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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold and Silver Juniors, Mid-tiers and Producers -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (33306)	2/19/2007 2:17:31 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78419

I don't know. hmmmmmm I would not say excited, really. The Zone is 20 metres wide. 65 feet. 22 million tonnes. 4.48 lbs nickel, $83.48 US nickel ($96.01 CDN) and 0.48% or 10.58 lbs copper, at $27.99 US or ($32.20) CDN. Total money in the pit is $128.21 or 2 billion, 820 million CDN. That would justify an open pit operation with a capex of 100 million if Ni holds over 10 dollars US for 7 years. You have to be able to mine 128 dollar open pit ore.. even 64 dollar stuff. Costs to mine and mill at scale are below 10 dollars. Capex is about 5 dollars a ton. In plant costs to grind 5 bucks, mine costs 5 bucks, subsequent processing 5 bucks, marketing/admin 1 buck, break even 21 bucks at 5k tpd. CDN. Maybe the Inco traditional of "we won't mine it open pit even if it is 0.75% Ni", don't operate anymore at $18.94 Ni with resent shortfalls and Chinese demand. Especially when you have the tons, and there are new non Orford processes to recover the Ni/Cu and Inco cannot slash prices on competitors anymore. All those old "standards" are now 30 years old, when Ni was 3 bucks, the Sherrit process was under patent and China was not building a new city every month. Non of this operates anymore. We have to think Dollars and cents, and perhaps we should take another look at Hard creek too, since it fairly large, and is better grades still than MUM. It is an open field now that the investor must independently assess with new eyes, and the scales of prejudice of the past when Inco totally dominated the market, must be cleaned away. Even back then (1978) Pat Sheridan found his own Nickel Matte process to make nickel from, independently of Inco and in Timmins worked away producing a final product, not a concentrate, from a 0.91% ni mine at maybe 1000 tons per day. If he could do it then at that rate, then with new processes you could do less grade open pit with the new cheaper Sherrit process at 5,000 tons per day. There are a few more people going ahead with Nickel that you will hear about. A few IPO's to come up. PP's were snapped up. You could not even get in a few months ago. I knew about them 2 years ago, but there was not market even then. It appears investors are into feeding frenzy, not developers. If they take that attitude all the time and don't assess supply and demand properly and real mines, not knee jerk grades and charts, then they will get left behind. Having said that I don't know if MUM, is a mine or not, or Hard Creek or Polymet. That is up to the big money. Biggie Risk Capital is hard to find, and it does not come out of Canada for mine building. We know that. CDN's ain't got the money or the balls to build their own mines. They never did. EC<:-}