(relevance to RED ... context was speculation RED might be interested in Kin's Iron King if GMD took Cardinia)
Well I hope I am not as wrong as you say I am, but I might be. Still holding a lot (for me) of Kin. DCN/RED/SPR have been much kinder to me so far. They all have good mills
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It is about 35 km from Cardinia to Leonora and about 50 km to Mt. Morgans. RED cart ore about 2.5 times the grade of Cardinia ore about 100km to KOTH ... hard to work out cartage costs, but I think transport is a small cost compared to mining and processing. You might be right that cartage just rules out taking Cardinia ore to Mt. Morgans, in which case Kin, its investors, and board (which overlaps largely with SPR) have spent an awful lot of wasted $ preparing to mine Cardinia and working on milling agreements, not to mention repeated assurances they are working on monetising Cardinia.
I guess a big con is hardly unheard of, but still, surely Delphi would cut their losses. DCN also have said Mt. Morgans will need outside ore to restart ... I think there are also considerations about how free milling the ore is ... some ore helps the mill function properly, and I was under the impression the oxide ore at least from Cardinia would have helped both Mt. Morgans and the Gwalia mill. Might have got that wrong. Down the track I think someone around Leonora is going to have to upgrade one of the mills to get better recoveries from the sulphide ore I think, but Cardinia has a few years of free milling ore. Potentially cheap to mine and process.
Crossed my mind if the water problem at Mt. Morgans can't be solved ... seems they just put more holes in a borefield and ran the aquifer down ... they could shift the mill to Cardinia and use the bummer creek aquifer which Kin thoroughly tested, or maybe just pipe the water ...
I can't see Delphi going to all the trouble of blocking the DCN takeover just to make some money on the shares.
I haven't been able to find out what it costs per tonne to move ore in those quad road trains ... the road from Cardinia to Mt. Morgans is a good bitumen road built for mining trucks ... but with a gram worth $100 I think there is room to pay for transport to a large mill which would otherwise either not run, which benefits no one, or would be running at less than capacity.
Thanks for the response.
(20min delay)