RE:Excellent News.. Gold Production Resumes at Pine Cove Mill Maritime is conducting additional sampling throughout the property and has identified gold mineralization contained in in the TSF #2 tailings pond (Figure 2, Table 1) where material grading between 1.19 grams per tonne ("gpt") and 31.1 gpt gold was identified.
Further sampling is underway to define the extent of this material and determine the potential for processing through the Pine Cove mill. About 2 million tons have been processed through the Pine cove mill at an average grade of about 3 grams per ton and an average recovery of 87% .Quick calculations indicate and 25,000 ounces of gold is contained in the tailings and wash plant of Shoreline aggregates
The material stored in this pond includes fines collected from the wash plant operated by Shoreline Aggregates Inc. which processes mine waste rock from the Pine Cove mine into aggregates for shipment to international customers.
Recent sampling of the wash plant fines confirmed the presence of high-grade gold assaying 11.4 gpt.
Maritime and Shoreline are investigating the installation of a gravity recovery circuit to the wash plant to collect any gold on a more permanent basis.
The reason for a gravity circuit is because Gold weights 7 times heavier than granite rock.
That means that almost all of the leftover gold in the waste ore being crushed by Shorline drops to the bottom of the wash plant where it tends to become conentrated at high gold grades.
As there are no mining or transportation costs for these fines and milling of gold fines to dore is very cheap, gross margins will be above 80% ......essentially almost pure free cash flows.
Lets say they recover 15,000 ounces which would generate revenues of $37 million CAD.
About $25 million of this would be pure unencumbered cash flows versus maybe $10 m or so from mined gold.
This is just a guess but illustrates the easy profits that can be made by recovering and processing this near pure gold fines.
So, as I expected , the Pine Cove mill is operating and creating very nice cash flows which will accelerate when Mining of Stoger Tight resumes this year..