Aston Bay Holdings Ltd V.BAY

Former CEO,Thoughts,,

[traps7]

 @BenjaminJCox As someone who knows economics inside out, what average copper grade do you need in order to be economic at say $3.50, what tonnage and what kind of NPV8 do you guesstimate starting with 20Mt @ 2%? Do you have winter breaks over there, special provisions needed for climate? Thanks

 

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27 Jul 2022, 03:46

 

@BenjaminJCox It depends on what concentrate grade you are willing to ship. Are you permitting a tailings dam, or can you make a dry mine? Once you touch water for processing, the cost increases in multiples, and I don't have enough information to model that. I bet $100m builds everything and $40-60m with money to spare. I can tell you what I would do. I would start with four concentrate specs, make it up, and start with four different specs. Open Mineral can generate those in minutes. Reach out to Ryan or me. Start with freight; 25,000-tonne dry bulk vessels trade at a discount in the summers, so work around 1-2 shiploads, then work back to mine size. So one shipload of 25,000 tonnes would require 10,000 tonnes of concentrate or 500,000 tonnes of ore processed, so think 2000-2500 tonne per day mine, if the head grade is 2% and concentrate grade is 40%, with 80-95% recovery. So, 5,000 tonnes per day is the rational mine size, producing 20,000 tonnes of copper in 50,000 tonnes of concentrate for two ship loads per year. So what is freight? Map shipping this to Boliden or elsewhere in Europe, assume one bottom (ship) can do two loads. It is probably a 30-day round trip, and two loads per ship should be easy with limited risk. The bottoms you want are baltic bound anyways so repositioning will be two days top from Russia or Finland. Then I would look at the Capex processing required to get to that spec, So crushing is 1.5 kWh, and can look like a roadside crushing station, sorting is $1-2 per tonne, stripping ratio is probably 10-1, but limestone banks well, the mill could be run by 5-10 people, the mine is 5-10 pieces of mobile equipment. Oddly, it is cheaper to operate nine months a year than year-round; stacking is cheap. But the working capital for the extra three months is not a joke. The thing is, if the geological system is figured out, this mine could lead to a mine 10x larger, so super excited