Mr. Salber,
Regarding your points of curiosity,
1) How are we running against the End of Feb target date. Any
surprise slippage will be viewed as bad news, so getting the word out ASAP is essential if a slip is to happen.
As you pointed out, these things run on a schedule of their own so it is not useful or even relevant if dates are missed because we can be sure the any dates that have been set are only target dates on not commitment dates. Therefor, for us to get concerned about "missed" dates is misplaced to some degree.
2) Have there been any permitting issues, or are we all ready to roll
when the Hardware is up and running.
As far as I understood, permiting was an ongoing and always moving effort. There have been no permiting issues to my knowledge that have held up any other work at FL so I can only hope that there is nothing holding up the running of the demo plant either.
3) How many processes are still under evaluation and what are the
relative results ?
I don't think Naxos would tell us the answer to this only because no matter if they have one or six methods being tested, each and every one would be at different levels of R&D and/or experimentation and therefor results will likely be all over the board because that is how they need to test the validity of each procedure. So the release of any of this data would not be very useful in pointing to any direction. For example, if a test procedure got 20 ounces of gold, we would all say, "yeah, but what can be extracted?" If a procedure got 0.08 opt, we would wonder why the 25lb test got .26 and then want to wait to see what the demo plant gets. So you see, in my opinion, any test results are only meaningful against what the demo plant can extract and therefor, more test results will only refute or support the demo plant results.
4) What type of deal is being discussed with the process owners ?
That I hope is a nice simple, industry standard deal. We don't need yet another J/L "we'll take a third of the company please" deal.
5) and, of course, are any additional numbers which have
recently been done ?
Who knows. I would think that anything presented to them in an official paper report must be released so no news to me means they have none of these type of results in their hands.
I don't disagree at all that it might be nice to have more information, but with everything that has happened, I also don't see that it would change my decision one way or another until after we see the demo plant operating.
It is true that some of the issues you bring up would affect the forward progress of the demo plant, but one way or another we will all have to wait for it to run and process ore to get our final answer...whenever that happens.
Regards,
Tom F. |
