People: Blue sky for Metcalfe

Mellifluous mining entrepreneur and amateur pilot Jeremy Metcalfe is having a busy summer. Not only has he built himself a private Skyranger Swift aircraft (his second), but he is also hoping that an imminent bankable feasibility study into his company, Strategic Natural Resources’ Elitheni anthracite project in South Africa’s Eastern Cape will clear the way for exports to China, India and elsewhere.

Strategic owns 74 per cent of Elitheni Coal, and Metcalfe hopes that drilling will increase estimated resources there from 90 million to 500 million tonnes, arguing that the whole deposit could exceed 1.5 billion tonnes of recoverable anthracite. He suggests it could cost £50 million to take Elitheni to hoped-for production of five to six million tonnes a year and says Strategic, which raised £2.9 million at 15p in March, should be able to arrange bank funding for that.

The versatile Metcalfe, one of whose first jobs was importing Hennessey cognac into Malaysia, originally hoped Elitheni’s output could go towards alleviating South Africa’s chronic power shortage. But his chosen trading partner, independent power group IPSA, headed by his friend Peter Earl (boss of fellow AIM counter Rurelec), has proved dilatory and so he is casting his net wider.

One ploy is designing clean coal burners to take Elitheni’s anthracite and sell them to prospective commercial users. That could launch a potential new profit centre as well for Strategic, of which another AIM company, Coal of Africa, holds nearly 20 per cent.

The energetic Metcalfe, who once ran volatile mining concern Minmet, mostly oversees developments from his office in London. If he fancies eating out, he can always pop down to Brighton, where his son Sam is chef and proprietor of the popular Seven Dials Restaurant.