First Ore

[Bamps21]

In my posts on First Ore I’ve been saying how the copper will be dominant at this stage.
You can see that in HAD005 logs
10% cu grade right at the top.
The production forecasts also show early stages to be cu dominant.

[Bamps21]

These are the average grades of gold and copper from the tonnage expected to go through the plant.
You can see that a grade of greater than 0.47% has a greater impact than 3g/t.
I’m not talking about revenues but larger copper tonnages will probably equal the gold revenues early on.

Copper price is steadily increasing and now at $3.87.
Copper stocks are at record lows down to 4.9 days for global supply.
Chile and Peru have recorded lower production levels partly due to falling grades.
The price should be really interesting by the time of our first production

[Bamps21]

These 3 slides were from around the time of the initial MRE Dec 2020
The middle one shows the gold and copper grades which can be seen in dark purple in top right where copper grades are greater than 0.75% thats very rich.
The plan and single section show the Kriging estimation shells in 10m cubes.

One thing I’m not likely to know is the variations in the shell cubes.
These are used with a cut off again different to the intercept cut off.
The ore body is divided into 10m cubes , each cube has to pass the cut off.
The cubes are targeted by drilling if the information within them is not adequate.
This information is used to form variable boundaries for each metal.
It’s called Kriging estimation and hard boundaries are formed around different cut offs zones mainly 1g/t and 0.2g/t.
It’s easy then to calculate the volumes using the full cube sizes.
Partial shells are not counted I believe or with a certain amount of waste/ dilution.

In the MRE this Kriging although an accurate way of estimating tends to lower the volumes counted by volumetrics.
It will also discount other metals such as cobalt. This will be due to the Kriging boundaries variables not meeting the shell cut off criteria even though the metal will be present and showing as uneconomic.
This may change when they physically sample test the ore

In the sulphides the Kriging boundaries vary greatly with the numerous types of ore in place.
In the Eastern breccia the ores are more consistent therefore the Kriging boundaries are larger and more defined.
This has an uplift of the average grades

[Bamps21]

The Eastern breccia shells

The cubes in the EB can be estimated easily due to the consistency of the ore without to much infill drilling

The lower grade shells in the sulphides are not necessarily fixed in that category they need infill drilling to upgrade them into the next category.
The estimation is too complex.

In the EB they don’t need so much infill drilling as the estimation is easier.

That has been the case for the last 2 years an emphasis on infill drilling together with growth drilling.

All the gaps between the high grade pods are being infill drill to allow easier estimation and insert into the shell categories