You are comparing apples and oranges. An open pit gold mine with a grade of 1 gram per tonne does not require much capex to build, since no mill or flotation circuit is needed, just some plastic for the heap leach pads and ponds and then a recovery system. Sulfide mineralisation like at Andover would require a lot of capex ($75M-$100M at least) to produce a concentrate for sale. That would include a good bit of underground mining, crushing and grinding of the ore, then a flotation circuit and concentrate drying plus construction of a tailings dam. The cutoff grade for a gold mine that would require that sort of mining and processing would likely be around 4 to 5 grams per tonne, and the average grade would need to be around 8 to 10 grams per tonne. In my opinion he grades so far found at Andover are okay for open pit mining if the strip ratio is low. You can see from the core photos that the sulfides are fairly coarse grained so they should float nicely without a lot of grinding. Azure needs to focus on near surface mineralisation and stop with the deep drilling. Logically, a drill out of VC-23 should be a higher priority that the VC--07. The permitting for that is probably already in process.
AZS Price at posting:
31.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held