Post by
nozzpack on Nov 28, 2024 2:33pm
Gold Concentration Ratio
Most FS studies show the amount of waste rock in the Optimized pit along with the tonnage of economic ore above the cutoff grade.
The latter is of course the volume of ore which must be milled to extract the estimated ounces of gold.
Lets take Valentine Lake for example which is very well sampled by the drill bit.
Out of 605 million tons of rock within the optimized pit, only 51,000 m tons contain economic grade ore whivh will be milled .
The gold concentration factor , thus defined , is 8.5% ( 51 m / 605 m ).
As anyone who has research the VL FS would know, it's intercept lengths and grades are well below that of QWN.
We don't yet have a optimized pit in QWN, but the channel sampling resukts of Keats Trench provide sampling density equivalent to that of an optimized pit subject to definition drilling and grade control.
In one of my recent posts, I calculated the gold concentration factor of KT as the ratio of meters with assays at or above the 1 gram cutoff , to the total meters assayed including dusters .
The derived gold concentration ratio of KT defined as above was just above 11%.
While grade does contribute to the concentration ratio, it is the intercept lenght that contributes most .
Longer intercepts means that more of the volume of rock being drilled is auriferous .
An extreme example of how long intercepts lengths affect the gold concentration ratio is SGD.
Its gold concentration ratio is near 50% .........very very long continously auriferous intercepts .
The point I am making here is that QWN does not have an anomalously low gold concentration factor represented by short narrow veins .
That would be V Lake , which itself is not out of whack with most orogenic open pit mines around the world .
By comparision, QWN has an above average gold concentration ratio driven by long intercepts abundantly blessed too with very high grades.
It will be a piece of cake to mine by open pit which indeed is the case with most orogenic open pits which..by the way ..contribute to orogenics producing 75% of the worlds gold.
You wouldn't know that if your stomach is strong enough to peruse ceo,ca site where one person with 4
IDs keeps harping on how diffucult it will be mine QWN ore..