Trinity Metals considers listing to help raise up to $100m of new investment

Rwandan miner Trinity Metals hopes to decide by the end of the year whether to pursue a listing as part of a plan to invest $70-$100 million in its projects over the next eight years.

The company’s CEO, Peter Geleta, told Global South World that he believed a Reserve and Resources statement of the company’s concessions would be ready by December which would allow it to review the best options to raise the funds.

The UK, Australia and Canada would be the most likely markets to go to market, he added.

Trinity operates three mines - Musha, Nyakabingo, Rutongo in Rwanda - extracting tin, tantalum and tungsten. However, it is also exploring the viability of Lithium deposits in its locations.

Resource race

Regarding its existing operations, Geleta says gains can be made both in efficiency and scale. All three mines are cash positive, he says, seeing global prices remaining high on the back of a race to secure critical metals needed for consumer technology and defence applications.

“Most of the world's tin, tantalum and tungsten comes from China, 80% in fact. That creates a bit of a problem for the Western world and the US in terms of trying to get more diversity in terms of supply chain,” Geleta said. “at the moment tin and the tungsten price is looking very good. And, we believe it'll stay like that going forward.”

Trinity production costs are below $18,000 per ton of tin, he said in a video interview, although funding planning investment would require closer to $25,000 compared with a market price currently above $34,000.

The company was established in 2022 to pick up operations that had been run down through decades of underinvestment exacerbated by the challenges of the COVID pandemic.

Geleta says that productivity is already up 70% since its formation despite the fact that it is mainly relying on tunnels dating back to Belgian colonial days. Only 18% of the concessions are currently exploited, he says, with plans to go deeper to open up new deposits.

In addition, new investment in on-site processing capacity could increase efficiency from 20% to up to 90% as well as allowing reprocessing of almost a century of discarded semi-processed ore.

Lithium

Another opportunity is lithium, perhaps the defining metal of the decade because of its use in electric batteries. A global spotlight on securing resources has seen many miners declaring opportunities but Geleta says preliminary research suggests Trinity’s deposits are significantly greater than other small and mid-size projects.

He estimates that more than 50 million tons of ore with purity levels above 1.5% may be extractable, although studies are ongoing.

“The lithium obviously could be a game changer. Initial results that we're getting from our drill program are very, very significant. It's looking really, really good… We think we've got something special there,” he said.

Trinity Metals’ shareholders include Irish-based resources investor Techmet, Piran and the Rwandan government. It recently secured $3.9 million in funding from the US International Development Finance Corporation to support its environmental and social projects.