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Gold/Mining/Energy : Precious and Base Metal Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (34164)	2/4/2005 1:56:21 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 39344

I made a mistake in the Capex calculations. If it cost 40 million to start a 1200 TPD mine, then the Capex cost would be only 7 dollars per ton on a 6 million ton mine. It may cost them however 12 million to drill it off finally. That is at 440 holes at 1200 foot average. Ordinarily you don't do that all at once. Costs to mine from a 5 metre wide shear could be quite low. Ring drilling or vertical crater retreat may bring their costs down as low as 20 dollars a ton to break rock and get it to the mill. They need a bit of volume though to make this work. It would be a mistake to overcalculate the ore before the nature of the deposit is known. Zones exceeding 0.30 ounces per ton may allow much cheaper capex, smaller scale mining to start the operation. bulk sampling may allow that the grade is higher in recovery than drilling shows. This is called the nugget effect. In the Yukon, the size of the gold recovered indicates that this may be the case. EC<:-}