter of intent to invest.

The boron deposit in Piskanja, according to the Canadian company, has 5.48 tons of indicated mineral resources, and estimates are that the mine could be in operation for 21 years and produce 11 million tons of boron, which is used in space technology and the mobile phone manufacturing industry.

It should also be noted that the price of boron is increasing year by year, and has doubled in the past five years, exceeding the figure of USD 700 per metric ton in December.

Incidentally, the purity of the borate ore, which is also called “white gold” due to its white color, in the Baljevac region is around 40%, making it one of the purest in the world.

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