It wasn't the most impressive presentation, but that doesn't change either the Burmeister ore, the potential Jaegermeister ore or his skills as a geologist (or coordinating a team as a CEO).
There's so many factors that go into whether a deposit is economic or not that simply stating its not economic is not particularly helpful. Evaluation studies have not been completed so I presume you are using some generic "rule of thumb" which may or may not have much relevance. Attributes that should assist the economics of Burmester include:
- Extremely limited dead zones with no mineralisation
- Ore starting 20-30m below surface
- The pegmatites being large area, and flat-lying (east/west) and only modestly dipping North/South
- A stacked pegmatite system
- Average "normal" pegmatite intercepts to date being about 1.4%
- Burmeister is located in a mining friendly country with a robust legal system
Given you are invested in PLS I'd presume you are of the opinion that a deposit needs to be super-large to be economic. Your view may be TG6 isn't yet super large and therefore its not economic. The fundamental problem with this simplistic view is that a number of companies have put out scoping studies on 10-30Mt deposits showing strong to very strong profitability. A 1Mtpa plant is a commercial size and a 15 year mine life at startup is a good length. Projects in the 20Mt range can show extremely strong economics.
Your statement could come from a misinformed position confusing pit shell and average price. Lets assume there's five areas of ore that cost A$500/t, A$800/t, A$1,000/t, A$1,500 and A$2,000 for the combined cost of mining and processing. They are all equal size. Set the pit shell at A$500/t and you have 1 unit of production at A$500/t. Small, but a good price. Increase that pit shell to A$1,000/t and you pick up 3 units at an average of A$767/t. Expand the pit shell to A$1,500 and you get 4 units at A$950/t. Expand to A$2,000/t and you get 5 units at A$1,160/t. Knowing there's a pit shell assumption of A$1,500/t doesn't tell you much about the average price of ore that would be recovered just that the mine design would need to change if prices weren't at that level. What it does do is means TG6 will be drilling modestly deeper targets and if robust ore volumes are found, establish the best way of mining them.
The use of a US$1,500/t pit shell for designing an open pit mining plan is sensible. On 24 August 2023 PLS updated their ore reserve and within that updated ore reserve they used a revenue assumption of US$1,450/t so one of the biggest in Australia is planning on extracting ore that is up to US$1,450/t in cost. If you are viewing TG6 as uneconomic because they have used a pit shell of US$1,500/t you might as well start shouting over on the PLS treads that PLS also a sell because its uneconomic as its using a US$1,450/t pit shell for its Ore reserve estimate. Good luck with that strategy because on the PLS threads they know the deposit is economic.
You may have the view that TG6 intercepts are too thin, but again we know PLS is economic. If you look at cross sections like the two provided below for PLS from August 2023, PLS isn't a large number of super-wide seams. Most in these two cross sections are drawn as 10-30m intercepts. Inclusive of the areas outside the pit PLS shell (which by definition cost more than US$1,450/t to mine) there's only a couple of noted 40m intercepts. That's not many thick intercepts for investing into a $12b MC company. There are other areas of PLS but Central and East are among the two biggest for their mineral resource.
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