New Oxide Discoveries will substantially reduce cash costsAny investor looking over our 2020 financials would notice that gold recoveries have declined to about 70% of contained gold.
This has been the case for several years , as mining has become more and more restricted to low grade tailings and expensive to mill leachable transition sulphide ore.
Our mining team have done an exemplary job in tweeking and fine tuning the milling process to achieve these recoveries such as they are.
Note howver that the actual recovery was 89.8 per cent for the oxide ore processed from the bulk sample.
From memory, this is the highest recovery rate in Monument history.
It costs the same to mine a ton of ore regardless of its metal content.
Extracting an additional 20 % more metal from that ton makes a huge difference to gross margins and operating cash flows.
POG is currently in the $2500 cad per ounce.
At the current recovery rate, Monument is recovering 70% of contained gold which means that 30% .....$750 Cad ...is left in the tailings.
Peranghi oxide ore would recover all but $250 cad from this contained ounce of gold....a recovery gain of $500 cad per ounce.
Assuming 25000 ounces of production , this additional increase in recovery rates will generate an extra $12.5 million cad in cash per year.
Going forward, we shall see these improved recoveries generate robust cash flows once again..