Post by
petersburggray on Mar 26, 2013 5:04am
Crescent mine plan
My understanding of USC's mine plan for Crescent is that the huge shortfall of necessary cash to ramp the mine will be made up through sales for silver from the Crescent, mucked during the development phase of the mine, prior to commercial production. I am unaware of any grossly underfunded miner like USC that has ever used this strategy successsfully to ramp a mine to commercial production. In fact, USC has already tried this particular strategy once at Crescent and it didnt work, yet here we go again...reminds me of that saying attributed to Einstein that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome each time. The path to production includes $18mm of exploration since apparently the silver found so far and mined from Crescents four open faces is not commercially viable. I had heard some chatter that USA passed on acquiring USC/Crescent several years ago due to the fact that all four open faces at the mine are oxidized making good mill recoveries problematic. The fact that USC has never disclosed publicly the New Jersey mill recoveries on Crescent muck or the amount of silver FCO refinery recovered from the crescent concentrates produced at New jersey, in my opinion supports the validity of the chatter I heard. There is no doubt in my mind that there is lots of silver deep in Crescent, just like Galena and Sunshine where the real rich silver is 4000ft and below with less rich and profitable silver ore shallower, however in my opinion the issue is that USC doesnt know exactly where the rich silver is and I doubt whether $18mm is enough money to even find it without dewatering Crescent first and to dewater Crescent, you have to also have Bunker Hill mine since the two mines are connected underground by a drift.