citigold mine visit, page-34

Find8, this is all gelling together in my own mind.

Garry Foord, in my first conversation with the company, told me they need to have a constant number of 7 stopes prepared at the Warrior East decline and be mining ore from 5 of them to reach steady-state production. It looks like they have 6 of the 7 prepared and could mine 5 now if they wanted to.

However, with the lack of power they have to decide between vertical and horizontal development. ML said they intend advancing the vertical development another 100m at Warrior East in the next 9 months or so to access the thicker widths below. Without extra power this advancement would be done at the expense of mining the 5 stoping areas. Therefore I don’t subscribe to the “now or never” view that someone expressed on this forum.

With the extra power, it means vertical and stope mining can occur TOGETHER at Warrior East provided they have the extra working shifts and equipment available to exploit it. Sid has seen the equipment and “it’s ready to go”. So the extra shift work just needs to be sorted out. So yes, I reckon CTO is almost ready to produce at 50k oz pa.

The interesting part for me is that Sidr (Sid) has informed us CTO needs to switch between developing Warrior East and Warrior West. With the extra power both can develop simultaneously. Warrior West can be developed using the cash-flow from Warrior East or debt can be used to accelerate progress.

Presumably, the plan will be to have 5 stopes working at Warrior West for another 50k oz pa. The timeframe to achieve this depends on 1) the power hook-up and 2) the decision to acquire debt or not. Once the power hook-up is announced this month I’ll be demanding CTO provides more detail along the lines above. Then we’ll see 60c before Sabre’s 16c I reckon.

Cheers
Rowingboat.