Thanks to SH EET guys for posting a link to "Creamer Media's Mining Weekly." Another excellent piece of information on Trans Hex overall and an excerpt regarding Etruscan below. Although TH's Angolan diamond play has much higher grade per 100 m3, Tirisano diamonds garner more $$$ per caret. A good read, provides informative relative comparisons.
miningweekly.co.za
Tirisano mine, 20 km north of Ventersdorp, is one of a group of farms and is what Delport calls an alluvial sinkhole deposit, as opposed to the company’s West Coast deposits Baken, Reuning, Saxendrift and Niewejaarskraal, which are riverine deposits.
Drilling has determined that the gravel occurs up to at least 100 m and in some areas up to 140 m and is a sizeable low-grade deposit; 2,22 carats/100 m3 is the average grade being produced.
“This is what I would term medium value, it’s not the high values we are used to at our mines on the lower Orange river, but the value is sufficient for us to think that we can make decent returns,” says Delport. Canadian junior mining company Etruscan Resources, which established the mine, invited the Trans Hex/Mvelaphanda Resources joint-venture company Mvelaphanda Exploration to inject cash and technical expertise into the Tirisano project and, since June this year, Trans Hex has been operating the mine with a potential to earn 50% of the operation, if it successfully runs and expands the plant.
“By and large what we have to do is operate the plant for a month at a throughput of 300 t/h at 72% utilisation, and then Mvelaphanda Exploration will automatically acquire a 50% stake in the operation,” says Delport.
“We have until August 2005 to do that,” he says.
Trans Hex is expanding the plant in two phases, but the first step was to repair the existing plant to Trans Hex’s operating standards and, by doing that, plant effective utilisation has been upped from 45% to 77%.
Production since June has been 2 430 carats and sales through Trans Hex’s tender system have achieved an average price of $588 a carat.
The plant has now been shut down to do the first-phase expansion.
Phase one plans to increase the plant throughput from about 120 t/h to 200 t/h, at a utilisation way beyond 72%, and then, early in the new year, in the second phase, new modifications will take the plant throughput to beyond 300 t/h.
“The key issue with our expansion plan is that it is low cost; the exchange rate is pressing everybody and we don’t want to spend more money than we need to,” says Delport.
“In the first phase we are spending R16-million to R17-million and the balance of the budgeted R41-million in the new year.” Cape Town company ADP Projects designed the new processing plant and Almec, a BEE engineering company, built most of the plant at its factory in Klerksdorp, disassembled it, took it to Ventersdorp and is reassembling it there.
“We have about 300 people on site including a number of electrical, civil and other smaller contractors in order to complete the work by the middle of December and to be up and running again before Christmas,” says Delport.
Tirisano is just one farm and Delport believes there are at least two other adjoining farms and a number of other potential mining resources in the Ventersdorp area.
“We want to engage with Etruscan, which has access to some of the land, to see if we can get a regional play going as opposed to just mining on one farm as we are,” he says.
|
