A bit more info on the company:
From Michael West in The Australian back on Sept 5 (as an afterthought at end of article)
Managing director Franco Belli and his amigos at Acongagua Resources have pegged more than 70,000ha along the Pacific coast and appear to have early-stage inferred resources tonnage numbers of Fortescue dimensions, right on the beach. No overburden.
And a bigger article in the Australian on 12th Sept (Different Author):
September 12, 2007
EVER been to Ecuador? We hear it is very nice this time of year. No monsoons, cheap cocktails, friendly people etc.
If you ever go to Ecuador there are a couple of things Daily Assay reckons you should check out.
The first one is that because of the country's position on the equator, the sun always rises at 6am and sets in the evening at 6pm.
Without fail, as regular as clockwork you might like to say.
The other thing worth a mention is Aconcagua. Not the mountain in the Andes, which just happens to be the biggest in all of the Americas, but the little Australian resources company of the same name.
Never heard of it? There's a good chance you may well soon be very aware of Aconcagua and its intentions to be an iron ore miner of significant size.
A quick look at Aconcagua's share price chart over the past couple of weeks seems to indicate the story is getting out.
Worth 45.5 cents each when the market closed on August 28, Aconcagua scrip is now worth 75 cents a piece after closing down 5 cents today.
It's a beauty this little company, and if you thought what Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest was doing was interesting, then this takes things a step further.
Namely mining iron ore on the beaches of Ecuador at its Fierro Inca Project.
Now Aconcagua doesn't have a JORC-compliant resource yet for the project, but take it as read that there is significant potential for a sizeable resource given that Aconcagua has pegged nearly 100,000 hectares of both on and offshore tenements.
At the Cojimies prospect in the southern area of Fierro Inca, the resource estimation is for some 254.2 million tonnes with an average grade of 10 per cent VHM (valuable heavy minerals).
Most of that is in the inferred category, but hey, you can't deny the potential.
Metallurgy analysis of the sands indicates smelter feedstock of near 50 per cent iron, 27 per cent titanium dioxide and 0.5 per cent vanadium.
Mining beach sand is not an easy job, you can probably imagine the environmental hurdles the company is going to have to jump through.
But at least Aconcagua won't have to build a railway or a port because you can't get much closer to the coast than the beach.
Ecuador imports all of its steel and there is real potential given the abundant energy reserves the country has to value-add and produce low manganese pig iron.
According to its latest budget, Aconcagua has allocated about $4 million to infill drill Ferro Inca while the company moves to the "bankable feasibility status".
While the project might seem a touch extraordinary, take a look at who Aconcagua has managed to attract to the company.
Director Andrew Susaeta was once the professor of the mining department at the University of Chile and has had senior jobs with Codelco and Fluor.
Non-executive chairman John Banks has spent 40 years with KPMG, 25 years of that as partner.
Consultant Bill Kluckow spent 20 years with Richards Bay Minerals - the world's foremost producer of titania slag and pig iron from its project on the Indian Ocean coastline in South Africa.
Got the picture? It seems Aconcagua is very serious about its intentions.
Now where are those environmental approvals?
End of Article
Cheers
Maz