For the non-technical:
1. Moving rock is expensive, so the less rock you have to move to get the metal the better.
2. We can make some guesses about how big the hole has to be dug, based on the length and width of ore at surface, and the depth of the hole. The closer the gold is to surface, the shallower the pit, and the less rock has to be moved.
3. my earlier post, was trying to find the volume of of the shape containing all of the ore based on the announcements to date. Paperbark was pointing out, that the gold is not evenly distributed within that shape, thus a smaller shape within the total, that is shallower but holds more high grade rock, could potentially be more profitable to mine. Plus, if the rock is heavier than I guessed, then the grade in grams per tonne of rock, would result in there being more gold, as there are more tonnes of rock.
4. Getting back to point 1, the more gold you get per rock moved, the more profit you can make, so high grade is better than low grade. 1 gram per tonne is equal to 1 part per million of rock being gold. The more parts gold the better. Gold has quite a high value, so you only need a few parts per million to be profitable, especially if it is close to surface so you don't have to move as much rock (at current prices, 1 g/t gold will generate about the same revenue as 0.5% Copper or 1 part per million gold is equivalent to 5 parts per thousand of copper.
Paperbark was saying, that compared to many other profitable deposits, although we don't yet have a defined resource, the drilling shows that there is high grade (parts per million) gold content ore quite shallow, so we should be able to get quite a lot of gold by digging a relatively small hole. That's good.
But we don't just have to dig a hole, we also need to separate the gold from the rock. That's where the metallurgy comes in. The reports show that in tests, over 90% of the gold can be separated from the rock. That's good because it means that we won't waste any. Further, it shows that ~50% can be recovered by gravity separation. This is a technical term for grinding up the rock then shaking it. Gold is the heavy bit, so it falls out one side of the machine first (just like gold panning but in a machine).
So, not only is the amount of gold per tonne of rock good, but the amount of rock that needs to be moved to get at the gold is also good, and the ability to separate the gold from the rock is also good.
We won't know exactly how much gold until they announce a resource, but if we calculate the volume of a shape being length, width and depth around the drilling that shows gold. Multiply the volume of rock by the weight of the rock to get the total tonnes of rock, we can average the grams per tonne of gold indicated by the drilling to suggest how many parts per million of our rock shape is gold. Essentially this is what the geologists do in their Resource calculation, although the maths are quite a bit more complicated.
From these estimates for Breaker, the total resource could be ~1 to 2 million ounces depending on how evenly the gold is distributed between the drill holes. And, as paperbark points out, the shape and depth suggests that there could be even more profitable portions of that shape, if there are shallower higher gold content areas.
Is the gold grade in drill holes relatively high? Yes.
Is the ore shallow or deep? Shallow
Does the drilling show that the gold is continuous over a large area? Yes
Is the gold easily liberated from the rock? yes
These are the "indications are good for lots of gold"
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! Thankyou from me and all the other ‘me’s’ out there who don’t know what all the technical data means and rely on simple interpretations of the results .
