Mexus Gold US (MXSG)

[TMLonggun]

We have been told there are about 4000 oz contained on the pad and in a year of stop-start leaching (but still most of a year under solution) they recovered 8 oz (.2% of contained metalics). That is just bad and I don't have a logical chemistry explanation for why this final stage of recovery is so elusive, although there probably is one. Salt or no salt it should be higher than that especially since this is with enriched grades, ie the solution they are recovering should be the richest at the front end of the cycle. Obviously if they leach for a year and then recover after I don't expect them to run a year's worth of solution through their plant in a day but that initial production should be way beyond 8 with these grades - it should be banging out at capacity cleanups. If the plant was at or near capacity I would be confident they could recover ~70%, the issues are mostly solved, and that we'd be golden. Yet it is far from it and this has me concerned that they are not recovering much of anything. Clearly the ore is leaching into solution, but why can the filters not recover it? Usually what I see happen is a mine would stack ~4000 oz, expect 75% and then get 40-60% recovered or 1600-2400 oz - enough that they produce a pretty decent amount but not enough to make a profit without making potential tweaks like smaller crush size. Announcing 8 oz after all the overly optimistic company predictions produced the exact market reaction it deserved. It would have been better to just call it "a small amount of dore" or something. What I would have preferred would have been an upfront announcement whenever the contamination occurred, explaining what happened and that all recovery had for practical purposes ceased because of the issue along with an explanation of how they are going to rectify it and improve things in the future.