Hi there. The drilling cost will be the largest part of the...

  1. 39 Posts.
    Hi there.

    The drilling cost will be the largest part of the program cost but not the only part. This will include labour for the driller and his or her offsiders plus some consumables (eg drill bits) but the other costs you need to include may or may not include mobilisation, access (eg building roads/pads), fuel, accommodation/camp, consumables, contract fieldys/geos, freight, travel, assaying etc. The commodity is mainly only relevant in terms of assaying costs. The drilling cost will depend on the technique used. To a maximum of 400m it's pretty safe to assume the deepest holes will be diamond, but you would probably have some shorter holes in the mix and they might be RC which is cheaper. Or you might do RC pre-collars with diamond tails to keep your costs down a bit. It depends on a bunch of stuff, but if you said $200/meter total to start with that will get you in the ballpark, but could easily be +/- 50% or more. For example CDU quote a 'discovery cost' of 1.5c/lb Cu for Rocklands with 340,000m drilling, I calculated that out to about $163/meter. Hope this helps.
 
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