The 1.7 billion tons refers to the size of a really large porphyry in Chile, found in 1907 I believe, the Chuquicamata. When one wonders whether or not a particular porphyry is capable of being brought into production one must compare it to something the Guggenheims mined or are mining, or something with economic viability already. Most of the stuff being mined is near the porphyry square law size and grade, 500 million tons of 0.5 grams gold and 0.5% copper. Today that is US $23.38 rock. To mine that profitably you absolutely must be able to predict 20 years political stability and freedom from government intrasingence and economic stability too. A number of things can be attached to this or flow from this. Money repatriation guarantees, access to a stable and cheap power grid, port facilities, easy to grind and blast ore, stable pit walls at low dilution, relatively low taxes, good currency convertibility, no excessive environmental activism or punitive gov't regs, no rebellious groups in the area etc..
If you look at the list of large porphyry deposits and find the number that are not being mined you realize that there are a few more factors than size and even grade that are operative. Even the Chinese have quite a few large porphyries that they are not exploiting. The Russians left one in the Kushinguras (Himalayas) that had 7 million metric tonnes of contained copper! Too isolated etc.. No infrastructure. There was one large one in Chiles that almost did not get exploited because of power cost considerations.
So when you go into the Phillipines, a country where mining companies have been in and out of over the last 20 years, with very low political stability, high banditry in the hinterlands, and so so infrastructure, you have to have a richer situation. One that you can afford to pay bribes on too, as that area is as corrupt as any you will come across. A
Swedish company walked away from an orebody with a mill on it that ran 1% copper and .10 ozs gold just sitting there in the late 80's, as they could not guarantee that when they flew the gold out of the mine site that the plane would get there safely. It frequently got shot at by rebels. I believe the ore ran 20 to 50 million tons or more open pit. One group I know tried to revamp it but investor interest was nil. The had budgeted 10% for bribes. The people who had their fingers in the pie were very hard to deal with too.
Anything that SUR finds there has to so tasty that BHP cannot wait to get into it given all possible adverse circumstances.
Or it has to be so high grade that SUR can do something with it right away. That is smallish and highish. I don't know. Their previous high grade pits did not go anywhere. They talked about mining them, but I guess there were difficulties.
At one mine in the Phillipines there was an article in the popular press not too long ago about a mine superintendent that went to work every day with a machine gun. It is a different area to work in.
Of course 500 feet wide of 0.10 oz's per ton is spectacular. And SUR has found high grade in the system. But will it hold up in drilling? The whole South Pacific is notorious for stuff that looks good on the surface but does not go down. We saw that in many Indonesian gold-silver plays in the past. High grade veins that can be stretched over wider widths by sampling but drill to narrow zones that need underground mining. I am not saying that will universally be the case here, but it remains to be seen what the down dip character of the body really is. Laterites and other oxidized zones have ways to concentrating gold on the surface, and beneath it the same values are absent.
Then there is metallurgy too. I note that SUR says they saw chalco but there were no chalco assays?
EC<:-}
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