Anyone crunched some numbers on this? The plant can throughput...

Anyone crunched some numbers on this?

The plant can throughput about 7MTpa. They'll feed the tails first I imagine, which studies have shown will yield a 50% recovery. Deleterious elements in the original ore source will inhibit higher recoveries.

So looking at recoverable zinc of ~85ktpa. Worth about US$240M at current prices.

Now the key here is what processing cost the plant will run at. Probably looking at ~US$25/t of throughput. Cost about US$175MM.

So margin on the processing alone looks to be about $65Mpa at current prices. Again, rough back of envelope calcs here.

Now can that margin pay for the following;
- labour
- services
- excavation
- concentrate freight
- smelter charges

Just my opinion. I think it'll be tight.

Yeah there's a bit of resource at Silver King and under the old ROM, but the volume just doesn't appear to be there to pay for capital costs to set up either mine (eg. overburden/decline/infrastructure).