Hi Shines, i think at the time of the discovery of Winu, the new...

Hi Shines,

i think at the time of the discovery of Winu, the new thinking of Rio was instead of taking 5 years in drilling something out to show it had a 20 or 30 yr mine life then another 5 yrs in planning and building that they might completely miss a commodity cycle.

So instead of doing it in 10yrs be in production from discovery in 5 yrs.

Which for a Cu/Au deposit was certainly different and novel.

"McIntosh’s plan is for Winu to start life as a small-scale start-up project, based around that shallow open-pit mine. The target is for first production by 2023, pending approvals.

"Once this first mine is up and running, Rio would then continue to drill for other nearby deposits – just as it's done with the new gold find announced on Tuesday – with the eventual aim of creating a network of mines within a single system.

“The additional exploration results support our view that there is potential to develop the Paterson region into a large-scale operation over time through both our 100 per cent-owned tenements and joint ventures,” McIntosh said."

The small-scale approach sounds a long way from Rio’s mighty iron ore machine in the Pilbara, but there are similarities.
The mining giant’s success in iron ore has also been built on mine systems where infrastructure is shared.

And as McIntosh has said before, not all tier one projects started out as giants.


Either way, it has certainly NOT GONE TO PLAN................will be nice to get an update at some point.