down-leg ?? attn madmacs, page-2

Can someone please review Legs last intersections with 33 GRAMS A TONNE with Harmonys (one of the worlds largest producers) latest announcement and these guys are wetting themselves.

Reuters
Harmony finds higher grades at mine expansion
Monday March 15, 1:22 pm ET
By Eric Onstad


ELANDSRAND MINE, South Africa, March 15 (Reuters) - South African Harmony (HARJ.J) is finding richer-than-expected ore at a deep-level expansion of its Elandsrand gold mine, the world's fifth largest gold producer said on Monday.
Officials told reporters and analysts during a visit to the mine that a pact with workers was expected soon to extend operating hours at the mine and boost operating profits by around 10 percent.

The expansion project, launched last year, taps a reef body with higher grades of ore down to 3,500 metres, 500 metres deeper than where the mine is currently operating.

The ore grade at deeper levels was due to rise to 8.8 grams of gold per tonne, from the current 6.0-6.5 grams, boosting annual output to 450,000 ounces per year by 2008, up 100,000 ounces from current production.

"We're finding much higher grades of ore than we expected," said mine manager Horst Jager.

In the first level that has been developed in the expansion area some of the ore is twice as rich as expected at 18 grams per tones, but it is unclear yet whether this is representative of the whole expansion area, he added.

"Our guys are excited...(but) this is too small an area to cause a re-evaluation of the whole area," Jager said.

Further boosting output and profits would come from an agreement with workers to implement continuous operations, or "conops", which extends operating hours to seven days a week from the current 11 days out of every 14.

"We have a very lucrative business plan if we get conops here, Jager said.

At Elandsrand, conops would increase operating profits by 12-15 million rand per quarter, or by around 10-12 percent, he added.

Harmony is in the process of changing over to conops after ARMGold, with which Harmony merged last year, successfully changed all its mines to the longer working hours.

Harmony's Free State operations, which account for nearly 30 percent of the group's four million per ounce total production, went on conops in January along with the Evander operations, which has around eight percent of production.

At Harmony's Doornkop South mine, another deep-level expansion project is aiming to increase production fivefold by 2008. Currently all of the 65,000 ounces of gold output per year comes from the Kimberly Reef, but Harmony is reviving the deeper South Reef operation that was abandoned by former owned JCI.

This will boost output to 320,000 ounces of gold per year by 2008 at the mine, officials said.



No wonder I am wetting my bed nightly.

LEG is bigger than Ben Hur.