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Gold/Mining/Energy : Global Platinum & Gold (GPGI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bernard Elbaum who wrote (6037)	6/1/1998 1:13:00 PM
From: Anthony Zack	Respond to of 14226

Bernard, Regarding further evidence required, I refer you to post 6035. In other words, SHOW ME THE MONEY!! Show me that a refiner says "yes, we have no problems refining your product, GPGI... here is your check". We were at this stage last fall, Gippy had a saleable product, 5 tons a day, etc. only to find out that we needed a custom refiner to process the product. While getting rid of the electrowinning is great economically, getting rid of the requirement for a custom refiner is HUGE!! They say they have done it, now lets see them do it!! I have a bottle of something bubbly that is ear-marked for my next born. I would love to raise a glass to Mr. Jensen and crew while I'm at it...the timing of both events should coincide!! Tony

To: Bernard Elbaum who wrote (6037)	6/1/1998 2:10:00 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14226

Bernard, while not from Missouri, I agree with most here that say:'Show me". I think that eliminating the electrowinning is a great first step. I have said that for two years now. The new process, however will not extract all the goodies (and I think we have gotten an inkling to that fact by the much lower results we are getting now then what we were told before). What worries me, a little is that I am afraid, once more that the communications between Hassayampa and Salt Lake city might be garbled, they have been before. If what is described in the letter is factual, the process has the following six steps: Ball milling, first dissolution of raw ore, precipitation (concentration by about a factor of six?), smelting, dissolution of goodies bearing copper and resin or chromatographic separation. One of the questions we face, is the process commercial. I think this will depend a lot on the extraction rate. When we were taking about 3 plus ounces of goodies per ton (and at some point even much higher numbers like 8 ounces per ton in the electrowinning process), we could afford smelting processes. If the total content extractable is under an ounce of goodies per ton (which the more recent numbers indicate). I have some doubts that we can commercially extract the stuff. Before we can dance in the streets we really need to now much more. As far as the onion is concerned, while not impossible, I can see problems with using a copper saturated solution and not "poisoning the first resin relatively rapidly. But, possibly, this problem might have been solved by the resin supplier. It might be nice to find out how much of these resin per ounce of recovered goodies is required. The most critical problem will be discharging the copper laden exit solutions, maybe they can sell these to copper smelters, but I doubt they will recover much of the copper costs. and Here is the rub. If the first precipitation step yields indeed a concentration factor of 6, we will need about 300 lbs of copper for each ton of ore. That is at a low cost of $.7/lbs of copper, about $210. That leaves us only $90 for the rest of the processes. When we were talking about $2500 worth f goodies in the beneficiated ore, we had ample "room" for six times as much copper, since we recovered a good 70% of that cost in the electrowinning. I have no idea what recovery we might get here. So, is the onion peeling finished. I think not. Zeev