Re: RED - Red 5 Limited
Hi Fastbuck and thanks for your comments. Before I reply I want to completely DISAGREE with the "disclaimer" you put on your post...""if you want to make a fastbuck do'nt buy the share i hold". You still hold RED shares, therefore how could I agree with your disclaimer, when my view is that RED holders will get a huge bump up in value in the next short period of time, Lol!!!
As for Mapawa, I would like to make the following observations:
Petard's post is entirely accurate, that in the event that Mapawa cannot support its own plant then RED has already indicated the intention to truck higher grade ore the 30 odd km's down the road to Siana.
BUT, in the event that Mapawa can support its own processing facility then clearly RED will not truck the shallower ore from Mapawa to Siana as it does not give the same economics. Just note, that Siana has a long life mining operation that will support its own processing facility for at least 10 years. If you add another few years of processing Mapawa ore to Siana you don't do anything for the NPV at all (after 10 years the discounting of time value results in minimal return).
If Mapawa can support its own operation then it is by far the best outcome for a few reasons:
1. You get economies of scale on the mining and processing, with a plant that is focused solely on recovering the economic minerals, likely to be principally gold and by-product copper, possibly with a little silver. (Note that Siana processing facility is based on a rated capacity of 1mtpa with no floatation circuit at present unless zinc is to be recovered from the deeper primary ore).
2. You get parallel gold production from both Siana and Mapawa, thus annual gold production is substantially increased beyond the approximate 100,000 ozs sole production from Siana regardless of whether that processing facility is treating ore from Siana alone or in combination with Mapawa ore feed.
3. You don't cop the additional trucking cost from Mapawa to Siana.
As for the economics of Mapawa, of course its early days now, but we have got some solid mineralisation from deeper drilling, which is continuing with 1 drill rig to plumb the bottom potential of Mapawa, plus 2 rigs concentrating on developing the shallower resource in terms of distribution and grade tenor.
What the posters (and analyst who appears to have been quoting generalities of porphyry systems worldwide with the comments about "billions of dollars capex" and "10 - 15 year development period") fails to realise is that Mapawa will only cost significant amounts of money to develop if a HUGE resource is defined, and if say only 100 million tonnes of ore, amounting to around 3.5 million odd ozs of contained gold is defined then a relatively smaller processing facility, maybe sized around 8 - 10 million tonnes per annum and costing maybe a couple hundred million dollars. Its horses for courses, so the generalities that have been used to "cast away the real value of Mapawa" has been mis-information.
AND what has failed to be noticed is that LSY is shaping up to be a significant GOLD porphyry with minor copper, not the standard mixed metal (say copper or copper moly) plus gold credits that have been developed in many other parts of the world. And as I have mentioned previously, Mapawa infrastructure does not demand the challenges that others developing huge porphyry projects elsewhere in the wilds of the world, such as many of those located in PNG or Indonesia, or high in the mountain ranges of South America. Mapawa is located close to a small regional city (of Surigao), it has power, water, access and labour sitting on its doorway. The comparison is significant to others being used as the generalisation for Mapawa development!
I should also point out, and what seems to have been lost by analysts and posters on HC regarding Siana potential, the last resource upgrade PRECEDED the final drillholes that intersected considerable additional wide intersections of gold at around 200 odd metres depth, thus the comments of blue sky below the deepest underground is not the only blue sky, there also is considerable upside to the resource laterally along strike at open pittable depths! This could considerably impact on final pitwall boundaries in year 3 onwards, to support a longer mine life of the open pit phase and allow considerable additional gold production from the open pit.
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