Continuing the discussion from Auryn/Medinah - 2022 - 1st Half General Discussion:
Soma is running grades less than 7 g/t on average. In the for FWIW department, since you repeated citing this company for comparison purposes.:
The El Bagre Mill processes approximately 450 tonnes per day (tpd) when running at full capacity and is permitted for up to 1,000 tpd. The mill historically achieves gold recoveries of ~87% and silver recoveries of ~81%. The plant consists of the following main circuits:
- Three-stage crushing
- One-stage grinding
- Flash coarse rougher flotation in the grinding circuit
- Gravity concentration and intensive cyanide leaching
- Flotation, thickening, and clarification
- Regrinding and cyanidation
- Filtration and cyanide detoxification
- Merrill Crowe gold recovery
- Smelting
- Reagent preparation
- Tailings disposal
(https://www.somagoldcorp.com/projects)
The company is mining in Columbia. Current market cap for Soma is C$57.55 (US$42.8M). The process needed to refine this ore for Soma is much more complicated than what ENAMI has already determined can be done economically and beneficially for AURYN after ENAMI. I conclude this is not a company that can reasonably be compared to AURYN. I appreciate you mentioning it. Out of curiosity may I ask what your Peruvian company is? It sounds more interesting.
Additional Thoughts
I don’t think AURYN took all this time to determine this was refractory ore. Given the high content CU content it was already a given this particular ore vein zone was refractory and was going to need floatation to recover the value of CU. The unspoken part was looking forward to when a gravitational circuit can be bought using the profits of ore shipped to ENAMI. Remember there was a large component of “fines” that were free milling contained in the surface ore historically mined. CU recovery was not a necessary component of this lower grade ore, so long as there was a significant free milling component present. When there is also visible gold in addition to the “fine” present, a gravitational circuit will be employed to recover the free milling gold to produce a very economical high grade concentrate. The crushing and grinding circuit that will eventually be added to process the lower gold grade content can be successfully concentrated 100X or better. This gold concentrate may actually be what AURYN management was negotiating with GoldLogic. It may be a very good delay for determining a future off take agreement with GoldLogic, or possibly a different processor, to help with financing some of the other free milling targets contained on the ADL such as Merlin 1.
EZ