Hi TropFreedom,How do you not know the difference between cut...

Hi TropFreedom,

How do you not know the difference between cut off-grade and the average mine feed grade?

Maybe this will help you understand.




WKT has a cut off grade of 10%, with an average mine feed forecast to be 17.9% TGC this means anything below 10% is considered waste and had resulted in a strip ratio of 4.4 to 1 over the life of the project, The mine life based on their reserves at 17.9% and plant capacity is 24 years.

SYR on the other hand has a lower cut-off grade of 7.2% and has the same average TGC grade as WKT coming in at 17.9% TGC, The Mine life based on reserves and plant capacity is 150 years at 350k tpa (17.9%)

Please note SYR has a strip ratio of 1.04 to 1. This means they need to move 4 times less material than WKT needs for the same amount of contained graphite.

In simple terms, WKT has significantly more waste (lower grade and overburden) due to lifting its cut-off grade, if they dropped there cut off grade down to 7.2% as SYR has, the average grade of the reserves for the lindi jumbo mine would be around 14-15% TGC, which is around a 20% drop in the TGC grade or the output from the plant would drop down to 32k tpa
.
If you compare the Million of Tones of contained graphite between the 7% TGC and the 10% TGC cut-off, WKT now has 6.7 million tonnes of waste graphite ore that now needs to be moved simply by increasing the cut-off grade. (higher opex)




Another way to look at it, other graphite projects in Tanzania have a cut-off grade of 5%. If WKT used this cut-off grade its average mine feed would drop to 11.5% and it would save moving 26 mil tonnes of graphite ore to a stockpile, although the mine output would drop down to 25k tpa

Now that is something for you to think about. WKT has to sort through 26 mil tonnes of additional graphite ore (difference from 5% to 10% TGC) to find all the graphite that is 10% or higher, or if you consider the total amount of contained graphite 35 million tonnes, 40% of the graphite is considered mine feed, with the other 60% being the same host mineralisation that needs to go to the waste pile.

Pretty scary numbers isn't it having that much low-grade ore to be sorted from the higher-grade mineralisation, it will take a lot of drilling and lab work to help come up with a mine plan that isn't going to have significant dilution.