Good question - previous failures plus the low price for Hillgrove places some doubt over putting a value on the antimony. If you can't process it to a valuable product economically then it's of no value.
BUT, I think wassa hit the nail on the head. RVR's team appear to have some excellent poly base metal flotation experience, and likely some gold, but antimony is so uncommon very few mets outside of China & Russia have proven flowsheet development/processing credentials. A quick google search about met companies in Brisbane and you will find one that developed their own patented technology for leaching arsenic and ANTIMONY from base metal concentrates. They appear to have extensive experience in antimony and arsenic flowsheets (being that they are in the same periodic group they behave similarly chemically).
If this is who Mel is referring to, and they can bring on board serious antimony expertise, then it's a done deal in my opinion. Just a matter of taking the time to do rigorous testwork, flowsheet development and piloting before pulling the trigger.
I was on site at Hillgrove when it was on care & maintenance 6 years back as our company had a relationship with the administrators (just purely a learning exercise). The antimony circuit appeared to be in good shape, and was set up well from an equipment stand point. The administrator said one of the areas Straits went wrong is they based the entire, very expensive, circuit on some small batch leaching tests without any continuous piloting or closed loop testing. Ultimately they couldn't run the circuit in closed loop for more than a few months before needing to bleed the entire thing because they didn't consider build up of impurities!! Just one of many mistakes they mentioned...
I am confident Mel will take the time to plan this out with the right help and won't be firing up a doomed circuit just for short term news. I am very excited to see RVR's next steps once they have the gold circuit running smoothly on stockpile ore.
RVR Price at posting:
21.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
