Cerro de Pasco

I'm mentioning this because I've watched it for a long time with muted interest, until recently. As it stands today Eric Sprott is a >20% holder of the company's shares and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation has recently committed to funding US$5 million towards defined project development activities, including the completion of a feasibility study. The USIDFC has also said it could fund up to US$300 million in construction financing if certain conditions are met. The project is an odd one in that it involves the reprocessing of a huge amount of mining tailings (rock that's already been through a mill once) from a previous silver-mining operation. That operation left plenty behind, equating to 5.5 oz/ton AgEq in the tailings. Given that this mushy mess of tailings is currently an environmental eyesore, its reprocessing is like an economic reclamation project. A win-win. The total resource is pegged at some 400 million ounces of silver, making it a huge deposit, and the key is that the cost to move it (i.e., pump a slurry) is expected to be as little as $1–2 per ton. Processing infrastructure will be required which is where the USIDFC would come in – we'll see. And why would the U.S. care about a tailings reprocessing story in Peru? Well, I think it has to do with the contained gallium and indium – both are present at good grades in the tailings. Gallium and indium are highly strategic metals, critical for many high-tech applications, including computing and solar – and those metals are hard to come by. There's a company called Amerigo (ARG.TO) in Chile that has owned a tailings reprocessing operation since 2003 and it has made a fine business of it. Seeing the long-term success of Amerigo, CDPR's much higher value per ton of tailings, combined with the strategic value of its associated gallium and indium, make it interesting to me – so I own a little after a friend encouraged me to take a closer look. It's not a big position, but I want to follow along with this one.