Gitreal and Georgei the Gold ounces is 0.40 or better using a "hydro-separation" process that makes the ore grinding very fine. I have done more due diligence thinking perhaps I should increase my position next week.
Here is what I found out. The ore with the gold in it is taken from the mine site and further ground down using this micro-grinding process. I assume very high water pressures are used to pulverize the gold-bearing ore or mine-site generated concentrates down to 10,000 mesh (mesh is how they measure granule size, like sandpaper from Home Depot). This powder-like ore is probably then run through a process called cyanide leaching where chemicals remove the gold from the powdery ore. They actually soak the ore in cyanide! There is a lot of information about cyanide leaching for gold extraction on Google if you do not understand how they make gold. Just Google "gold cyanide leaching". Boy did I learn a lot! I have spent hours on the interweb and reading the company forum.
That's what I found out using Google. So I believe you are mistaken by saying there is no gold at the El Capitan mine Gitreal. Since you seem to have some understanding of how mining works I would ask you to read the following comment placed on the company forum by a person who went to the shareholder's meeting. You are welcome to critique the extraction process El Capitan's Mr. Davidson is employing. I am reading everyone's opinion on this. I need to learn as much as I can about mining because as I have admitted I am new to mining investing. Here it is:
Some clarification here. We have an AuraSource separator at the mine. We also have a excavator and a front loader. In order to get smaller than 6 inch to fill the head ore orders we bring in a crusher. It was not at the mine site when we were there. I don' think we own that. That is all the processing we need to do to load trucks for the head ore sales. Management would not tell us what they were selling the head ore for. They did tell us it would cost $30 per ton to process it and load it on trucks for the customer.
In order to use the AuraSource we must crush further, and to do that we bring in an impactor, this takes us down to about 5 milimeters. This is then run through the AuraSource separator, the crushed ore runs up a conveyor belt and falls into a bin which separates using regular magnets and super magnets. If I have this right the magnetite is picked up by the regular magnets and is separated on the left side by a conveyor belt. The super magnets then pick up the hematite and it goes to the right side. The non magnetic ore goes out the front conveyor belt. If I remember correctly the magnetite has a large gold content as does the material at the front conveyor which also has silver and platinum. The hematite also has gold but to a much lower concentration so is not as desirable.( Hopefully I don' have the mineral type reversed, but you get the idea). ECPN has piles of this separated ore stacked up on the property. That is as far as we can process at the mine site. About 10% to 15% of the separated ore is that more concentrated with precious metals and about 85% to 90% is higher iron content with lower PM.
So the plan now until we get the Forest Service to allow us to truck the larger head ore is to just truck the separated higher PM containing 5mm ore to AuraSource. AuraSource will then do the second very fine crushing and rerun separation again. After that they go through a hydro separation process that gets out most of the iron. Then, they go through a lap process and a plasma process where they heat up to 6,000 degrees without melting the ore. What comes out of that process is several different separations. One is a lead concentrated with silver and a little gold. The silver and the lead are together and that gets heated where the lead is melted off and you are left with silver and about 3% gold for that track. The other separation tracks produce gold, and platinum, and some other platinum group metals such as palladium. The purity of those at this stage are 90% or greater. If you looked at the website you saw the small beads of gold or platinum. That is when these are sent to the refiner to process into pure metal. The concentrating and processing goes something like this from 0.05% at the first concentrating of PM to 1%, to 3%, to 10%, to 35%, to 75%, to 90%. Now those are not actual numbers, but it was the drift of what Davidson was talking about. The whole process yields on average 0.4 ounces per ton of head ore of precious metals on a gold equivalent basis. All of these concentrations and the the percentage of the various elements at each stage of this process was shown to us using a handheld X-Ray Flourescence spectrometer analyzer. So we could verify the purity of PM in each of the samples he had on the table.
There it is. This is how they get gold at a high OPT from the El Capitan Mine ore. If anyone with mining experience wants to take exception with this process - to say it is not possible - then have at it. Maybe some people from the company forum will chime in here so we novices can get a better understanding. I am now comfortable with investing in this stock, and will weight further purchases.
