RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Earnings outjicoop,
There is no question that the oxide stockpile is a huge copper resource, but the problem is whether to design a SART plant for 3 years of high copper production or do you take a longer view of the resource and blend the oxide stockpile in with the UMZ tailings and convert a 3 year mine life into a 10 year tailings recovery project?
Obviously, given the high copper grades of the oxide stockpile at Don Mario, one of the key design considerations has to be do you design the SART plant based on a 3 year oxide stockpile, or do you size the plant for a decade of operation and process the entire UMZ tailings?
Second, with respect to the oxide ore heap leach operation, is it more advantageous to do sequential leaching of each ore type or separate leach cells for each ore type?
The third issue is zinc. If there is enough zinc present in the oxide ore and UMZ tailings, it may be necessary to use a two stage SART removing zinc and silver in a first stage SART, then remove copper in a second stage SART plant, and then send the gold solution to the CIL.
Don Mario has the advantage of having a permitted 100 tpd sulfuric acid plant to provide the sulfuric acid needed for SART. This plant was built for the LPF process back in 2011 but used for less than a year because it couldn't provide enough sulfuric acid to run LPF at full capacity.
Assuming that the final SART plant design is based on a blend of UMZ tailings with high grade oxide ore fed into the plant over a 9 year time period, the resultant blended ore grades would be 0.785 g/t gold, 0.57% copper, and 21 g/t silver.
In this blended ore scenario, gold production would increase to 4850 ounces per quarter, copper production would be 715 metric tons per quarter, and silver production 150,000 ounces per quarter. At current metal prices, quarterly revenue would be $19 million USD at current metal prices for 9 years.
Don Mario tailings recovery would feature a negative AISC with respect to gold ounces produced, and the income derived from the SART plant would allow the Don Mario property to be fully explored in search of the next major gold deposit and throw off enough cash to develop Taguas in Argentina and make additional acquisitions of mines in Bolivia.
ganndolph