Ann: September 2024 Quarterly Presentation, page-24

I agree GB… I for one had raised my concerns about said costs on several occasions, given the direction that we had been tracking. So, its nice to see DRE actively reducing those overheads to align more appropriately with the current climate…
The strategy of transforming into a self-funded explorer is also a good move – and interesting to hear the expected timeline is aggressive.
I do have my concerns over the viability of toll treating at Paulsen’s….or more so, the $/Oz that DRE would walk away with. I mean its good that we share a link with BC8 through PC, but that doesn’t mean we will get any favors…by that I mean it will obviously need to stack up on both sides of the equation. But, don't get me wrong, I still think its worth pursuing and looking at, particularly when it can be assessed for relatively minor expense (both time and cash).

Depends on what route is selected…but assuming it goes via Maroonah station then up to the NW Costal Hwy and in on the 136 then its ~330 km. Plus over 160 km of that is on the dirt. There are more direct routes on station roads…but I wouldn’t bank on them being up to the task. Plus, id assume they’d want some degree of weather-proofing the route, at least to the point its not stalled out by every small rain shower…even though in a big rain the whole district grinds to a halt anyway.
Point is ~330 km is a decent haul (especially with a large gravel component). Not unheard of..but it’s a long way.

Look at something like AWJ for example, toll treating dirt from Jeffreys Find, east of Norseman, and up to Coolgardie. Now that’s ~215km and 95% is good black-top. The JV between Auric and BML is structured such that BML are the miners, operators and managers. They (BML) incur and pay all mining, haulage, milling costs (plus related expenses). After sale of the gold BML subtracts all direct costs before splitting the surplus cash proceeds on a 50:50 basis. So, this kind of agreement works for both because BML themselves are setup as a mining entity so all they need to do is lock in a haulage contractor…and happy days.

But for us, we have DRE with the resource, BC8 with the mill…but BC8 contract out the Paulsen’s ug mining. So for the DRE at the Star of Mangaroon we will need to also procure a contract miner (presumably on a campaign style setup) and a haulage contractor as part of any toll processing arrangements. From looking at the historical reports the weathering isn’t overly deep, so we are talking drill-blast not just free-dig. Mind you, DRE have acknowledged this re contracting it out, so no doubt they are looking into the options. So it doesn’t mean it won’t work…but it will impact on the bottom line.

Stating the bleeding obvious…but it all rests on what comes out of the sample buckets and how it is sliced and diced in the MRE. The ‘target areas’ shown on the long section are important to test the upside potential, but really from the view-point of ‘lets get some ounces out of the ground’…its more about how well that purple >20gm zone in the top 100 m actually hangs together with more drilling:


The historical UG mined grade is bonkers, but probably need to be a bit more realistic with potential open-pit average, maybe ~8 g/t depending on how its domained. So just for a total thumb-suck in that top ~100 m panel I get between 25 to 30 thousand ounces (depending on total thickness blah blah)...
Will be interesting to see what the new drilling comes up with and how they choose to frame the MRE.
GLAH