Pretty much echos the discussion I just had with my old man over dinner tonight. He hasn’t looked at the prospect yet but was talking in similar terms about the typical barite-silica cap above a zoned core. I had noticed from the historic drilling that the barite percentages were decreasing with depth as metal grades increased.
The old man was saying it’s important to understand the ore genesis as that will generally also determine the types of contimanant “penalty” metals (cadmium etc). The contaminants attract penalties at smelters and in some cases if the contaminant levels are too high, smelters will just refuse to take the concentrate. No need to worry about this yet but it is a question someone should ask the company before too long if they haven’t addressed it yet.
As far as products go, without looking at the metal grades yet, the old man said they are likely to produce a copper-gold concentrate and either a zinc and seperate lead-silver concentrate or a lead-zinc-silver concentrate. Normally with the Cu-Au concentrate it depends very much on which metal the processing plant is designed to maximise. If they maximise Cu they lose more gold to the tailings and if they.maximise gold they lose more copper to the tailings. These are important decisions that have to be made early in design and construction as there are capital costs to alter the plants performance after construction. The grade of Cu verses Au and the outlook for each commodities will determine which way the recovery circuit is maximised.
My father has a table he uses when he teaches project management that outlines the average recoveries for these metals which he will send me. It is a bit outdated but he said the averages will not have changed much since it was published. Off the top of his head he said if you want to be conservative with estimation you would use the following recoveries: 50% for Zn, 60% for Pb and Ag and about 90% for Au and Cu.
I’ll wait until he has had a chance to look at the prospect and I get his table then I’ll re-estimate the metal equivalent values for the various drill intersections based on more realistic and conservative recovery rates. Given my last estimate using 100% recoveries all around gave a AuEq grade of 21g/t (over 66m) there is quite a lot of room to drop and still maintain very high grades. Esh
ADT Price at posting:
44.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
