Increasing Assay Lab Turnaround Times

A word of reassurance for those not working in the mining industry in WA, and also for the nervous and impatient:

I have just dropped a pallet of RC drill samples off at my usual lab in Kalgoorlie, and their yard is FULL of pallets and half tonne Bulka bags. These are other companies samples, which must be sorted, dried, prepped and analysed before mine even get a look-in.

We are at the height of the drilling season, in the middle of a raging mineral exploration boom. So all of the assay labs are completely overloaded with work, and their assay turnaround times are getting longer and longer. In the case of this lab, the best that they can promise me is 6 weeks from the day I drop off the samples to reporting my results.

So for Antipa's current drilling, of which there is a huge amount in progress, we should not expect results soon. And if the market gets bored and impatient, and if a few panic-merchants and doom-laden fantasists freak out and sell, this is not necessarily a sign of bad news to come. Far from it. It is more likely a sign of ignorance and impatience in the face of the current lengthening lab turnaround times.

The reality if you have your boots on the ground in the mining industry is actually this:

A remote-area drilling programme takes several weeks to set up and carry out
The drill holes then then have to be logged and sampled
The samples then have to be sorted, and dispatched in sufficiently large batches to make up a truckload (so several holes must be accumulated)
Samples then have to be road-freighted for 2 or 3 days to a city-based laboratory
The samples will then sit in the laboratory's holding yard untouched for several weeks.
And the company may even be told that the lab will not accept any new samples for a few weeks due to lack of storage space, as I was 3 months ago
Then finally, once the samples get to the front of the queue, they must be dried, prepped (ie. ground, split to a representative fraction, pulped, and then an assay charge prepared)
The assay charge must then be put into solution and analysed.
And the assay results of each batch must then be collated and reported to the client.
The client then has to put these results into the database, check teh QA/QC, display them in plan, section and in 3D alongside the geology and the geological interpretation, analyse and interpret the new results, and figure out what they actually mean
The assay results then the results can be written up into a meaningful, painstakingly illustrated ASX report and released to the market.

So the practical reality is that a drill hole that is collared this morning will probably not have the assay results reported to the ASX for 2 or 3 months.

That is the boots-on-the-ground reality. And if you look at the amount of work involved, even without the usual inevitable delays for mechanical breakdowns, weather events, lost gear downhole, injuries, etc., it is not surprising and there is not a lot you can do to speed it up.

And you cannot blame the labs for not responding to increased workflow. They have fixed processes and fixed equipment, and there are very long lead times on the purchase of items that allow them to increase their capacity.

One of their biggest bottlenecks is drying ovens. Each of these only holds 200 samples (about half a tonne). And drying drill samples (which are often full of mud, which then dries out like concrete), so that they can be crushed and ground is a slow process. But you can't just nip down to Bunnings in Kal and buy a couple more lab ovens. They are specialist items, which have to be built and installed. So the labs cannot respond quickly to a surge in sample volumes. They just have to extend the assay turnaround times.

Just a bit of background to add balance.

A share trade is a millisecond click of a mouse.

But the ASX-reported assay result upon which it depends is the result of a very much longer, slower and laborious process.