Copper news., page-14

Don't bother looking at last night.

To fill the plant on Day 1 it would be necessary to double the amount of ore being processed. 1.5mtpa to circa 3mtpa. Probably wouldn't get to 3.6mt as it seems higher grades need more time in the plant.

The following slide indicates that if KTD208 is typical, dropping the cut off from the 0.6% used in the study to 0.4% would increase the amount of ore arriving at the mill by 55% to 2.3mtpa.

There seems to be little joy from dropping the cut off lower as the grades outside the pink and green areas are near to 0.

My spreadsheet tells me that the breakeven copper price for processing 0.4% copper if there is 0.1g/t of gold ( which assumes there is no gold in the extra halo) would be US$5.20.

It seems therefore that filling the plant will require additional lodes. Maybe Spitfire and North Kavanaugh could do the trick as they are not in the current study.

There has been no talk of studies being carried out to increase cu recovery. There has however beed work done on increasing gold recovery from 55% to 85% using a Kneelson separator. I believe one will be installed before the higher grade gold from Nugent is processed. Recovering 85% instead of 55% in the study numbers should add $6m to free cash flow.