Ann: Corporate Update, page-79

The road redirection is a 1 year or 10 year thing, because of the inconvenience to villagers. It would change from a direct road to an indirect road - benefiting the mine at the cost of the villagers. Unless they could build a huge bridge over super pit...I'm not depressed because super pit is not hugely important. A-full is important (due to extortion or whatever delaying Quartz by a decade).



Grade gradually fell over time, as the pit was expanded and the plant size was increased to 6MTPA+. By the end, A-main was the main one able to support that throughput. A-full will better be able to do so - temporarily having raised grades - while Quartz remains above its full depth.

Once grades fall at A-main/quartz, they'll just step down the ladder.

Eg. A falls from 0.8g/t to 0.5g/t over time, then re-open some other pits that are 0.5-0.6g/t. Once those fall to 0.5g/t, open some new pits with 0.5-0.7g/t (being a step down the ladder because of the effort of developing a new area). I don't claim 0.9g/t or anything from exploration, because we have a large plant that needs to be filled - they'll expand the pit designs as much as possible until grade gets down to 0.5-0.7g/t, so that we can fill the plant (unless we had some exceptional luck to find a huge resource with good grades). But by the look of the exploration prospects, they're not huge, so they'd just expand the pits until grade reaches a low limit.

I somewhat ignore exploration, because it's such a slow process. Drill to find, drill to prove, bureaucracy, land acquisitions, building, digging. Re-opening pits is more like: de-watering, digging. We likely know what grades we ignored in older pits - anything that was worse than A-main - so maybe 0.5g/t for the bulk of it, except for withheld bits like Quartz.

But anyway, I imagine we'll get 5+ years from Quartz/A-main before grades drop off too much, to require another source to be added.


High gold - if it stays high, and profit is excessive and starts to accumulate (even after high royalties), they'll consider expanding/modifying the plant. That would require ore in bulk, but may make slightly lower grades profitable. So needing new ore, but not desperately.
Low gold - we continue the same mining plan, but the stress is on, as the mine could become unprofitable over time as grade fell towards <0.5g/t. So we'd have pressure to find new sources etc. I'm not sure if it would help to shut 1 of the plants in an extreme case.


Repeat Chatrees - it's hard to predict. I think it's a long way off if we're lucky.

In the fence - management should have a good ideas / plan already.

Outside the fence - they have a vague idea, requiring lots of drilling.

SP - the main negative is management being behind schedule on grade and holding short term debts (now medium term, but still high cost), and government uncertainty. The mine itself should work if it's allowed to by the government (the royalty doesn't help).