AYN RECOVERYMacmins problem was one of efficient silver...

AYN RECOVERY

Macmins problem was one of efficient silver extraction/recovery. Ive done the research and I believe that the announcement from Macmin dated 20 May 2008 is imperative to the understanding of Alcyone. Section 5 of the announcement outlines that the EMEW plant (a new technology) was entirely inefficient in recovering silver from the pregnant solution.

The following is an excerpt from the aforementioned announcement, The EMEW plant has been shown to be inefficient in extracting or reducing the silver in leach solution below 40g/t silver. These barren solutions which still contain 40g/t silver are then recycled to the heap with further dissolved silver rebuilding the solution to 60-90g/t silver. There is a concern that it is inefficient to recycle solutions with as much as 40g/t contained silver.

Bloody oath its inefficient! Following leaching, the EMEW plant is supposed to extract the silver ions from solution to create the silver powder, but it simply wasnt working properly! It was not stripping enough silver from solution. The problem was two-fold, however, because the leaching solution was recycled to the leach pad but because the solution was already part saturated (40g/t silver) it couldnt extract all that much more silver from solution.

As this cycle continued over and over again, its obvious to understand why Macmin was haemorrhaging cash.

Almost immediately prior to administration, Macmin instituted a non-commercial pilot scale Merrill Crowe processing plant and it proved to be far more efficient reducing the pregnant leached solution to less than 10g/t silver in solution. This should have been no surprise to Macmin because the Merrill Crowe extraction process is the long standing and well established means by which to extract silver from solution.

The EMEW process was and remains a new and unproven technology when applied to silver extraction and whilst is shouldve worked in theory it did not. The EMEW process was sold to Macmin by Electrometals Ltd, which is an Australian listed company (EMM). Its share price graph has been heading south for quite some time.

I believe that one of the main objectives of the mine review by Alcyone is to solve this problem. I see two options here; adjust the EMEW plant so that it works as supposed to as represented by Electrometals; or, to scrap the EMEW plant all together and to set in place a Merrill Crowe plant. Either way, both alternatives are not, in my view, cost prohibitive to the efficacy of a mine this size.

On another note, the gold price today is 1,108USD and the silver price is 17.30USD. The silver to gold ratio is therefore 64. Alcyones gold equivalent silver resource is 236,000 ounces of gold in a shallow or pre stripped mining environment. Cheap.