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Gold/Mining/Energy : Naxos Resources (NAXOF) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tim Hall who wrote (12974)	5/18/1998 8:36:00 AM
From: Henry Volquardsen	Respond to of 20681

...the standard fire assay is rarely used on placer or alluvial deposits. It is mainly used on hard rock deposits. For this reason I disagree that gold is accessible via conventional methods. It might be but we won't know until a recovery method is found. Tim this is much more your area than expertise than mine. I will try and check with other sources but have no reason not to believe that you are accurate in saying that standard fire assay is rarely used on placer deposits. However the in house mining professional is John Norton. He has experience with developing a number of mines and with the state of the technology in South Africa. He has a lot more direct experience with the deposit than either of us. From what I gather he seems to believe that standard fire assay is appropriate and that conventional extraction is possible. As far as to whether it is accessible via conventional extraction, you and I seem to be in a linguistics joust. If you reread our statements we have both said conventional extraction might possible. I seem to be more optimistic on this than you but have stated all along that it still must be proven. As I have said this was still a risky investment. If I believed that conventional extraction was a slam dunk because of the standard fire assay then I would have said this was a no brainer. Where we really disagree is on whether the recovery program should precede the drill program. If we don't do the drill program what material will we use to do analysis of recovery? We need to understand the deposit before we can address recovery. However I believe, as I have stated several times, that the questions about recovery are really a continued attachment to the belief that there is elemental gold and that the only way to extract that is through a high cost extraction technique. Now I am not an expert in this field but have indicated I am a skeptic in this regard. That does not however stop me from being willing to engage in the research. But we have no reasonable way of knowing when this research will be successful. It could be tomorrow, it could be fifty years. You can't bet the entire company on that. I am not arguing that we will not need to spend time on the recovery process. As you rightly point out this is a relatively unique deposit and will most likely require a customized recovery process. I just believe you need to do the drill program to increase your understanding of the deposit. Also as you point out, the South Africans are working on the minerology. Yes they have not published anything but I would not expect them to do so until the feasibility report is complete. So in all liklihood the drill program and the investigation of the minerology are going on in parallel. Henry