Morning Gents, I did a bit of digging in the ASC announcements last night for MOY, I think the refractory (sulphide) ore that has caused them problem is from the base of the Golden Eagle open pit and Au81 open pit. This issue won't go away, you don't really get to this stage of a pit with too much oxide left, you will progressively get more transitional and fresh material = poorer recoveries going forward from here.
Barton's UG recoveries isn't too bad apparently (85%), and considering they have been processing it for the last 9 months that seems to match up.
Golden Gate pits (just approved) is the savior apparently, but only 200Kt of open pit oxide reserves (~75% recoveries) so only going to help out for this quarter. The UG component looks nasty from what I read ( 65% recoveries at best with current setup). To put that into context, if they mine Golden Gate UG at a break grade of 5.0g/t they are going to recover 3.25g/t, and any small scale underground operation below 4g/t is hard work.
As I see it, after Dec Quarter they are in the same boat as Sept quarterly, they will need to process more refractory material, albeit with Golden Gate at least its going to be slightly higher grade but comes the higher costs of underground mining.
At 65% recovery I'm struggling to see how they make this work
MOY Price at posting:
6.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
