It's simply increasing the amount of tonnes to market from the ore that we have and maximising production.
The more tonnes of ore you can get through the plant, the more tonnes of spod you can sell at a profit obviously. However, the margin increases per tonne when you increase the recovery rate, reduce impurities like iron etc, and/or have a higher grade of ore feeding the plant.
If feeding the concentrator with say 1.2% ore, with say a recovery of 67%, then you are getting 670kg of usable material per tonne of ore, then times that by 5 to get a 6% concentrate (6 / 1.2 = 5).
We are producing 5.5% (rather than 6% to get more sellable tonnes from the same throughput of ore) give or take based on a permit of 4200tpd of ore through the plant, so the maths work like this:
4200 x 0.67 = 2814. 5.5% / 1.2% = 4.55. So 2814 / 4.55 = 618.47. So on these numbers that I believe our nameplate is based on using 1.2% ore, you get 619 tonnes a day of 5.5% concentrate from feeding in 4200 tonnes per day of ore with a 67% recovery rate. 619 x 365 days gives you our nameplate of 226,000 tonnes per year.
So, if we could increase feed to say 5500tpd using 1.3% instead with a better recovery of 70%, well, then things start to look very good indeed, do you see? You start to multiply the saleable product and use less ore to produce each tonne of SC, therefore increasing profit margin per tonne.
So using these improved numbers as example:
5500 x 0.7 = 3850. 5.5 / 1.3 = 4.23. 3850 / 4.23 = 910.17 tonnes per day x 365 =
332,212 tonnes per annum of 5.5%! That's 332tpa rather than 226ktpa... that's a 50% increase in saleable product....!Now do you see? Unbelievable difference!
This is what we are aiming for with what Brett has mentioned, 5000+ tonnes per day feed, in pit iron separation, blended Jourdan or Authier ore feed...
I hope that makes sense and helps people understand how important these numbers are, these technicals lead to massive differences in revenue and profit for a producer
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