This post was written after the Aug 2023 update which reported 57 g/t results trucked to ENAMI when hope was still alive that ramping up production and incoming revenues would soon breath life into the SP of AUMC & MDMN: Auryn/Medinah - 2023 2nd Half General Discussion - #119 by cornhuskergold
Today this hope officially died.
As suggested there they attempted to mine in the 2nd half of 2023. It is now apparent that the hope that they could maintain 57 gpt (or at least something profitable) turned out to not be the case. This is the problem, to beat a dead horse (but then again these days dead horses come to TMP just to receive a good beating), with very narrow vein high grade underground mines.
That is you can cherry pick via a variety of slow and meticulous processes and get amazing grades. But by the very nature of what you have to do to increase mining rate, that is, mixing lots of low grade / no grade rock with a small amount of high grade rock, there is no way to maintain profitable grades in the rock you remove from the tunnel. It’s all one big hodgepodge of rock by the time you get it outside. And what is apparent now is that the grade of this hodgepodge could not support transport costs and be meaningfully profitable. Add to this a large amount of variation in the quality of the vein as you move forward and you have a difficult knot to untie.
As I have pointed out it is quite possible to suffer 90% dilution blowing up a narrow vein, collecting the remnants, and dumping it outside. I am sure they tried everything they could think of to come up with a process that would get them decent grades to the truck. But they couldn’t. Either you suffer huge dilution within the mine. Or you go so very slow,manually keeping the ore separate from waste rock that other costs like labor eat you up. So here we are. It is a place many who have gone before have ended up at while trying to mine narrow veins.
Fortunately there seems to be a technical solution. But it requires money, a processing plant, construction time, etc. And once you need someone to write a check you need to be able to convince them it is going to work so you have to do work to convince them, etc, etc.
All hope is not lost. But production is now definitely a ways off in time.