Ann: Exploration Update - Exceptional Intercept, page-51

This post explains why we may see a NN MRE of around 1.5mt by mid 2024. The quite below from today's announcement especially the parts in bold are important:

“Importantly, the outstanding new intercept of 11.55m at 36.77g/t sits 170m below the lower boundary of the current 952koz Mineral Resource, with further indications from recent drilling that the footprintof the mineralisation is expanding significantly at depth. This supports the potential to add further high-grade gold ounces at depth while also increasing confidence in our geological model.”

My interpretation of that quote plus the image 1 below is that the 170m below the lower boundary is 170m below RL700 in image 1 (ie RL 870) which seems to be supported by image 2 below ie the lowest point of the MRE around RL700 only has a little bit of inferred resources. If they convert the grey area in RL650 to 700 to inferred resources @ 2,000 OPVM will add about 125k Oz.

Adding on 170m @ 2,000 OPVM gives another 340k Oz ie we now have 465K Oz of potential resource down to the deepest hole or about 1.4m Oz in total.

If we now assume the OPVM expands from 2,000 to 2,500 OPVM or 3,000 OPVM (which had that size at RL 450) from RL600 (ie below the flexure zone) based on SL highlighted comments above and also looking at image 3 below – the 2,500 OPVM seems feasible based on today assay results and SL comments above but 3,000 may be pushing it too high.

Using the increased OPVM of 2,500 or 2750, 0r 3,000 from RL600 to RL870 increases the MRE to between 1.6m Oz to 1.8m Oz. These estimates assume the NN resource is fully explored horizontally but if they follow the past it will not be and if not these estimates probably need to be reduced by 150 to 200k Oz which gives a total estimated MRE of between 1.45m Oz and 1.6m Oz by mid 2023.

One other important aspect to note is that past images of OPVM (eg at Jan 2023 and July 2023) like image 1 below end up being conservative – ie with subsequent drilling the OPVM increase, some significantly especially the deeper RLs. This also supports the view that the OPVM will increase above 2,000m from about RL600.