funion, there are a couple of things you are missing in that post, and you are jumping to a conclusion. You are overlooking the fact that these are small to mid size miners, meaning that they are not going to roll out the TPD that the bigger guys do, they operate at a much smaller capacity. Many of the small Peruvian companies are formed from years of local people growing their mine and into companies so that they can get certain help from the government and be registered so the government can keep records and get proper stats. Many of these companies start out with just people and very little machinery, as they make more money, they buy machinery and become more advanced. To simply look at the map I provided and think that there are only 1-2 million ounce deposits there could be further from the truth.
If you look at how many ounces they are producing a year, this is not a bad number. Look at the grades for viability also.Keep in mind that if these companies are still growing, so will the ounces of production per year. Also, I am not sure of the year on that map, it may have to be updated.IMO, that is quite a few successful mines shown there, when you think of little major advancement in that area. Also, another thing to consider, these present miners are only targeting the high grade veins, (at least the couple I checked), they are not looking at the disseminated gold that makes the bulk tonnage open pit mines, that the majors like.
I also believe you should be looking at the scale of these mines in regards to the veins they are excavating, i believe it said the gold for the one closest to us, came from 3 vein clusters, this gave them~ 1 million ounces.If you remember Dynacor, they have ~700 ounces from 3 veins also. To help put this in perspective, we have 8 known vein clusters on the Canchete alone. We have 7 other zones besides the Canchete recorded to date, or at least that we publicly know of. I will stick my neck as far as saying that the probability of finding new veins and zones on the new property surrounding the Tesoro, that is ~200% bigger, is rather good.A little bit of quick math with the numbers above should give you a better idea of what may be found at the Tesoro.
My main reason for putting that post on was to show the activity in the area, the richness of the area, and how it is widespread. You have to remember that Peru is very underexplored. This is a rich gold region we are in, with most of the production from this area coming from close to the surface because the tools of the locals are limited, and there was enough rich gold at the surface that didn,t require them going so deep following leads.We are probably the first company to have geophysics done to this scale in this part of the region, showing an xray of an area below the surface that hardley ever had to be mined.This region that we are in, only has limited exploration done in the last couple decades, unlike the La Libertad region, where Barrick, Newmont, Vale de Brazil , etc are established and have been there for awhile, where our Vilcoro is. If Lori can prove a large bulk tonnage for our Tesoro, this region will start to get the attention as well, with majors jumping over themselves to be the first to get the best spots.
IMO
