@miningnut No that wouldn't be a fair comment as AQG actually...

@miningnut

No that wouldn't be a fair comment as AQG actually spent a lot of their money on stockpiling sulphide ore on a ROM pad well in advance of needing that ore while they built their sulphide plant which will run on a different technology to the Syama plant (ie utilising two pressure oxidistaion autoclaves). That's one thing I could never understand about AQG's strategy. Why go into debt to have a huge stockpile of ore. The "mining" part of a mine should never be the bottelneck. Also their sulphide stockpile came from open pit mining and AQG are not at the stage of developing an UG mine at Colper.

The new Colper sulphide plant has nameplate capacity of 1.9Mt/annum whereas RSG's is 2.4Mt and consultants have said the UG mine at Syama is scalable to 4Mt/annum in which case RSG would also need to scale their processing plant. So the answer is no, AQG have not spent their money on an UG mine. They have spent their money on an expensive pressure oxidisation plant that relies on two autoclaves, one of which is yet to come on line, and an expensive oxygen plant that needs to produce technical grade oxygen so the whole plant can function. In my opinion this is not an ideal arrangement because if one autoclave goes down or your oxygen plant goes down your plant operates at half capacity or worse. You wouldn't want this to happen early in the debt repayment cycle. JW has mentioned that with the upgrades to the sulphide plant at Syama, sulphide ore production will be able to be maintained when the roaster is shut down. Also the sulphide circuit at Syama is more conventional and IMO less sensitive to input parameters for gold recovery than Copler.

JW has made the comment that a lot of the sulphide plant you see at Syama is new. A lot of the $315 million has gone towards Project85 which is aimed at improving recoveries in the sulphide circuit. In the 2016 quarterly activities report, to which I have just referred, you can see a photo of some of the civil works (concrete poured) in connection with this upgrade. The major works include repurposing the old calcine CIL circuit to treat the flotation tails, construction of a new calcine CIL with a new regrind circuit and an upgrade of the floatation circuit.

Given your love for that Tassie magnetite miner I'd get up to speed with sub level cave mining, as Savage River will need to go underground sooner than most expect IMO. They are already spending $10 million on drilling and UG studies.

I don't know if you caught my post on sub level cave mining, the Swedish and their deep UG magnetite mines but here it is just in case you misssed it. Cheers. Esh

https://hotcopper.com.au/threads/re...598372/page-109?post_id=37079885#.XEA-wBo_WhA