Bright Future For Tri Origin's $8 B Zinc Project

Sydney, Dec 14, 2006 (ABN Newswire) - Tri Origin is a unique company in Australia. We’re focused purely within the Lachlan Fold Belt of New South Wales, which is a highly prospective geological environment, particularly for zinc, copper, lead, gold and silver. As a company, we tend to concentrate on zinc and copper.

We’ve got a fantastic resource here. We’ve got significant reserve potential to come out of that resource and we are one of the higher grade projects in Australia.

I think it’s exciting and also unique because of the significant world-class resource we have, as well as the setting for the project, with the infrastructure and the approved mining lease in place.

In that 600-metre interval below the pit, we’ve got $8-9 billion of metal, and it’s up to us to mine and extract that metal for the benefit of our shareholders.

Importantly, from Tri Origin Minerals’ point of view, when we acquired the rights to the minerals of the mining lease at Woodlawn, we also acquired data from 130,000 metres of drilling. It is this data that has enabled us to calculate a resource of 10.1 million tonnes for the Woodlawn Underground Project.

When the mine shut down in 1998, the ore was valued at around A$275 in the ground. It’s now valued at $900 plus per tonne of ore in the ground. So that allows us to spend a lot more money in winning the ore, but it also provides the opportunity for significant return on capital.

We will release a reserve for the Woodlawn Underground Project in the near term, and we’ll also complete the pre-feasibility study for the Woodlawn Underground development. We expect this to be a positive result and a significant result for the company.

We’re also working on the retreatment of the tailings at Woodlawn. Now that is a significant project in its own right.

With our developments at Woodlawn, the potential is to produce 120-150,000 tonnes of concentrate per year. And this can be achieved I would hope within the next two years.

When you look at Tri Origin, at our AGM a year ago, we said to shareholders we are pursuing a pathway to cash flow. I believe we’ve achieved that for shareholders and fairly soon we’ll be classified as an emerging producer.

Aside from the investors, we’ve also got significant international interest in terms of what we’re doing at Woodlawn because of the world-class nature of the resource. We’ve had a number of enquiries and we’ve had visitors to the site, interested in terms of off-take opportunities or other arrangements that may be of interest to us in the future.

We also have a pipeline of projects. After we’ve developed cash flow at Woodlawn, we’ll then look at the development of the Lewis Ponds project. And that will be our next business unit or project area to be developed.

As well, we have excellent exploration opportunities within the region of Woodlawn and Lewis Ponds. And that provides us with a long-term, sustainable business in both those areas.

I often say to people that we’re the smallest company with the biggest board. Although we’re a new company, we’ve all delivered significant projects and outcomes for investors in the past. So what we’re trying to do as people is not new to us.

And therefore when you look at the mix of skills we’ve got, the assets we’ve got, then as a company we’ve got fantastic potential and we’re in a great location to attract the right people to operate and build the projects.