The numbers are confusing The simple answer to your question is...

The numbers are confusing

The simple answer to your question is that from now on we will be processing only the low grade ore from the stockpile.

We mine tonnes of ore and process tonnes of ore. The metal that is produced is in the hands of the grade gods.

For those with a high tolerance for detail.

The plant has a capacity to process 3.5mt of ore per annum. I recently learnt that higher grades will reduce that through put and I guess lower grades may require less time to process. Thats to do with the leeching process and how long the ore has to be held in that part of the process.

I have assumed a steady throughput of 3.5mt in my calulations.

770 t/month = 9.24Kt/annum at 92% recovery = 10.04Kt of contntained metal in 3,5mt of ore processed.

Which matches the stockpile grade of 0.3% (.00287)

The first quarter we produced an average of 1.654kt /m at throughput rate of 3.3mt/annum a grade of .65% and a recovery of 91.6%

The big elephant in the room is how much copper is going to emerge from the Giant Pit in the absence of going underground which determines when we started mining the lower grades in the stockp[ile..

Using the VAA dec 2017 valuation as a starting point plus the knowledge that we have gained since, my thoughts are:-

(1) Up to end of Dec 2018 we produced 5.5kt less than VAA forecast which I have been told is carried over into 2019 and 2020 and not lost.

(2) we have lost 2KT to the wall slip.

(3) The dec 18 quarterly tells us that we are only recovering 97% of the reserve estimate which on face value is another 1.4 KT lost. Based on management demonstrating that they don't think contingencies are an important part of big picture budgeting I'm assuming that that tonnage has been lost from the VAA total..

VAA forecast 12 KT in 2019 and 2.5 Kt in 2020. If we add the 5.5 Kt carried forward and take off the 3.4 Kt lost I end up with a total of 16.6 KT.

After the first quarters 5KT that leaves 11.6kt to go.

On that basis I'm assuming 1.7 kt for April and 770 t/month for a further 13 months taking us through to the end of May 2020.

All we have been told apart from those numbers is that at the end of March there were 3.1m tonnes of ore in the stockpiles (about 11 months) and from the quarterly report "Open cut mine – the extraction of ore from the open cut is scheduled to be completed during May, but treatment of ore stockpiles will continue until mid-2020."

The chairman at the annual meeting told us there was 200kt of blasted ore in the bottom of the pit. I have recently learnt that the blasted ore in the bottom of the pit may be written off as too dangerous to recover I'm not sure how that will effect us but we will know soon.