When will Botswana produce?, page-27

The question on when SFR will produce is interesting . If they get a DFS and take it a that then "last quarter of 2021" is a suitable estimate especially since they're moving on 'early works'. However, SFR has said they want to investigate the pant site as a hub for producing more out of the expanded area (taking in T4 & A1).

It's standard practice when you build a pant to build in contingencies for growth.
1) You space elements of plant so you can add in extra element s e.g an extra ball mill or float tanks. Some things like thickeners you are better of building a bigger one to start with.
2) The grinding mill itself usually a key determinant of capacity can usually be run at up to 20% above name plate capacity.
3) Still other in terms of tailings dam if you run the plant harder earlier you just fill up the tailings dam earlier and may have to add another or build up the walls.

However, there's another more important question that feeds (pun intended) into the plant design. What is the price of the commodities you are producing what is your target internal rate of return and this what grade of fed are you going to use. The issue of scale goes to this question.

Once you have the plant up an running when commodity price changes you can run computer simulations on changng the mine plan e.g to favour silver over copper if a large difference arises.