Processing

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What other minerals could be processed from Havieron ore.
At the Town Hall someone asked Shaun about nickel, he replied by saying it’s there but it’s down deep, it is not higher up in the crescent.
Nickel is normally associated with magma or a source, the top of Havieron is formed by hydrothermal fluids not magma so there shouldn’t be nickel in the crescent or upper breccias.
I asked him about cobalt and molybdenum.
He said if his team get to run Telfer they will test for everything they can get out of the ore if it’s economical at Telfer.
He could not speak for NEM or NCM what their intentions will be.

Going back to basics let’s start at an historical drill HC9503 (Newcrest 1995) let’s see what they found. I’ve included the first few samples there’s another page with the gold

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The initial MMI at surface picked up
Silver, arsenic , gold , cerium, copper , iron, lanthanum, lead and uranium
Some of these will be in normal soil sample levels but indicate an ore body of some description.
After the first drills the prevalent minerals were gold , copper and cobalt right down the length of the drill in the orebody

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After HAD005 in the RNS “ other metals are present in the system including silver, lead and zinc”
Cobalt didn’t appear in those results but appeared in HAD006 after wider assay tests for other metals .
HAD006 to 009 contained consistent levels of cobalt
“Cobalt grades have been consistently elevated throughout the system.”
In HAD008 peak cobalt we’re 2,763ppm that’s 0.276% that is extremely high, 0.05g/t is normal production grades
HAD 006 peaked at 0.41% bearing in mind the global record is around 0.6% in the Congo.

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On HAD006 results they’ve added in the cobalt grades making a gold equivalent value
Au + cu + co
In some intervals the cobalt adds 1g/t but generally around 0.2g/t
When Newcrest took over as Manager cobalt was dropped.
Could be a number of reasons
1 The high cut off grades excluded cobalt to a point it wasn’t economical (this also includes parts the copper intervals)
2 the cut off grades used to form hard boundaries in the Kriging method of estimating excluded cobalt as not continuous.
3 processing cobalt from these ores may be too costly

Shaun did say if it’s there they will process it.
Testing the ore when it starts to come out May mean more adaptations to the processing train.

Then there’s the remark from Sherri about the Molybdenum, I know it’s in the historical drill results but nothing has been shown since.
Cerium and Lanthanum (refer to my thread on Ashburton), these are in the Light Rare Earth group or REE so there could be others in this LEE group.
Uranium is in the HREE group or heavy rare earths so there might be more in that group too.
Silver will come with the gold Dore bars sent to Perth.

Testing the First ores will determine what metals will be retrieved