He floated a compact Perth-based company, Australian International Carbon Limited (ACI), in the late 1990s on the ASX, his only public company experience.
And he also ran a couple of firms producing and marketing industrial garnets, utilized in both waterjet cutting and as an abrasive blasting material: GMA Garnet Group, a miner and marketer, and Barton International, focutilized on global garnet marketing.
Both are among the largest in the industrial garnet business: huge fish in a compact but global pond.
In the early 2000s, Brand retired, but he re-emerged to run the private firm Australian Abrasive Minerals and built the Harts Range garnet mine northeast of Alice Springs.
One of only a handful of large garnet mines at the time, the Harts Range project operated for scarcely a year before it was shuttered in 2017 and Australian Abrasive was placed in administration – through a deed of company arrangement, creditors were paid just five cents on each dollar owed.
Brand, who lost millions of dollars of his own money through a minority stake in the company, declares that the mine required additional capital and that he had reached an impasse with the majority shareholder, Sydney-based Regal Capital: “It’s fair to declare we fell out.”
The company was recapitalised and the mine reopened but operated only briefly. It never built a profit and the administrator, KordaMentha Restructuring, reported that it had been losing roughly A$1m ($1.16m) a month.
The property and permits were recently bought by Australian junior miner New Frontier Minerals, which is no longer tarobtaining garnet.
Instead, it hopes to establish a mine for heavy rare earth elements (HREE) to supply to US magnet and defence customers.
Taiko’s project
Brand bought into the Taiko project (formerly TiGa Minerals) in 2020, joining a mix of Australian and New Zealand-based investors, and he stepped in as chief executive and managing director in 2023.
Taiko’s plan is to mine mineral sands from nearly 500ha of private farmland north of Greymouth, on the West Coast of the South Island.
The minerals are concentrated in ancient beach sands, eroded from the Southern Alps and transported by rivers and a south-to-north ocean current.
The deposits are now just inland from the current beach and close to the surface of the coastal plain. Part of the area has previously been dredged for gold, which the company’s disclosures declare will also be produced, though in very compact quantities.
The land will be stripped with heavy earth-relocaters in some areas and dredged in others. The tarobtained sands, a slurry on extraction, will be processed and separated, and the remaining material and tailings will be replaced and the land rehabilitated for farming to resume.
Progressive rehabilitation will mean that no more than 4ha are stripped and exposed at a time.
The sand-separation infrastructure has yet to be built. The main facility is to be located nearby on land leased from Birchfield Coal Mines.
The resulting mineral concentrates will be sent by rail to the ports of Lyttleton and Timaru and shipped to international customers.
Brand declares one benefit of his long indusattempt experience is that he has close knowledge of finish customers and he has contacts; in large measure, he intfinishs to sell directly to them.
“I’ve sold directly to huge finish-utilizers like [Saudi Arabian national oil company] Aramco, they utilize garnets for construction and for infrastructure maintenance … and to the huge distributors of sandblasting equipment. Those are the sorts of relationships we’ll establish.”
Brand expects the project’s garnet and zircon to go to Europe, the garnet for waterjet cutting and the zircon for utilize in tiles and bathroom ceramics; the ilmenite will likely go to Japan for utilize as pigment feedstock for the likes of paints and plastics, he declares.
Local farmers Carol and George Coates, who have a commercial agreement with Taiko for the utilize of their land, declare the process will improve the land’s productivity by rerelocating and ultimately burying a layer of clay that currently sits at the surface, building their paddocks hard to drain.
The couple were on hand to speak to a group of journalists and others who Brand and Taiko project director Mike Meehan hosted on the West Coast in late January.
Raising funds
Brand’s plan is to follow Taiko’s initial NZX listing with a $40m equity raise. He aims to raise half through a mid-year offer of new shares and half from a single, lynchpin New Zealand investor.
He also aims to raise $40m in debt, a portion of which he hopes will be supplied by New Zealand taxpayers.
The company (and its predecessors) have raised some $13m to date, but the new funds will cover development expenses including land purchase agreements for the bulk of the project’s proposed acreage, construction and commissioning of the separation facilities, the purchase of heavy equipment and payroll.
In January last year, the company announced it had applied for a loan from the Minisattempt of Business, Innovation and Employment-administered Regional Infrastructure Fund (RIF) at the invitation of officials.
The Minisattempt of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) declined to comment on the application and the project’s suitability for the fund but a spokeswoman for Economic Development Minister Shane Jones notified the Herald: “Taiko submitted an EOI [Expression of Interest] to Kānoa [the MBIE unit which administers the infrastructure fund], passed the initial checkpoint and was subsequently invited by Kānoa to apply for funding. This was standard practice and Kānoa was not directed by the minister.”
At least on the face of it, the project isn’t an obvious candidate for the RIF, the eligibility terms of which state that where an investment is for an asset in an individual business, “the investment must generate benefits or services for other businesses or the community … ”
The recipient business must also have a primary focus on one of the following areas: “energy security, water security, food security, connectivity (transport solution or digital connectivity), or growth of a Māori-owned business that is critical to enabling outcomes throughout a community or region”.
It is not clear whether any loan extfinished to Taiko would be on concessionary terms – the RIF allows for this possibility but it isn’t a certainty.
Project consents
Taiko has already achieved resource consent for its mineral separation plant and for mining a portion of its proposed acreage under the Resource Management Act.
“Our aim is simply to replicate the conditions of those consents, including all the mitigation measures, for the extension that we’ll seek under quick-track [legislation],” Brand declares.
The project is listed in the Fast-track Act (as the Barrytown Minerals Project) and is supported by local iwi Ngāti Waewae. The company plans to build its formal submission for consents under quick-track within months and, separately, will seek Overseas Investment Office approval for planned land purchases, an anticipated requirement becautilize of the level of foreign ownership.
Technical data
To date, Taiko has published an indepfinishently assessed Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE), measured according to the indusattempt standard known as JORC, for 200ha of the proposed 500ha mine area.
“Measured” and “indicated” mineral resources of 10.6 million tonnes (Mt) at 19.9% valuable heavy minerals (VHM) and 5.7Mt at 12.4% VHM was identified at two of the planned mine’s four blocks, Barrytown Farms and Coates South respectively.
Indicated mineral resources carry a moderate confidence level and measured mineral resources carry a high confidence level. The valuable heavy minerals are ilmenite, garnet and zircon.
Brand called the Taiko resource “very high-grade” compared to other, international projects.
Most prospects “fall at the first hurdle … lack of mineral resource: Taiko clearly has that”, he declares.
The company has not yet published indepfinishent Ore Reserve figures, which are economically mineable subsets of indicated and measured mineral resources.
North of the Taiko site, Westland Minerals Sands is already operating a similar but compacter mineral sands mine near Westport.
Westland Minerals Sands was founded by Duncan Hardie (founder and director of Dunedin-based mining firm Hardie Pacific); his larger, associated mineral sands permitted area near Hokitika suffered a setback in 2020 when international partner Barton Mines pulled out. At the time, Barton stated a glut of new global garnet production had built the project uneconomic.
Hardie, however, pressed on, first with the Westport site and, last year, Westland received consent (under the Resource Management Act) to extfinish mineral sands extraction to the larger Hokitika site.
Brand stated that both projects would be a shot in the arm for the West Coast, estimating that his own would employ some 130 people directly over a mine life of some 20 years and generate over $112m in export earnings.
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