By Barry FitzGerald
Beds are hard to find and the locals sense a more optimistic mood than this time last year.
A RECORD number of mining types have descended on Kalgoorlie for the annual Diggers & Dealers bash. All up, some 1800 miners, brokers, investment bankers and service providers of all types have signed up for the three-day event, which kicks off today with an opening address by conference chairman Barry Eldridge.
Expect a fiery sermon from the seasoned mining man criticising the Gillard government's mining tax and, what's more, the sheer arrogance of the government in consulting only BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata on the changes to what was originally proposed.
He won't be offending the CEOs of the ''big three''. The D & D bash is not something they attend. Same goes for Julia Gillard, and Ken Henry, for that matter.
But the rest of industry shows up in, errr … the thousands, taking the chance under Kalgoorlie's big blue sky for some serious networking, deal-making and the relaxed bonhomie that being holed up in an outback town with more pubs than you can poke a stick at can provide.
Only trouble is, Kalgoorlie is again bursting at the seams. Digs for the event are hard to come by, and they've been squeezing them in wherever they can. Damage caused by the April earthquake at Boulder, five kilometres from Kalgoorlie's main drag, knocked out some rooms normally available down there.
Not to worry, increasing numbers of locals are renting out their homes for the duration of D & D for a pretty penny to fund a trip to Bali for some party action of their own.
Local accountant and owner of the Palace Hotel, Ashok Parekh, reckons that there has been a resurgence of business confidence in Kalgoorlie since the federal government's original killer mining tax was replaced with the friendlier mineral resources rent tax (MRRT). Only iron ore and coal get caught by the MRRT, for the time being, anyway. Kalgoorlie and the broader region don't produce either.
But there will be more said about the MRRT than any other subject at the conference, one that has tried to avoid politics - or, more correctly, politicians - ever since it got going in 1992. The non-Rio and non-BHP iron producers, which mainly means Andrew Forrest, are seething that they were outside the tent when the deal on MRRT was struck. Forrest's speaking slot is tomorrow.
Back at the Palace, Parekh senses a happier mood this year at the bash. Last year suffered from global financial crisis hangovers. And since then there has been a broad advance in commodity prices. All that means there is more cash around, giving the Palace reason to expand its roster of scantly clad and athletic ''skimpies'' barmaids from the normal four to 20 during the bash.
But Parekh also noted that there would be some sadness at the conference when it comes to remembering the Sundance Resources plane crash tragedy in June. The entire board of the company were among 11 people who died in crash in the Republic of Congo. Eldridge is one of those who has stepped in to fill the void by becoming a de facto director ahead of his appointment being confirmed by Sundance shareholders.
KALGOORLIE is a male-dominated town, even more so during D & D. The ratio of male delegates to females must be close to 10 to one, despite the best efforts of the city's hoteliers to even things up by flying in scores of multi-skilled female bar staff from Perth, and as far afield as the Gold Coast, to pull beers and help get the party mood going.
As for the fair dinkum business of the conference itself, female chief executives of participating mining and exploration mining companies are few and far between. One of the few (if not the only) woman CEOs fronting a company booth at the conference this year is Keren Paterson.
Paterson is CEO of Energia Minerals (ASX: EMX), the group that was floated last year to pick up the running on the uranium exploration properties held by underground coal gasification group, Carbon Energy, which holds a 42 per cent Energia stake.
A mining engineer who started out as an underground miner in Kalgoorlie, Paterson has got plenty to talk about. Just seven months after listing, Energia has issued a maiden uranium resource for its Carley Bore deposit, part of its Nyang project in WA's emerging Carnarvon Basin uranium province.
It is not the biggest resource around at an inferred 7.5 million pounds of the radioactive stuff. But it is very much the start of the story, with Energia confident that drilling in the immediate strike extensions to the resource area will come up with more of the stuff.
Recent gravity surveys have confirmed that the prospective palaeo-channel, which hosts the Carley Bore mineralisation, extends for up to a further 60 kilometres. Energia is holding cash of $5.1 million to fund the hunt. On Friday's closing price it has a market cap of a little more than $11 million.
Elsewhere in the Carnarvon you'll find Paladin's Manyingee uranium deposit (24 million pounds) and Cauldron Energy's Bennett Well deposit (4.8 million pounds). So you would have to think that some time down the track, we could well be looking at a central processing mill drawing in uranium supplies from multiple sources, of which Carley Bore could well be one.
Energia also has an interesting uranium project in Lombardy in Italy called Novazza. It was shut down in the 1980s when the government of the day banned uranium mining. But Italy now wants nuclear power to account for 25 per cent of its power needs by 2030, requiring the building of up to 10 nuclear power stations.
It would be nice to think the Italians have set that target because of global warming concerns. The truth is that they are tired of paying over-the-top prices for nuclear power from the French. And they don't like relying on gas from Russia either.
INVESTOR types on the lookout for what might possibly be the next big copper play in Western Australia could do well to pay a visit to the Encounter Resources (ASX: ENR) company booth at the conference.
Managing director Will Robinson and exploration director Peter Bewick will be on hand to talk about the group's BM1 copper prospect, 60 kilometres south of Aditya Birla Minerals' Nifty copper mine in WA's Paterson province.
A 10,000-metre drilling program kicks off this month to follow up the set of promising results from beneath 2-10 metres of cover in previous programs. Copper mineralisation in excess of 0.2 per cent copper now extends for more three kilometres in strike and remains open to the north, south and east.
Interest in the prospect heated up with the recent report that a four-metre intersection grading 5.45 per cent copper had been returned from a depth of 66 metres. The latest drilling program will be completed by end of September and it won't be long after that we will know if BM1 is living up to that sort of promise.