Originally posted by prawn_man
Sorry amigo, I think you have made a major under-estimation in your calculations and it gives a very misleading impression about CCZ. In particular, your calculation is as follows: "
you have 100,000 tonnes of dumping grade 1.2% copper ......therefore the tonnes of concetrate are 770/22%=3,500 tonnes". But the stockpile is much more than that. If you recheck the announcement on the 25th October, it says on the first page that:
"
Both groups will work towards delivering a binding off-take agreement enabling Noble Group to exclusively distribute up to 200,000t of copper concentrate from existing stockpile ore."
It then goes on to report details on its testing to give a grade for the concentrate of 22% copper. In other words, doesn't the announcement say that the stockpile will produce about 200,000 tonnes of 22% concentrate? That means the copper in this 200,000 tonnes of concentrate is about 40,000 tonnes (ie, 200,000 x .22 = 44,000 tonnes), not 770 tonnes as you have calculated. That is, the 5 stockpiles have about 3.5 million tonnes of dump grade ore at about 1% copper.
They also say on page 1 of the announcement:
"
Noble Group will pay CCZ a A$500,000 pre-payment for working capital purposes."
I don't think a big international player would pay $0.5 million if the in-ground value of the stockpile was only about $3 to 4 million. I'm guessing the in-ground value for copper alone, is about $100 million plus. If I've made a blunder, please let me know.
@prawn_man
As mick z says, I just used 100,000 tonnes of dump as an example.
How much might there be in the dumps and slag heap? It is hard to know but one could take a rough guess and say 1.5 - 3 x the tonnage of ore processed. On page 30 of the inferred resource estimate it is stated that 60,000 tonnes of ore were mined. So we're looking at stockpiles of say 90 - 180,000 tonnes.
The 200,000 tonnes of concentrate is a notional amount, a limiting amount, an amount with which to work out some contract numbers. Using the calcs in my post, if you work back from 200,000 tonnes of concentrate assuming a grade of 22% you end up with...
100,000 tonnes of dump gave 3,500 tonnes of concentrate therefore for 200,000 tonnes of con:
tonnes on stockpile = 100,000 / 3,500 x 200,000 = 5,700,000 tonnes grading 1.2% Cu.
Now I don't know if you've ever seen a 5.7Mt stockpile but, in my opinion, the stockpiles at Cangai are not of that size. They are more likely to be in the range of 90 - 180,000 tonnes, IMBO.
Think of it another way...if the stockpile tonnage is 5.7M then for every tonne of ore processed in the past about 94 tonnes of other material was mined. I haven't met anyone who was mining back in the days of Cangai but I know an underground gold miner who is the son of an underground tin miner who was the son of an underground tin miner and I do know that digging rock back then was hard work and if it didn't pay it was left in the ground. They tunnelled to the vein (waste) then tunnelled on the vein (waste, low grade and ore) then mined the ore between the tunnels.
Look at the long section of the inferred resource - those blobs on the section constitute 3.2Mt and some are 20m wide. Tell me where the 5.7Mt came from given that the average mining width was about 3m.
(20min delay)
