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

To: Mr. Aloha who wrote (50121)	10/7/2007 9:58:25 AM
From: loantech	Respond to of 78419

<In a letter from Mustard> The guy is a joke, wasn't Colonel Mustard in that whodunnit game clue? <G>

To: Mr. Aloha who wrote (50121)	10/7/2007 12:02:29 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 78419

I think I ran into than name in the jungle from time to time. The odds of 'finding a mine', (presuming you are really looking) is far better than 500 to one. For instance I know about 15, if people are looking. How I know they are mines is that they were once mined and still have ore in them. So there. In fact if you had the miners, there about 100 mines in Ontario that could be restarted. There are no outfits with sufficient miners and engineering staff to tackle them, even if you could get over the cost of acquisition, and the gov regs and permitting. If they could be put back into production within 2 years, you could put 10,000 people to work fairly easily. Finding that many spare mining people or even intelligent trainees would be a formidable task. Engineering staff are not there either and you cannot use grads, as they need ten years to be useful. The odds of finding easy money to develop one are a really different issue. That is hard to calculate. It is in part dependent on what game you play as well as who you are. Whole other jungle. Depends on who you cut in, and what their intention is, and belief in the mine making process. If you just cast about the showings that are historically "out there" and counted the mines that emanated from them, you get a not bad roll of the die. Of 5000 copper zinc showings in Ontario of known grade, drilled or trenched in some fashion, there were 50 mines. So one in a 100 on showings by pure chance is a worst case. Of course many showings could be owned by the same company, so it is even better than that. Perhaps 1 in 50 to one in 30. But if you invest in competent 'grass roots' companies it may get even better than that. But they gotta get money and land. That is a dance of the seven Butylated Styrene veils indeed. Trouble is once the get the usual money bureaucracy and swell names in there, who don't have a clue what they are doing in the bush, you will never get anything done anyway. And all the geomavens out there with brushcuts who cut their brush with various majors baby sitting drills and pushing paper whilst practicing their yessirs ain't real prospectors, let alone geos. So they ain't gonna find anything unless they steal it. It isn't about just poking away at anomalies. Electrical/gravity anomalies, depending on the environment may be 500 to one. You can't just do that, as it is way to expensive. No even falco will drill every electrical megatem anomaly. It is about an intelligent approach to exploration and having about 5 million a year to do that. Where do you get the money to just do that out of the box? A land rush and agood relationship with a powerful money machine is how they usually do it. As all the companies spawned in Red Lake recently on the heels of Goldcorp and the gold price rise. I was fairly assured that there would be no mines coming out of that. The same thing happened on the same ground in 1930 and it produced just so many mines when they knew how to do it from minimalist drilled gold. The joke is you do not need to drill a million ounces in an Archean gold property in order to start developing. There is no point and most of your ore is too deep to drill anyway. What they used to do is drill 30% and plan the fease from there. Most mines in the old days had no feasibilities anyway when they started. Feasibilities are what major companies do to justify their actions to the accounting army. The Lakeshore had no fease at all when they started their mile deep shaft. If you want to resurrect mines and just go about rehab and metal sales, there are about 150 in Canada to choose from. The difficulty there with base metal is to find a metal that can be smelted cheaply. Ordinarily for small companies in the past that was limited to Gold and Silver. Maybe moly cons if you found a really high grade showing, but that passed by about 1930. Gravel makes sense, bentonite, vermiculite, silica, flux if you can get paid, but few other industrial minerals can be done such as tungsten, vanadium etc., as it takes financing from the buyer, which obviates owning the property, as a sell out is the only possibility for a deposit of any size. Major metals, such as iron, nickel, copper, zinc, lead, etc, are out of reach of small money and people without smelters except where non consolidated deposits can be mined for peanuts such as placers and nearby open pits in low reg countries. Oxide ores however can be put in production remarkable cheaply and generate metals directly so can be done by small enterprise easily. North america has a very few oxide deposits. There is a fairly good ten million ton, 1% oxide copper thing in AK, that is still not in production because it lost impetus in the 90's but oodles of money could be made from that for peanuts at today's prices. Copper-gold could be done cheap as the concentrate was desirable, but still not that good. Nickel was the hardest to make any money in. Nowadays however, with sufficient scale, there are non patented processes that allow back end metal production, so one does not have to sell concentrates and take a beating on them. And there are so many smelters around the world that there is competition for concentrates anyway, so the game may have changed considerably. EC<:-}