Dunno about that @fmx_rider. Head grade, maybe 0.7g/t is about...

Dunno about that @fmx_rider. Head grade, maybe 0.7g/t is about the limit. Cut off grade can go a lot lower though. There are plenty out there at the moment processing 0.4-0.5g/t material from +500m deep open pits. Lake Cowal has a head grade of 1.2 g/t and AISC something like AU$900 with their main pit designed to go to 650m, and it's refractory, or essentially so with sub-85% met recovery.

Gruyere's Ore Reserve is 87 Mt @ 1.2g/t and AISC $1100-1200/oz, plenty of room there for lower grade.

I do take your point though. What others dont seem to understand is that gold, even intrusive hosted, is not like coal or iron ore, you dont bulk mine it unless you're block caving. If you've got 300m wide you'll be lucky if 150m is actual ore (more likely 100m or less) and if you've got 1000m long then maybe 700m could be ore, in a good deposit. 2000m deep - dreaming, there are no deposits anywhere on earth that behave like that so why this one might be different I dont know. Plus something like that would take 30-50 years to mine so NPV would make anything below 500m essentially worthless in today's dollars.

Full disclosure, I got out of DEG at 35c with a bit over a full bag and happy enough, congrats to all holders since then, well done. Main reason I got out was I've had history with a few of the players in DEG and DGO and they had started playing their usual shenanigans. Discovery trumps shenanigans, I should have remembered that.

I still cant see Hemi over 5MOz yet though and if it was, they would need to be producing +500kOz / yr to get any NPV value out of anything beyond 5MOz. At 2g/t through the mill and 90% recovery that's an 8-9 Mtpa mill, maybe $500M to build if you used cheap Chinese parts and 4-6 years away. Just keep that in mind.