1 million ounces, easy peasy, page-86

Allday you need to keep in mind the type of deposit.
If you have a large ore body like Buccaneer (usually much lower grade than a high grade narrow vein system like OP) then just a couple of long holes might intercept hundreds of metres of mineralisation.
If it’s reasonably uniform you can use quite wide spacing and get a very large resource to inferred with a limited number of holes.
ABU have done this with Buccaneer and discovery cost has averaged $4 per oz across 3 prospects over 2 years to the date of the last jorc resource.

When working with a narrow vein and nuggety system, a 300m hole might only hit 1- 4ms of vein.
Even then it might hit a barren part of the vein.
You have to expect discovery costs to be significantly higher for OP than for something like Buccaneer.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile though.
OP’s much higher grades are worth much more per oz of resource than Buccaneers low grade oz’s.
I doubt anyone would disagree.

Let’s assume they add 250,000oz at OP at 10g/t for $12mill.
Keep in mind the $12 mill included admin costs, scoping study work etc, not just exploration.

At $12 mill for 250,000oz, discovery cost is $48 per oz.
Much higher than $4 but;
At 10g/t in open pit, your profit margin before tax according to the scoping study will be $1,100/oz.
Capex is already paid for by the ounces previously defined so you are adding around $1100/oz for resource additions at open pit depths. Even below open pit depths, with high grades like these, margins will still be high.
Pretty good value for $48 per oz added.

I’d much prefer to see OP resources grow for $48 for each oz of 10g/t gold, rather than see ore averaging 1g/t added to Buccaneer for $4/oz when we don’t yet know what margin it will have or how far from production it might be.

With OP if we add only 150,000oz to mining inventory for the $12mill spent, then if $600 cash cost you get $1000 margin/oz and you add $150mill before tax to the value of the project for the $12mill spent.
If its 200,000oz, then its $200mill.
If we can take $12 mill per year from future cash flow and add 150-200,000oz per year to mining inventory, we will be extending mine life and future cash flow at a much greater rate than what it will be depleted by each year.

Lets see how many oz’s and how much value we have added before deciding if the money was well spent.
I think it will have been very worth while.
With a bit of luck we add significantly more than 150-200,000oz of 10g/t resource.