$Fil Filo Review/Thread No.1 1/ 1 needs to spend time on the data, reading background reports, looking at plans etc. & I have been doing this while waiting for a couple of answers from the Co. on its dataset available on the website. Nothing major, just a couple of questions on
2/the differences between the RC & DDH drill survey data. If I have wonkey survey data, or bring the data in wrong, I'll get wrong sample positions, which would lead to wrong models &designs➡️different economic outcomes &then we know it could all end in tears➡️ not good.😁
3/ So while we wait its a good time to review the PFS report by Ausenco. Very nicely presented, clear & professional it answered some of my initial doubts about water & land/sovereign risk. Need to spend more time on the Chilean vs Argentinian laws & its impact on a mine
4/ straddling an international boundary. Well worth a read yourselves.👌 I also had a look at it on google earth (something I always do). In this case it was hard to find, using the GE photo in the technical report circa 2017. You can see the drill roads & also realize how high
5/ this project is. The tops of those hills are 5,600m or 18,000'👀Mining is really challenging at anything over 4,800m but nevertheless still doable, but its animal. There is also the worry about permanent glaciers (of Barrick lore), which seem absent in this NW view below.
6/ Access is going to be something else, the closest being a 50km gravel road pass up the mountain after a 2 hr drive along a tarred road from Copiapo. its 245km from port in Chile, which seems the logical place to ship cathode/conc.
7/ Looking at the site from the south, it really is quite isolated. In this 2x vertical exaggeration view, you can see the resource sits atop a mountain, with limited flat space around it for plant & dumps. I also imagine workers will live @ a lower elevation & be bussed in.
8/ I want to look at the existing plan to build a mine on the oxides & only then review the impact on the relatively recent big results on the deeper sulphides. This project will always be an oxide project first, so key is the success of that B4 we look at the deep hole Upside.
9/ But while you wait for that, I refer to you the $Fil presentation which puts in a "potential" category with lots of get-out-of-jail warnings containing avg. 119Mt of contained fine copper, worth just enough to pay off 1/3 of the US 2021 deficit at today's copper price. 😃😄
10/ 👆That's one ballsy slide!😁
The other side of the coin is that if this mine is to become a reality as pumped (it is being pumped), it would be big enough to put some downward pressure on the copper price, so lets just hold our horses & 1st work through things logically.
11/ Back to the oxides, I managed to suck in the pit design in and drape it on the topo surface. Using this image I should be able to reconstruct the practical pit; then once/if the block model can be done; to compare things & look at a few scenarios. Takes a little time to do.😏
Good tactical & strategic planning along with execution is more important than grade. A 🧵
Our case study today is Pure Gold $PGM
& how it turned into Pure ..💩
1st, some theory you'll know if you have been following me 4 a while:
/1
These concepts are important because the decision was to use large trackless machines in the mining of the new access ramp & therefore say to say all ore development will be of a similar size as well. We should therefore expect dilution issues in narrower orebodies of Marsden /2
SRK (Vancouver) did quite a nice MRE for the Co. I know Wayne Barnett, he is quite a smart fellow & a good geo with solid experience. The report reads well, and tellingly, there are NO RESERVES & NO MINE PLAN. Alarm🔔's beginning to ring. /3
#Mining with Electric machines: A modern miracle to save the environment or a pipe dream? 🧵
I'll discuss both open pit & underground apps.
For 60yrs, engineers have been innovating electric mining machines b/c they're cheaper. An electric dragline moves 60t each swing.😳1/
These monsters are so huge, a ship's diesel engines don't cut it. Way before I was even born, the clever guys worked out its cheaper -on a per-tonne basis- to use electric motors connected to the grid. They work well and are excellent in soft-rock stripping operations. 2/
Mining is about LOGISTICS of moving large masses of material to expose what is valuable & then move the valuable material to extract the metal. All this movement requires a LOT of energy.👇If you have ever dug your own swimming pool, you understand.😏 3/
Some of you may have been following the $AUN debacle, a good e.g. when the Lassonde curve goes south. 😬
I will discuss a few important technical flaws in the Aurcana investment thesis. /1
A couple of things in the 2022 Feasibility study Mineral Reserve Estimate immediately jump out. 1- The reserve is small 2- The min. mining width is crazy 3- The dilution No.'s seem too precise
One thing mining is not is precise. It can be accurate, but that's a different thing/2
Let's learn all about this mining method from $AUN. Below are excerpts from the FS tech report with my comments in red.
A (nice) investor video of the mine explains the resue method quite well by the then COO during minutes 16:41-23:33.
1/ Lets review this Q: @Darken_Man got it right, well done.
Look at the pit floor: Very uneven, by far the biggest negative impact on this operation. Why? Slower reversing in, slower truck tramming, more difficult loading & damage to tyres. "How so?", you may ask.
Thread:
2/ Have you ever driven a car on a really bad road? Its slow and hurts the car. With trucks its way, way worse b/c trucks are the most expensive part of the open pit mining biz. & they're also the production conveyor that moves your product in diluted form to the plant.
3/ Consider a typical medium-sized OP operation with 180t dump trucks running an avg. cycle of 45 minutes, for 19 effective hrs/day. That works out to 1.64 million tonnes per truck per yr (with 5days off). Now, if the floor was level it would likely save 20-40 seconds reversing;
1) Thread: From Drilling to Open Pit Optimization For Dummies.
Imagine you have project and hire a truly great geologist who has drilled some fantastic looking sections based on a small surface anomaly he found from a surface geochem sampling program.
2) Your geologist (lets call him George) tells you its a pipe-like copper skarn, vertical in nature about 50m wide and open at depth that he interprets (a key word here) in section in this pic below. (We will keep things simple by staying in only two dimensions X & Y).
3) Your drill results come back and your copper values are amazing. The consultants concur with George's interp, and then create a 3D grid over of blocks over it, each block being approximately equal to a the minimum mining unit size, which for open pit would be about 10x10x10m.
1/11 $REG REVIEW Thread: - I'm a hopeful shareholder, underwater🙄for 3yrs now. Bought it at 1.65 - yeah crazy I know. Here's a review & why I'm still in. The pic below says it in 1000 words.
2/11 Probably the most important point is the property is and in particular the resource is part and the same of an adjacent operating mine, Tantahuatay, which is 40.1% owned by Buenaventura (the operators), 44.2% by Southern Copper & 15.7% by Regal Ware Inc. out of the USA.
3/11 Tantahuatay is a sweet oxide OP mine hitting the oxide cap above a huge porphyry & produced 110koz Au & 2.1Moz Ag last year. However this year production is F/casted to be 77koz Au as they start to get into the sulphides which cannot yet be processed.