RE:Don Marino Mine-2 years left onlySheep, I posted the following comparison of Orvana's stockpile at Don Mario with Teranga's huge ore stock pile. The surprising result was that Orvana's stock pile is worth more than Teranga's stockpile in terms of gold equivalent value per share.
I posted the following on Teranga's Board in response to a poster making the same comment about short mine life at Don Mario:
kkkrrrr,
Regarding ORV’s short mine life, the 150,000 ounces of gold in the LMZ extension gives them 3.5 years of production at 40k oz per year. So let’s assume that this is all the gold that’s there except for the stockpiles left over from previous mining.
So let’s compare Orvana’s ore stockpile at Don Mario with Teranga Gold’s HUGE 13.7 million tonne low grade stockpile grading at 0.82 g/t. Teranga has an impressive total of 360,000 ounces of gold in that stockpile and at $1300 USD gold, that works out to 90 cents in gold per share of TGZ stock.
Don Mario’s stockpile is only 2.2 million tonnes but it grades at 1.84 g/t gold, 49.3 g/t silver, and 1.89 percent copper. So that’s 129,000 ounces of gold, 2.76 million ounces of silver which is about 40,000 ounces of gold equivalent, and 90 million pounds of copper is worth about 210,000 ounces of gold equivalent. In terms of gold equivalent ounces, Don Mario’s oxide stockpile is 379,000 ounces gold equivalent.
So the oxide stockpile at Don Mario is worth $3.62 USD per Orvana share, and Orvana trades at 18 cents in the US. At a gold production rate of 40k oz per year, the oxide stockpile is good for 3 years of running the plant at capacity with no mining.
Then there is about 8 million tonnes of sulfide tailings left over from UMZ production in tailings from copper flotation that contain 0.7 g/t of gold which could be run through the CIL plant to recover the gold. That’s another 150,000 ounces of gold or another 3.8 years of CIL plant operation with no mining.
Compare that to the situation at Teranga Gold where 38.2 million tones of waste have to be moved at a cost of $99 million dollars to mine 1.6 million tones of ore containing 190,000 ounces of gold. It takes 80,000 ounces of gold just to pay for mining the waste, while Don Mario’s miners could sit at the office and play checkers for the next 8 years, while Don Mario plant cranks out 40,000 ounces of gold per year.
Which miner do you think will be more profitable? Which miner will get to $2 USD first, the one that has 90 cents per share in gold stockpiled, or the one that has $3.62 in gold equivalent stockpiled?