gold room status and ore grades

Frustrated with the level of speculation here on HC last week, I spoke to Liam today about the gold room status and ore grades. Here is a summary of my conversation with him, apologies if my terminology is not quite right in some places as I do not have a mining background...

The gold room is still not fully complete. The schedule was to have it completed by now, but this was re-prioritised by metallurgy management, Alan Downham. They had switched their immediate focus to upgrading the on site labs so they could do more testing on site. This means that most samples do not now have to be trucked to the public labs in Leonora with a turnaround time of 5 days, which means they can keep a closer eye on grades and tweak the plant as necessary.

The status of the gold room is not impacting production. They are pouring gold approximately once a week.

The stripping and pouring is happening in Perth until the gold room is fully operational. This process has not been that expensive for them.

95% of the gold room equipment is on site. Liam estimates the gold room is now 60% to 70% complete.

They have not published grades so far because they feel that since the grades bounce around, as the ore body is mined, they want a fuller set of data so that no one is mislead by a small snapshot. They will be releasing this data in the quarterly which of course has to be published before the end of the month.

The plant is running close to its design capacity.