It seems to be a guide for the 1 year strategy:
- Which ideas are most worth testing before PFS. (A: heap leach, CM by-products, some processing technologies)
- What additional evidence is needed to increase confidence of funders, investors and partners. (A: ore sorting bulk test, more Measured resources at RPM)
- What are the best ways of minimizing CAPEX (A: heap leach pathway for the low grade, to lower the amount of sorters needed).
- And which drilling would be most valuable (A: RPM, RPM area, Stoney for some reason, Stibium).
Reaching production requires us to pass the PFS stage in any case. So I don't see how a longer term strategy would have helped, since they can't skip PFS.
Maybe they could have foregone any non-RPM drilling to save funds, and accelerate RPM drilling and potential production, but that is also a risk - risk missing the antimony grants, risk the project being sub-scale and not finding a funder, risk the NPV being too low relative to the cost of BFS and associated time and dilution.
Some of the results of the review were somewhat intuitive eg.
- Sort out the high grade, then only spend money on a lower throughput plant, then heap leach the rejects and low grade. (Saves CAPEX on plant size and sorters, and minimizes gold in waste.)
- RPM needing more drilling. North Uphill is the high value target, Valley is the under-drilled target, and Train/Trumpet/Shoeshine/Muddy Creek are the upside.
But who will believe it based on a hunch? Needs to be proven for funders/partners to believe it.
Though some of the other conclusions need more thought / experience:
- Specific technologies for processing, mining, heap leaching which are superior to SS2.
- Are grants likely enough to justify the redirection of some drilling to Stibium.
I guess management could have come up with half of these conclusions off the cuff, but the point of spending the money on the review was to get a second opinion, from groups with varying experience (eg. with processing technologies), plus accumulating evidence that is usable in PFS (off the cuff would not be good enough to prove the best path for use in PFS).
What is the alternative? Management override the usual process and preface PFS by saying "we've restricted the scope of PFS to RPM only, because we believe it's the quickest pathway to production"? Then in the future, maybe we reach production, but never knowing what the optimal path was.
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