excalibur advancing to gold production, page-3

pachino
dont mean to burst your bubble but i read the ann a little differently re; Juno. As i understood it the tender process could take a few months and the j/v is for a drilling program at Juno to upgrade resource to RESERVE status and the conducting of a full bankable feasability study, any decisions to progress to mining Juno would have to be made (and negotiated ) after the BFS was complete.

My take on all this is that Juno is a big proposition and will require robust fundamentals in order to proceed (and by the way i believe this is very achievable) to mining via open pit. As far as open pits go this will have to be a fairly large one (Juno is approx 200m under cover) and a very rewarding one, much of the overburden is untested and economics will (in part) rely on mineralisation being present in the overburden. For this the ultimate J/V partner will need to be a serious mining outfit with deep pockets IMO.

A tender process like this will usually invite expressions of interest, then a short list of contenders will be chosen to conduct due diligence and then submissions will be tendered and finally EXM choose a partner.

Early production at Tennant Creek will most likely come from open pit mining the shallows at Rising Sun, Nobles Nob, Weabers find and Nobles nob west. The company is also planning to investigate ore dumps and tailings dams from previous mining and the possibility of treating this ore by heapleaching. Both methods could well be conducted simultaneously for a very low capex start up.

The next step on the road to production will be to drill the shallows to JORC RESERVE status in preparation for mining and drill testing of dumps etc as well as metallurgical testwork to determine the feasability of heapleaching