I attended the AGM and I thought it was a great presentation and I have absolutely no concerns moving forward even more so now with my significant holdings which I have been sitting on for some time now and will continue to do so well into the future !
In regards to the grumblings on HC about the issue of performance rights to me was put to bed at the AGM, in my opinion Brett Fletcher did well to explain in great detail the incentive share placement, which has very strict mine performance targets and modelled on similar company's like Herron, Glencore and the other 10 or so ASX listed zinc company’s ! And is clearly outlined in the middle of the Explanatory memorandum in great detail for all to digest !
Mal P. said that as the mine was offline for 2 years what can happen with the electrical cables is they can draw in moisture and after a short time after restarting, days, weeks, a couple of months after starting again wires/circuits can blow.
No big deal in my eyes, i believe thats why god gave us sparky’s ! Straight forward fix.
Onto the more warm and fussy stuff, Mel Palancian stated the mill had been ramped up, tested and run at a 500ktpa capacity for 3 days with no issues for when this is required in the future !
Only 2 of the 3 crushers are currently being used saving electricity $$$ and having the 3rd on stand by ready to go when things are ramped up !
For the 5am-7pm door to door times he said of the workers i got the impression they are doing at least 12 hour shifts so really putting in the hours.
He went into great detail about the ongoing drilling and exploration progress !
Currently there are three drill rigs working on-site with a fourth just arriving with plans of bringing a few more on-site early in the new year.
He said drill rigs are very expensive to run costing $5,000 plus per day, so very easy to burn money with them drilling just anywhere haphazardly !
He more or less said exploration can be a bit hit and miss at times and he has worked for companies with big $70-$100 million dollar exploration budgets and in his words “seen a lot of money pissed up against the wall” therefore it needs to be a very methodical exercise.
So if you can open the ASX announcement Melbourne Mining Club - Cutting Edge Presentation and i will refer to various pages in this, as they went thru !
Page 9 of the 3D image of the West 45 mine.If you take a look at the green tunnels outside the purple area, basically those areas weren’t originally on the plan to mine these areas but they’ve kept hitting high grade targets outside the mine plan and if you look to the top left tunnel with hole TH741 and that surrounding area has awesome potential to expand into for West 45 in that zone and as you can see there is still more vertical mining to be done at the bottom.
He said it doesn’t matter what mine or where it is, any mine can only vertical mine down at a rate of about 60-70 metres per year.
He pointed out the Proposed Far West Portal location (page 10) is only about 450 metres from the ROM pad, only a stones throw away ! In turn keeping trucking/cartage to an absolute bare minimum, saving $$. This couldn’t be in a more prime location.
Page 14 Liontown East - Mal said, there has already been enough exploration carried out for at least 240m of vertical mining ready to go ahead with my conservative estimate of a minimum of 3-4 years of mining resource in LTE using the 60m-70m a year calculation and with exploration still being carried out.
To give you an idea of 240m he said look at the West 45 plan and 240m is taller than that ! Refer to the size scale at the bottom of each diagram, West 45 is a 50m scale and LTE is a 200m scale !A resource upgrade could have already be announced with what has been discovered but won’t be until more extensive exploration has been completed. Watch this space !
The question was raised with Mel about scarecrow and its exploration potential however he said there are now over 130 potential deposits to be explored, what do you do, do you pull a rig off an up and running mine or do you keep them exploring the 3 main targets, it’s much more cost effective to continue exploration on the current targets and expanding a resource that will come out of the ground much sooner, cheaper and more cost effective than a patch of dirt that hasn’t had a shovel or drill bit put to it yet. (That patch of dirt/shovel bit is my spiel ;-) )
The question was raised about mixing the low grade and high grade zinc but Brett Fletcher made it very clear, he said, make no mistake, even any of Thalanga’s low grade zinc is much higher grade than anything else comparable on any ASX listed zinc mines. And as we all know mines like New Century are in the very low percentage grade range.
There has also been great high quality grade Lead recovery, on page 4, zinc on the left and Lead on the right side pile !
He mentioned it was a fine art getting the chemical mix right and optimising the recoverys and minimise zinc going into the tailings area, something they are working on to improve !
i think management is doing an top job to be sweating all the small stuff and not waisting a single $$$ of my hard earned investment !
In my opinion Thalanga is fast becoming a licence to print money.
Keep up the good work management !
GLTA
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I think the above sums up the situation perfectly, especially good to see they are sweating the small stuff and spending wisely, it can often be the difference between success and mediocricy...
