Following the announcement on Monday alluding to increased...

Following the announcement on Monday alluding to increased throughput and pulling the mining schedule forward, I have been having a look at the mine plan in the NI 43-101 release of the feasibility study.

Interesting thing for me is that to compress the schedule into 8 years there is going to have to be a big uplift in mill throughput. Previously the first 8 years of production only had 14.7Mt of ore milling and this would increase to more like 20Mt.

To get to 20Mt they are going to need to mill more like 2.4-2.5Mtpa vs the numbers below. The announcement said minimum 2.0Mtpa (hard rock) due to mill motor changes.

I’ve had a crack at working out the increase in NPV from the compressed mining schedule. I estimate a 5-8% uplift in NPV.

This is before any increase due to open-pit mining the deep M5 ounces not in the current mine plan and before any additional M1 South underground ounces.