The high grading and lack of backfill by prior operators have certainly made the mine harder to operate. The key with these things is getting tonnes, MLX best attempt was ~1.5mtpa when capacity is near on double that.. hard to make cash running at half capacity with large fixed costs, especially when commodity prices aren’t on your side.
The open pit study provided one possible solution to improve the throughput (and in a way reduce the risk of geotechnical events). I’m sure the right engineers would be able to come up with a number of other solutions to increase throughout here too.
The orebody is huge - they keep finding more copper, there’s a huge amount of infrastructure, MLX sunk hundreds of millions into improvement. And they’ve got a better understanding of the geological model after doing 30,000m of drilling last year and over 90,000m since acquisition in 2016. If someone can’t make this work at A$10,500/t Cu I’m not here.
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