Cross-posted from "over there"
The silver, based on the ore samples I have, and what I saw coming off the table at the mill, is probably present not as pure silver metal, but primarily as acanthite, silver sulfide. There will be a slight correction for the weight of the sulfur.
Assuming a silver:gold ratio of 15:1 (the historic ratio for War Eagle is 14-15:1), then there would be about 28 lbs of gold, and 418 lbs of silver. The rest would be sulfur.
I'll use today's prices for silver and gold.
gold 28 x 16 x $1320 = $591,360
silver 418 x 16 x $23.60 = $157,837
Total = ~$750,000
Not bad for 3 weeks of mill time with the lower (not low) grade ore, and for the first output from the mill while they were still working on optimizing recovery rates and tpd. With the mill running full time, that would work out to a rate of maybe $1M a month using numbers from the startup and tweaking period using lower grade ore. Still higher than their "outrageous" burn rate LOL. And of course one would expect even better numbers as the mill production and recovery rates ramp up, and they process higher grade ore.
Let's play with the numbers some more:
This represents about 567 oz of Au eq. At 0.75 oz/t, that's ~750 tons of ore. For 20 days, that's just under 40 tpd. But remember, recovery rates were probably low to start, so maybe more like 60-80 tpd for a recovery rate of 50-70%. Which is probably about the rate they were running at for the startup and tweaking period. The ore grade may be a bit higher or lower than 0.75 oz/t, and offset by lower or higher recovery rates or tpd, but it certainly looks like the numbers in the PRs that I have been using are right in the ballpark of where things are turning out.
And what to expect as things ramp up? That $1M is for 0.75 oz/t ore at ~40 tpd at 100% recovery. At 160 tpd, and with 2.45 oz/t ore, that will be $13M/month. Looks like that $6.5M won't require so much dilution after all!
