Thought this of interest; A Near Vertical Shallow Orebody with a...

Thought this of interest;

A Near Vertical Shallow Orebody with a minimal Overburden assuming stripping cost around US$1.00 per M3 to US$1.00 blast and remove is a dream Orebody.



If you have Mineable widths of 8 to 20 metres you can bulk mine then selectively mine higher grade portions via declines underground from say a 200 metre to 250 metre depth openpit envelope.

Some costs you need to bear in mind, a Decline, of which you often need two going underground one for ingress one for egress, plus ventilation shafts etc typically cost roughly AU$5,000 or US$4000 per metre or US$160 to US$250 per M3 assuming 1 in 7 decline on a 4 x 4 metre to 5 x 5 metre width/height decline.

To put a decline to 1000 metres, which you probably wouldn't putting a shaft in instead would thus cost approximately 1000 x 7 for decline gradient x US$4,000 each ie US$28,000,000 per decline before you started.

Here we have real Measured and Indicated Resources typically drilled out at 50 metre centres, ie hundreds of drill holes, a known JORC deposit, with extensive data from both Harmony Gold and African Rainbow Minerals Limited/Platinum Australia Limited.

We know already this is a fact, our updated numbers after somewhere towards 45,000 metres of drilling will extend both the high grade and pressumably bulk tonnage Measured and Indicated Resources.



To define a Measured and Indicated Resource above 3,000,000 toz of PGMs is thus taking probably 225 drill holes assuming average 200 metre depth.

That is alot of driling, now imagine needing to do that to 1000 metres depth?

People don't think too often and these other plays somehow get punted in London but nowhere else.

Oh for a real mining investing professional market like ASX, at least you know the market understands mining.

No one would let anybody get away with claims of 65m toz PGE without a NI43101 in Canada or similar JORC data in Australia.Indeed I certainly would never expect PLA to say anything like this until they had drilled it and established Measured and Indicated Resources at 50 metre centres or Inferred Resources at 200 metre centres.

Drilling up 50,000 metre strike even at 200 metre centres assuming twins is still 500 drill holes across KALPLATS 50 km ie an enormous drilling programme.

We know we have this over 12km strike at least, shallow alone not exceeding 230 metres depth most probably within 150 metres, and we know this will increase on added drill data to upgrade high grade resource to 3m toz target ie roughly increasing by 215.50% the High Grade Resource.



If I say I think KALPLATS contains 30m toz plus PGE to 200 to 250 metres it probably does, but let us just get enough PGMs ie 3m toz to establish the mine to support the 180,000 toz pa to 280,000 toz pa early stage target, from there with CAPEX repaid/depreciated the scope could be seriously large due to the shear size of the strike length and orebody width plus shallow overburden easy accessibility.

KALPLATS at US$210 to US$225 per toz Total Operating Costs and current Basket Prices of US$850 per toz PGE ie Pt, plus Pd plus Au per Mt this is seriously going to make a gigantic amount of money when mined anyway.

We certainly don't need to ramp the troy ounces below 200 metres down to 1000 metres that are probably mineable at 3.60 grammes per tonne composite PGE Grade over an 8 metre width, even if I think establishing Inferred Resources to this depth is probably worth while.

Afterall even a pessimist is going to expect there to be 13,925,000 toz PGE over 50 km to 200 metres (50km/12km x 3.34m) and 5,800,000 toz in high grade zones (50km/12km x 1.39m), probably nearer 12,500,000 toz PGE (50km/12km x 3mtoz), the amount mineable to 1,000 metres will logically be 500% of these amounts in the high grade portion potentially, but is it relevant realistically at this stage?

I am happy with ASX:PLA targetting 230,000 toz attributable PGE pa by 2009 which I calculate is roughly 65.527% of AQP Plc 351,000 toz pa attributable production forecast 2007, ie gives us some serious upside with LSE:AQP being valued already at £16.30 at £1,386,620,071 say AU$3,318,530,611 which gives us serious upside from here to target a AU$2,175,000,000 market capitalisation ASX:PLA by them, ie multiples of where we are now.

I come to AU$351,842,990 at AU$1.90 so I can see AU$11.75 per share by 2009/2010 realistically on a comparative valuation as possible.

all imho, nag, dyor etc

Dr Bob