cat among the pigeons , page-3

Pete,
I’ll say this an apologise if I’m being too simple. At AMEC (the Mining Explorers conference) last year Kalkaroo was listed in the large ore body category say the 100 m odd tonnes that it was. But Ore bodies like Prominent Hill are truly large say 300m plus what I would call a jumbo or an elephant which could tolerate lower grades from better mining efficiencies.
When a gold resource was used for designing DFS Kallaroo’s mineable resource was scaled back based on grade and moderate prices of Cu & Au. From all the Cu/Au hits were getting if you extend the amount of ore we can get from a much larger pit with lower grades and cut back the strip ratio it’s just possible we have a jumbo or Elephant. E.g. I’d say Carapateena is on the verge of being one.
As for low grades in long drilling intervals. Remember these holes are really widely spaced. If you recut /tabulate the cores over different intervals as you would in a more densely drilled resource the grades would come up somewhat. Further it’s pretty much taken in the industry that mined/ mineable copper grades are going down since not nearly enough copper is being discovered to feed demand. Throw in a bit of Molybdenum at say 3X the Cu Price and I think 500 ppm = 0.5 % Mo and you get decent amount of ore.
Normally the hanging wall say pit sidewall is the mining limit, completely different material to the ore body and barren one wouldn’t have expected mineralising solutions to have invaded it but not totally unprecedented. Dr Bob is saying that some of the wall of the pit as previously designed are mineralised lenses so what might have been expected to be waste isn’t. Further he’s intimating that he understands exactly what happened. Given he’s the guy who had a model of how the mineralising solutions welled up and formed Kalkaroo and extended into the “saddle”. I have no reason to disbelieve him. Fortunately / Unfortunately it will require quite a lot more drilling to make it as obvious to us (non- lecturers) but for all the reasons above it’s going to be big hence my contention of a baby Elephant and some major is going to want to buy/ & mine it at some point.
Now Clarke et Al can go to work and shade in the fine details.