$0.30 party, page-25

Great post.

Just to add one more layer to this,

the most important part of economics is generally the early stages of the mine, the first 5(ish) years. The largest advantage to the orebody geometry at Corbel is that for these first 5 years, the strip ratio will be even better than 1:1... it will literally be nearly 100% ore, especially for the first year or two. They will start the pit in the middle. This will backload most of the waste moving to the end of the mine life of the Corbel when possible higher gold prices and/or new satellite orebodies starting up can offset the less favorable economics.

See below, the red outline will be the pit shape after the first 50% of the orebody has been removed, and shows and very low strip ratio.




Also, for the total newbies to mining, both of those examples are for open pit mining. Some of the really high grade stuff you may see out there (10+ g/t) is very deep (up to 1km) and located in very narrow veins (maybe only a couple meters thick at most) so they have to build what they call underground mines. These are the long narrow tunnels. Underground mines are orders of magnitude more expensive to build and operate, not to mention generally consider less safe.