Vat Leach Gold ASIC?, page-2

i dont know where you got those costs from but this is the way i see it...
typical vat leaching operations involve soft oxidized material or finely crushed tailings which have a natural porosity

(a)...maranoa is very narrow and hard quartz in hard rock with little to no gold in the wall rock, so that entails a high proportion of waste while no one has talked about ore to waste ratios, nor about a mobile crushing plant with the ability to grid the ore fine enough to extract the gold by leaching.

(b)...if the contractor can handle all the mining and crushing and vat leaching for $88 / tonne good on them, that is a good margin at less than a gram out of 4.5 gram ore, but i would expect they will still want a fair share of the gold after costs.

there is plenty of soft, quartz/ sericite/ biotite schist up to 2 metres thick and 5 grams available in the area that would be eminently more suitable for vat leaching than quartz...some times the ore reserve quantities and grades dont tell the best story, but i suppose they have to work with what they've got in hand.