sp should test 9c soon, page-6

There may be 100 mill oz of gold here but none of it may be economic - it looks like there's just too much barren earth here per ton of ore.

It's got nothing to do with scale and production rates !!
For example if you need to tunnel and access through 30 tons of earth to get to 1 ton of ore that's a dilution of 30 to 1.

That doesn't change as you scale up - you don't end up with less dilution.

So you may start off with 15 g/T ore in the veins but what you end up mining may be 0.5g/T effectively (taking into account the 30 to 1 dilution that I used as the example).

An open pit mine is barely profitable at 1g/T .. an underground mine may need to end up with head grade of 2g/T to be profitable ?

Looks like there's too much dilution going on here in my humble opinion.

I wish the company clearly stated the development costs - so that investors can see the real production costs instead of hiding behind cash costs - which may be 1/3 of the development costs.

The company can be more up front about total costs, dilution rates and effective head grades - but I can't ignore the fact that CTO can't produce profitably after so many years of production - whereas other underground miners with larger veins (5 metre veins compared to 1 metre veins for CTO) and 30 times less dilution (there's virtually no dilution in 5 metre veins) are producing profitably from their first year.