Fort Knox: does tailings pond have cap. for Golden Summit?I haven't looked @ Freegold since 2022 (before the MRE was released in Feb 2023.)
the expectation still seems to be that Kinross will buy Golden Summit or all of Freegold.
Kinross investor's presentation says that with the addition of feed from Minh Choh, the Ft Knox mill has company-owned feed until 2034. [Minh Choh? It's ~700,000 oz @ ~ 6 g/t, somewhere to the southeast [like rough guess 100 miles away?]), ore to be trucked to Ft. Knox.]
Freegold is really close by; seems a no-brainer, right?
Is really 'all you need' is some improved connecting roadway from Golden Summit to the Ft Knox mill? I'd guess you'd need only 3 to 7 miles of all-weather road, also designed/built to endure many years of loaded trucks running ore.
Maybe Kinross has already thought about the capacity of the Ft Knox tailings ponds/storage. [I was too lazy to research the capacity.]
Maybe Kinross is also concerned about effects of cumulative years of operation of the mill exceeding the design life in too many ways, if they were to process the Golden Summit through the mill?
Maybe it makes more sense for Kinross to feather-in ore from small, high grade projects [like its Minh Choh] -- instead of Golden Summit's huge tonnage of ~1.34 g/t ore - in order to minimize wear on the mill, and issues of permitting and building-out more tailings management?
Sprott might be right in buying more - but he's got a longer time frame and ~10,000 x more money than me.
Maybe in the next ~6(?) years Freegold will double the MRE for Golden Summit, and even push the average grade up a bit.
If Kinross was crazy enough to buy or build Ft Knox at 0.3g/t, then running Golden Summit at 1.34 g/t (0.75 cutoff) as a stand-alone project seems plausible. I bet that's in the back of management's mind, but they're smart and tell us retailees that Kinross will buy 'em out first, because its a more seductive story.
Thoughts, anyone?