Waiting around for these drilling results from Cannon and Weolyu makes me quite restless. Therefore, in the meantime, I've been doing some rough Maths (with what I consider plausible figures) about Gubong's Tailing Facility.
There's two good reasons for me to ponder this. One as a potential reserve/resource and the other being an indicator of historic production (me - not at all believing the official 400K Oz figure). I also wonder that the 400KOz figure may have falsely implied there might only be 30 or 40 KOz in the Tailings - so why even bother JORCing it????
I estimate the area to be 500 m by 200 m. The depth is very difficult to estimate. I chose 40m (a pure guess from the film clip and it makes the sums easier). Specific Gravity 2.5. Much of the ore grade 8-10 g/tonne with gravity circuits yielding 70-80% recovery rates. Probably meaning 1.5-2.0 g/t for tailings. A BMV/SAU mill would conservatively extract at least 1 g/t out of a CIL process, I'd reckon.
10 million metric tonnes of tailings would yield 330,000 Ozs, if 1 g/t could be recovered.
That would also indicate 3-5 million Ozs production over her mine life (and logic in reverse, I would say that the TSF was only 4 metres deep if the mine produced only 400KOz). Given the size of Gubong - I'll confidently hang my hat on 3-5MOz production at least.
There's probably sizeable TSFs at Taechang, Kochang and many other mines. All being high grade and fed through gravity circuits (technology of that era), I'm thinking that these tailings could almost be considered "company makers" by themselves (eg SAU $2-3).
Pretty easy mining. No stripping of overburden, basic earth moving equipment, easy to transport means very cheap costs.
I think 200 -700 KOzs of tailings gold could potentially be extracted. I wouldn't mind some sampling and testing been done to test my theory and numbers out.
SAU Price at posting:
27.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held