imaginary gold: resources and reserves

Darn it, I was too busy celebrating the KCN news and salivating over RSG’s excellent quarterly that I missed all the rubbed out posts today! Moderator, if you must delete can’t it wait 24 hrs so we can read them all? It’s like watching Eminem on TV with all the expletives removed, most frustrating!

RSG has an underground mine at Mt Wright which is near CTO (65 km East of Charters Towers). This mine has ZERO reserves defined and modest resource (indicated + inferred only) of 1.05m oz. Yet production will soon be ramping up after successful trial mining of the veins where (Page 3) “there has been a high rate of conversion of the feasibility inferred resource to measured and indicated category”. Based on this trial RSG will be mining the “inferred” resource.

Can someone please explain to me how RSG intends to produce 100+ k pa from Mt Wright in 2009 for a few yrs with zero actual “reserve” gold defined, i.e. with “purely imaginary or conceptual” gold? I don’t think RSG is lying.

If CTO announces a reserve any where near 1m oz in 2008, wouldn’t this be a massive milestone for underground gold mining in Australia and put CTO well and truly on the map? Wouldn’t it dispel once and for all the notion that the 10m oz inferred resource is only conceptual and doesn’t really exist? Even the king of underground gold mining in Australia, DOM, has a reserve of only 600k oz.

Rowingboat.