When you think of the informales (local individual surface miners) near the Tesoro, these guys get grades up around the 5 oz gold per ton mark and have found veins around 80 ounces gold per ton! The excerpt below out of this mercury study around and above Dynacors mill, says this on the first page, see bottom of this post for details.
So, in our couple years on this board informing each other of the Tesoro property, we would get pretty excited over 1 ounce gold up to around 11 ounces of gold and understand the economics of these grades and widths, most notably coming to mind when Lori stated that 1 ounce per ton gold was the average grade that came from development material while putting a shaft in between 2 veins in the C-1 AREA.The significance of the bolded statement is that a shaft has to be at least big enough to work in, which would be about a meter wide at least, a mining shaft is usually around 1.8 meters. So, if we take half of the gold grade, which is around 15 g/t, to allow for a mining width, you are still above an average grade of around 7 g/t to be economical and really, double the amount required.
But, lets go back to the 80 ounce veins, quick math suggests that from less than a meter square of vein material from a vein this rich, yeilds a gross net worth of $136,000 at todays POG(price of gold) of $1700 in the area of the Tesoro. I believe Dynacor has trucks capable of hauling 20 tons at a time from the Tesoro, so a truck load of this rich vein could be worth $2.7 million dollars. If a vein this rich was found at the surface of the Tesoro while heavy equipment is there, it would take maybe less than a day to excavate this much material and load on a truck.
A vein such as this, or even a portion, could turn around considerable cash in a heart beat and be very lucrative to filling a treasury and alleviating the need to get cash from a market. Even when I think of the N-1 VEIN found as a result from the Quantec Geophysics, grading 2.5 ounces gold per ton, a truck load of this material would yeild around a gross of $85,000. $85,000 would put in about 3- 200m drill holes.
Lori always said the Tesoro was a unique property where the gold coming from exploration work was paying for this work almost entirely. So, why all the raising money in the last PP and the proposed one, there should have been no need? I have recently asked the CFO of a breakdown of all gold revenues from Minera Santa Elisa, (our subsidiary), for the last 4 years, his reply was; that if it wasn,t public knowledge, that he couldn,t comment on it. I have 2 problems with his reply, 1) it should be public shareholder knowledge and he should have known where to get that info for me from , 2) why did he seem to be uncooperative?, am I not entitled to know any and all revenue sources for a company that I own a piece of?
But
In this area, gold veins with lengths from 1 to 10 cm and gold grade from 1 to 80 oz/ton, are exploited by artisanal
mining.
http://www.imwa.info/docs/imwa_2005/IMWA2005_084_Soto.pdf
IMO
