Sirius Minerals PLC Declares Probable Ore Reserve Of 250 Million Tonnes

Sirius Minerals PLC (LON: SXX) updates investors with its maiden ore reserve.

Maynard Paton

Maynard has worked at the Fool since 1999. He ran the Qualiport online portfolio on the Fool from November 1999 to September 2005 and was lead adviser for the Champion Shares & Champion Shares PRO stock-picking services from September 2005 to June 2011, at which point he moved to become Deputy Editor of the UK Fool. Prior to joining the Fool, Maynard worked for a year as a Poll Tax clerk and then for six years at the local authority's IT department in the murky world of ICL mainframes and COBOL programming. He relocated to Kent to join a financial services firm's IT department and there discovered the joys of stock market investing. As well as keeping an eye on share prices and his local housing market, Maynard's interests include karting, martial arts and entertaining his young family.

Published 18 September, 2013 8:55 am BST

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The shares of Sirius Minerals (LSE: SXX) rallied 0.4p to 9.8p during early trade this morning after the miner said its York Potash project covered a ‘probable’ ore reserve of 250 million tonnes of polyhalite.

The AIM-traded favourite claimed the analysis included a mean grade of 87.3% polyhalite, which made the reserve “the thickest and highest grade in the world“.

Today’s update follows a resource statement in May that revealed the group’s site close to Whitby carried an indicated and inferred reserve of 2.6 billion tonnes of polyhalite.

Chris Fraser, the chief executive of Sirius, said today:

“The scale and quality of the York Potash polyhalite deposit has now been confirmed as truly exceptional.“

“Defining such a significant high quality Ore Reserve is a vitally important step in the financing and development of the project.“

The share price of Sirius has slumped about 65% since July after the miner requested the North York Moors National Park Authority to defer a planning decision on its mining application.

The company said the deferral was to allow additional time “to address issues relating to European habitat legislation and robustly deal with the questions over the work completed by consultants on the environmental assessments“.

New planning submissions for the mine will be made by July next year.

Mr Fraser claimed today that a “potential mine life of over 100 years” could put the additional time for the approvals process “into some perspective“.