Mining Engineer, 32 years man and boy. Fired my first few dozen blasts at the tender age of 17. Since then, 4 continents. Mostly WA gold but about 10 years in base metals and a few stints over east. A bit of open pits but primarily underground. Some coal but long ago. Been running a Mining Consultancy the last few years - Turns out I prefer the design, scheduling and financial modelling side to waking up in the Desert, Snow or Jungle at 4.30 every morning to deal with whining from the Board to the Janitors all day with no support, no gear and no money for years at a time.
And I'm not a downramper, I just get ticked off when I see the same "we'll just ..." culture when it comes to mining, making the same assumptions and same mistakes as hundreds before them but "this time it's different". So I try to introduce some perspective. If it was easy, gold would be cheap and anyone could do it.
Personally I think RXL are on to a winner. I've got about 25% of my portfolio in them. Only CHN make up more.
Youanmi didnt get a lot of attention. Apex had bigger problems. I spent a few days looking at the various Gidgee assets at one stage and knocked up a couple of designs for possible undergrounds but it didnt go anywhere - no money available to do the work required to get them started. From memory the known resources were too small below the satellite pits and the main underground was too hard to dewater, lots of inflow, and a lot of corners cut toward the end so unable to use the last 100m or so of levels - small, steep decline with curves too tight for normal trucks.
This new drilling is literally new and unknown at that time - it's looking pretty good so far.
Also at the risk of being pinged for off-topic. Apex's fatal flaw was that while they did great geology at Wiluna they literally assumed, and told everyone, that the previous owners were idiots and therefore they didnt need to research what actually went wrong rather than what it looked like on the surface. And then they forgot to come up with a plan for what they were going to do differently.
It was also when everyone was having to hire anyone with a pulse and they didnt recruit enough experience in key roles for what was a seriously technical project. The previous mob were actually some of Normandy's best who'd moved to Agincourt but were beaten by a lack of foresight regarding ventilation and eventually by seismicity - which didnt become apparent to Apex until it was too late. Turns out they were doomed from the start but shouldnt have been. They raised and raised and raised, I've never seen a mine sold so many times by the one owner, amazing salesman at the helm. But it all went into paying existing bills and they never bought the right mobile fleet, fixed the power station or fixed the vent. Same story the last few years with Blackham, except they were told where the problems were by quite a few people but chose to substitute their own reality because it didnt fit with what they'd already told the markets. They're not orphans on that point.
If Apex had just spent a little more time at the start they would have been fine. Unfortunately, having sold Bounty for 20 times what they expected or were prepared to accept from Viceroy and then been unexpectedly bought out at LionOre by a bunch of Russians who got into a bidding war with XStrata and paid 100 times what it was worth due to Nickel at $50,000/t for all of 5 minutes, the top dogs at Apex believed their 50-ft boats at Hillarys meant that they knew more about what they were doing than the consultants telling them where to do more checking. The timing of the GFC didnt help much either, gold price wasnt actually that good at the time. The record prices didnt come until right at the end. Dryblower or someone similar spotted the problem early, in the first few months, and said Apex were "circling the drain". They managed to circle it for another 3 years or so in the end but it took something like $400 million in capital raises to get it started and then keep it going that long. I came in after mining had started and only lasted through the first 4 General Managers, 5 Mine Managers and 30-odd mining engineers, about 18 months.
Good times, I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. Enough reminiscing though - It's somebody else's problem now. Let's look forward to a new era in a whole different place. Go Rox.
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