A real Game Changer for Edenville Energy PLC
“…Critically for Edenville we have the right shareholder base, we have a good operating management team, we have a nice board, are now well capitalised and will be debt free…”
Indeed that’s a nice platform to relaunch Edenville Energy from.
The company known for its Rukwa Coal to Power project in Tanzania is diversifying and it is doing so after raising £2.5 million and attracting a cornerstone investor in the form of oil and gas veteran, former Heritage Oil chief executive Anthony (Tony) Buckingham.
Edenville’s non-executive director Nick Von Schirnding is delighted with Buckingham’s £1 million cash injection, and describes Buckingham as “a game changer for the company going forward.”
This cornerstone investor now has an 18.5% shareholding in Edenville and according to Schirnding, Buckingham has already “put some ideas forward for new investments” and is an indispensable cog in the company’s “more ambitious strategy outside coal.”
These new investments are part of the company’s reset which includes searching for assets that will power a greener economy. “The focus going forward is on additional key strategic metals and minerals that play such a key role in environmentally strategic assets such as EV or batteries or green energy.”
Schirnding also notes that copper and lithium prices have gone ‘through the roof’ and is confident they will stay there. “We’re in the beginnings of another super cycle and I forsee things getting stronger and stronger as the whole environmental and green energy space becomes more and more critical. It’s almost like the early scramble in the early days of the gold rush.”
And Edenville wants to be able to cherry pick assets early and quickly, and is hopeful that by the end of 2021 they will have “injected at least one key asset into the group which will be the key strategic focus for the group going forward.”
So what about the asset Edenville initially set its stall out on – coal? Schirnding says the company will continue to extract as much value from those assets as possible. With a new President in office, operations in Tanzania are less problematic. Currently Rukwa is in a ‘good operational state’ and Schirnding says it could be of interest to a third party.
Either way Rukwa remains at the heart of Edenville’s portfolio until those new assets come on stream. Schirnding admits to being ‘impatient,’ but he is confident companies under the right management can be transformed quickly as evidenced by Arc Minerals the company he chairs. It’s been close to a £100 million market cap and as he explains to Sarah Lowther he doesn’t see any reason why Edenville can’t achieve the same.
The author was remunerated but does not hold shares in the company
