What appeared to happen for Van Uden is that they had the...

What appeared to happen for Van Uden is that they had the foresight to realise gold prices were low and mine the deposit into 3 selections of ore:

• Ore to send to the mill
• Ore to put into a sub-grade ore piles
• Ore put onto the waste landform

The waste landform is circa 500kt of material and is still a waste grade because while there will be masses of ore in there that is 0.1 to 0.6g/t there will also be massive quantities of ore in that landform with zero grades. They are now all blended together so the overall grade may be perhaps 0.1g/t. The slice at 0.35g/t to 0.6g/t is no longer separately identifiable. Its one of the features on the landscape but it has no commercial value other than in the remote scenario of regulators requiring pits to be refilled. There will only be value in other ore piles from the other mining activities if they also had the foresight to create three product streams from the mine.

If other Mt Holland operations were to have only separated into waste ore / mill ore, the waste ore piles will contain some material in the 0.5g/t to perhaps 1.5g/t or 2.5g/t range. There will also be a lot of 0g/t and 0.1g/t ore included the waste landform's of other open pit operations. This would most likely take the blended average grades on each waste ore pile below 0.5g/t. Each individual situation would need a separate assessment but its only because they created a mid-stream pile next to Tasman that there's presumed economic merit in toll treatment of the at surface ore piles.

IMO there isn't 20Mt of ok grade stuff lying around the Mt Holland area. It would be nice if there were, but I don't think its the case.

Regarding TG6, David noted the sub-grade ore piles might be 0.6g/t to 1.5g/t in a video. This range may have come from the 1999 reporting below where 0.6g/t and 1.5g/t cutoff grades are noted.

Regarding further deals, there's a little bit of a chicken/egg situation at present. The deal might help lift the share price but TG6 don't have much spare cash and you wouldn't want to do many if any script issues for tenements at current prices due to the dilution.


These were the JORC's that Kidman released on acquisition. If you remove the 5.4Mt of Van Uden from these totals and the 2.1Mt of Bounty UG then the totals reduce to 9.9Mt and 2.6Mt. Inclusive of all the quoted JORC resources that are still in-ground that might be commercial to mine there isn't 20Mt. It would be nice if there were, but there isn't.