MINMET PLC FTSE MNT

Mike -

Certainly Pocone is the jumping off point for the Pantanal, a wet-land area much famed amongst nature lovers. I do not know the depth of the water table at Pocone itself, nor further up the trend towards Piracicaba. The climate for the area is tropical, with distinct rainy seasons and occasional flooding.

However, a few guesses can be made. When Minmet sampled at Pocone, they did indeed use boats to get at some of the pit wall. The photos are on the website, in the Outlook section, and show the scale. There seems to be at least 100 metres (hard to be exact because of parallax) of rockwall above the water. But it is clear that mining has stopped in this particular part of the pit - so hard to say whether the water is seepage from the water table, or whether the pit has simply filled up with rainwater. The same goes for most of the other pits which are pictured on the Minmet website - particularly Ourinhos - they all appear disused, and may well have just filled up with rainwater like gravel pits do in this country.

From the photos on the website, there does not seem to be any problem with water where digging is actually occurring. See the pix of Pocone on the main site (not the sampling pix in the Outlook article), and of the Cangas mine - the excavators are operating in completely dry conditions.

Naturally, if Minmet wish to start digging again in a pit which has filled with water, they will need to pump it out, and will require power to do it - but with so much potential as yet unexploited, I don't see why they would want to.

Pocone do not use boats, as you have been told - this is probably a misunderstanding of the photos on the Outlook page. Minmet used the boats simply to get at areas of previously worked pitwall which were not accessible in any other way.

As for Pocone's owners joining in with Minmet, it appears that they are working at full capacity at their own mine, with a new pitwall just pushed back etc etc. I understand that Minmet are using contractors from elsewhere in the region.

Hope this helps.

PS Have you been taking English lessons from Nucleoli? 8-)