Hello 2mar$, the gold chronicle is hinting good stuff.
1. I have been and am busily engaged, even more than usual, with business plan this, proforma that, and presentation something else.
2. I do not quite see the end of the busy-ness, and must postpone the summer holiday to next year even as my nearly-9 daughter Erita and wife shall visit somewhere on mama-daughter trip whilst the fat Jack and I must make-do w/ dada-son hanging-out at home. I am thinking of talking nearly-3 Jack on a short trip if able, if only to get away from sameness.
Issue, cannot go too far away, cannot go to place w/o easy access to conveniences, and really prefer to have mom, in-laws, and nanny all in-toll.
3. The work needed to launch the fund-raising effort for the Tasmania gold-silver tailings project are nearly done, should be launched Wednesday / Thursday, and then the busy-ness to meet w/ interested investors happen, presumably.
Our objectives are to get the capex funded, take a drink of water, and not cede control. The project is large and nutritious-enough to enable a win-win-win.
4. The Queensland gold mine & mill project is just pouring gold manufactured from rocks by liberal applications of labour, diesel, tires, machines, and cyanide; lots and lots of cyanide.
We are now transitioning from processing the initial low grade oxide dumps (0.8-2.5 grams of goodness per ton of dumps) to higher grade oxide dumps (5g per ton), the pours are getting more plentiful as well as more bountiful. We are recovering at the 86% level.
Our silver credit is coming in at 2x the rate guessed-at in our acquisition dd proforma.
5. The bad news is that we are suffering from a 3-6 months cash crunch due to working capital needs and the need to snatch up some additional claims even if on super-time-value-money-protocol (10% down, 90% on first production as and whenever, plus 1% royalty). We are setting the price of claims transaction at essentially nothing because we have the only mill within 750km radius and our monopoly feeding-range is w/i 350km radius.
We are a free-range organic marauder, and we mean to benefit from our mad max camp to the max.
We are reaching into our own pockets for the cash-plug rather than raising the sums needed from the banks or funders because we do not wish to be beholden to anyone for that is the natural behavior of one who adores gold in possession. Gold holdings must remain pure even if still embedded in dirty rocks. Speaking of dirty rocks ...
6. The good news is that our very good, extremely nice, and expensive-enough metallurgist figured out the nature of the sulfide ore w/i our feeding range, and in so doing solved the mystery of why there are large sulfide ore dumps left over from early Queensland history on our claimed territories.
Before we bought the mines and (oxide circuit) mill from the Germans we figured we had to invest an amount larger than than the acquisition price to build a sulfide circuit (an expensive Albion plant that would recover 92% of gold from sulfide or), because we believed that the oxide ore resource (0-15m shallow) were pretty much exhausted of high-enough grade material, and that we need to quickly - quickly as in race against time to zero-oxide w/i 24 months - build our sulfide circuit. It takes 9 months to amend our permits and build the sulfide ore (>15m depth) processing plant.
The Germans sold us the gold biz because they had a larger tungsten resource to put into production, and given the state of the market, they could only unload the gold biz to try and save the tungsten potential, and they did not mind because they thought they had creamed-off the easy-picking oxide material at the surface. The Germans were wrong, one all counts, and are now going down for the count.
(i) the tungsten resource the germans counted on isn't wherever they were counting
(ii) the oxide material they off-loaded on us is so plentiful that we can remain w/i the first 15m depth forever should we choose, and
(iii) the sulfide ore testing work our geewhizbang metallurgist commissioned for 50k revealed the good news, that our sulfide ore once crushed, crunched, ground, milled, released 63% of the gold by direct leach - pour on more cyanide. To do so we only have to lift our tailing dam walls by spending one Monty's worth of profit ever 3 years to store the sulfide tailings that would be left over after we have extracted the 63% of goodness out of the rocks.
Most of the 63% usually would be locked inside the sulfide ore matrix, leaving perhaps 12-18% free gold to recover by direct leaching - not economic, and very wasteful of gold.
Even better, once the leftover Queensland tailings are stored in the tailings dam, we can then wait for gold @ 3,000 and eventually re-visit the value extraction equation by either shipping the tailings to the eventual Tasmania tailings processing plant, or sell the tailings to mainland Chinese cousins, or sell the tailings pond to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Gold mines are a gift that keeps on giving through its eternal history.
(7) at 63% recovery w/o capex and power-on as soon as securing permit, we shall simply forego the pleasure of obtaining the 92% recovery w/ all the capex (~>18 months of profit worth) unknowns, plus the 9 months wait, and enough uncertainties.
We are at the 95% certainty level re the metallurgy findings. We are commissioned a double-check. Should thumbs-up, we do sulfide ore w/o bothering w/ engineering and installing a sulfide circuit.
We receive the probable geewhizbang gift from kind god w/ much sincere thanks to wise geologist partner, astute metallurgist friend, as well as a ohwhoawee know-everybody contract driller CEO.
Cheers, j |
