Hi folks,
Once again I find myself being dragged down by this board. So much dismay. I get it, personally, I do. All 217k times I get it! So I sat down to do some crunching tonight in an attempt to alleviate a little bit of the pain from the wait.
I tackled just a portion of the inferred in an attempt show people on this board what it means to have this included in the resource portion of the pit shell as revenue generating rock. i looked at Op Costs LOM and strip ratio.
Current Strip Ratio 2:1
1.89 Bt waste (the 171,160,000 t inferred is included in this for the BFS)
940.8 Mt resource
Convert this and the figures change drastically
Waste reduces to 1.71 Bt waste
New resource 1,111,960,000 t
New Strip ratio 1.55 : 1
Now this is pretty dumbed down I know but you get the picture.
I was told by Elmer during our conversation that the waste rock is to the tune of $2.16/tonne cost
Annual mine production of ore and waste is projected to average 147 Mt/year with an in situ LOM waste/ore stripping ratio of 2:1
The current resource of 940.8 Mt mineral reserve should support a mine life of approx 21 years (47.4Mt/year resource)
With the upgraded resource of inferred to M&I in the pit shell the new 1,111,960,000 tonne resource over 21 years would mean approx 56 Mt of resource production/year instead of 47.4Mt/year). Averaged, the inferred resource would add 8.15 Mt/year to the 47.7Mt. This is a 17.1% increase in resource production throughput if the mine stayed at 21 years ! Imagine what this would do to payback, IRR, net cash flow, NPV.
Now I chose to try and tackle the impact of this conversion on operating costs since it appears that Open pit mining cash costs average of $6.56/tonne of ore mined, including waste and ore mining costs.
With this conversion the impact on mining costs is reduced by about $0.21/tonne from $6.56/tonne to $6.35/tonne.
Now you might say 21 cents, what a joke. Well at 147 Mt of annual mine production ore and waste it looks like this
@6.56/tonne mining operating costs of $964,320,000/year
@6.35/tonne mining operating costs of $933,450,000/year
-------------------------
SAVINGS $30,870,000/YEAR
21 YEARS FOLKS = $648,270,000 LOM
650 Million saved from operating expenses roughly from converting that inferred resource. Now someone else who knows what they are doing calculate the impact of the revenue the rock generates!!!
Have a great night everyone.
