When a company flogs off an asset it has been focusing on for 2 years for less than it has spent on exploration/drilling it is obvious it is not going to be a cheap and simple operation to mine it for early cash flow or they would've done it themselves.
So even though we have gold sitting at the bottom of the pit it is not as simple as just going down and start digging. The pit needs to be expanded, quite substantially to access the top of the ore body with grades of only 1.29-3.31g/t.
Also the ore body is down plunging. The extensional drilling 70m to the south of the open pit hits the deposit at 130m, gradually increasing to >300m deep at 200m south. That's a lot of dirt to move. And the grades don't improve with depth, they actually seem to get worse.
So I suspect that MEI did not release the scoping study in 2022 as they had announced because the economics of restarting the mine would be marginal at best.
But with an increasing gold price and an expanded resource it just might prove to be economical eventually. But starting a low capex toll treatment operation of the high grade zones to generate some early cash flow is not happening. Plus nothing is cheap to do in the Kimberely.
(20min delay)