Formerly known as Jubilee Platinum, this junior mining group is now called Jubilee Metals Group.
The new name is more fitting to the actual business as years of development are starting to pay off — with projects the group has been working on finally kicking off.
Jubilee is not a mining company. It does have platinum mineral rights to a piece of land on the platinum belt in the Rustenburg area, but operationally it’s better described as a metals recovery business.
Jubilee processes tailings to recover platinum group metals (PGMs). Tailings are the waste produced by conventional mining. A huge amount of rock is crushed and put through chemical processes to extract either base or precious metals. Once the rock has been processed to extract the metals targeted, it is considered waste product or tailings. These tailings are then dumped in huge stockpiles above ground.
Jubilee Metals Group has spent years developing techniques to reprocess these tailings and extract metals that were either not targeted by the original process or were left over due to inefficiencies in older processing techniques.
Jubilee is considered the world leader in these reprocessing techniques. The group is able to extract 4E PGM metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold) from tailings at yields similar to traditional PGM miners.
Jubilee manages to do this for as little as $400 an ounce — compared to most miners which range between $700 and $1,000 an ounce. This allows Jubilee to maintain higher margins and requires significantly less capital. Because the material they process is already above ground, they cut out all the costs and risks associated with mining it.
PGMs are not the only metals it produces. Jubilee is about to start production from the Kabwe Project in Zambia where it will be recovering lead, zinc and vanadium from historical surface deposits (tailings) totalling 6.4Mt. The PlatCro Project in the Rustenburg area in SA is recovering chrome and has an agreement with Northam Platinum to process 60,000t of tailings per month to recover platinum.
At this project, Northam Platinum will lay down the capital to get the project started for a share in the profits and Jubilee will be using existing recovery plant facilities to process the materials. So there’s zero plant capital outlay for Jubilee.
The Hernic Platinum Project in SA is the world’s fourth-largest integrated ferrochrome producer and has an estimated 3.2Mt of platinum-rich materials at surface (tailings). The DCM Platinum & Chrome Project in SA has been operational and producing chrome since 2016. Jubilee is on the brink of starting recovery from platinum-rich tailings — which it estimates could produce about 1,100oz of 4E PGMs a month. Finally, Jubilee has a mining right to mine for platinum at the Tjate Platinum Project in Rustenburg. This deposit is estimated to be one of the largest in the world but it is deep underground, which means it is unlikely to be mined for a number of years.
Jubilee could be a little gem in the PGM and base metals segment but investors, perhaps fixated on larger mining enterprises, appear to be completely overlooking the share.
Admittedly, not much production has taken place, with Jubilee spending most of a decade perfecting its processes and setting up operations. Now Jubilee looks set to prove its recovery techniques can make big bucks from material discarded by other mining firms.
There is also talk that Jubilee has been invited into the boardrooms of many of the major mining companies to explore potential agreements to recover metals from tailings. The longer-term strategy is to obtain tailings from mines in Africa, Australia and South America and recover PGMs and base metals for sale in Chinese, European and North American markets.
Investors always need an abundance of patience (and nerves of steel) to back junior mining ventures, but there is enough evidence to suggest the long wait at Jubilee might be over.
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