Read my disclosure again, I do hold a very small parcel of GRE and have for a fair while, and whether someone holds or not is irrelevant to the topic at hand as the topic is discussing recent ASX releases from the company, both holders and non-holders can offer facts and inforation and their own opinion unless you want the HotCopper forum to be a holders only circle jerk then you should expect some questions and arguments from a variety of different sources....
Before we discuss any further, you might want to specify what your understanding of a "moot point" is - as it's one of the most overused and vague and misused words on many forums at the moment:
What is moot? If you are using definition number 1 - subject to debate/dispute or uncertainty: The continuous disclosure rules of the ASX? Uncertainty as to the exact numbers in the current MRE or a future MRE? The JORC code of reporting exploration and resource results in the ASX? Please clarify what is moot.
If you are using definition number 2 - what has little or no practical relevance? Or tell us what the uncertainty is? If its irrelevant what the mineral resource is now then why put it in the ASX release? If they are going to produce a new MRE in a matter of weeks then how about just doing the work, and releasing the new mineral resource estimate when its ready?
There are some decent gold results in some of those holes. There is no doubt that any decent gold grades are restricted to areas that already have decent Cu mineralisation, so the announcement might be seen as attempting to dress up an existing known copper mineralisation as some brand new gold discovery, the fact that a lot of the existing and previous assay data in the database contains gold values means that previous explorers and miners were already well aware of the fact that gold has an association with copper in the Whundoo area, that's not anything new.
Using a low cut-off of 0.2g/T Au they can use leapfrog to show some pretty blobs of gold assays in some drill holes in areas that already contain known copper mineralisation anyway and the high grade gold intercepts in the ASX release are already within very high grade but very thin lenses of high grade Cu and/or Zn, and some of them quite deep beyond open pit depths so we are talking underground mining depths and costs to extract them. So this is stuff that would already be taken as ore in a future mining operation anyway and I suspect that the small amount of gold with the copper might assist the economics of extracting the ore (even given the added complexity of attempting to extract the gold as a separate product or just getting gold credits in a copper concentrate), but this announcement is not adding anymore tonnes to the current resources, that will be done in a future mineral resource estimate.
In short - they haven't discovered a Kalgoorlie orebody underneath their marginal Cu-Zn Whundoo collection of orebodies so probably best to temper expectations a bit, they have gold where there is already high grade copper, but the bump up in value provided by the gold may only be a little accretive, considering that the Zn grades are frankly pathetic and uneconomic in their own right, its going to be the copper grades that make or break the economics of these Whundoo type lenses.
