Transcript
Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:04 Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from. I'm lucky enough to have with me today, we're doing planes, trains, automobiles, hotel rooms and airports. I've got Bob Archer, CEO of Pinnacle Silver and Gold. I'm lucky enough to have on to discuss the company's most recent press release. Bob, how are you?
0:20 Well, thanks, Romeo. Yeah, in transit, as you say, in the Winnipeg airport. That's what makes it fun. We're able to talk about the news wherever we are in the world. I'm in Quebec City, you're in Winnipeg. I will tell folks in the room, this is an interactive event, so please do feel free to use that chat button at the bottom of your screen during today's event so you can ask questions while we go. Also, today's event is being recorded and will be available for replay probably the end of the day Eastern time today. If I don't get to your question for
0:51 whatever reason, it's unlikely, but we are aiming for a pretty short event today. So on the off chance I don't get to your question, I will send it through to the Pinnacle team. I'll make sure that they get it afterwards. The other thing I'll say is there's a meeting request button at the bottom of the screen. If you would like to meet with Bob or the Pinnacle team, please do go ahead, press that button and I'll try to get you guys connected after the event. Bob, talking about getting right into the news, I wanted to ask a number of questions. I know this was a much wider second round. You had 7 samples across all 3 veins instead of 3 from a single.
1:23 So what gave you the confidence to expand the scope that far at a scoping stage?
1:30 I think we really needed to in order to keep fast-tracking the development of the project, we needed to take that step forward. Knowing that the mineralization, or if we can call it that, is going to come from a number of different veins. We just needed to see how they were going to act in the plant and the processing circuit. Geologically,
1:56 we can look at the veins and they're somewhat different in characteristics. The main dostomyovane is a breccia vein with a lot of fragments in it that are individually mineralized, but the other 2, papilloma and mastrea, are more banded, calcidonic, borch-type veins with bands of mineralization in them. So the characteristics of the veins themselves are slightly different. And so we needed to see how they were going to respond to the same type of processing circuit to see if we would be able to just blend everything together and process it at once or in order or batch process the different veins as sometimes happens like in the utopia mine.
2:42 So, so yeah, so it was it was an important first step and I'm super pleased to see the gold recoveries exceeding 97% across all 3 of these. Yeah, that's a gold came in what 97.8 on dust to my composite and held the line like you said at 97.6, 97.4 on Australia and Kaepelin. For a low-sulfidation epithermal system, how unusual
3:11 is it to see gold that clean and consistent across 3 separate veins?
3:18 In a system like this, I think it's fairly common to have recoveries over 90%, but to get right up close to 98%, that's just super. It doesn't get much better than that. You only have 2 more percentages to play with. But the nice thing about it being clean, there's no mercury, no antimony, arsenic, anything like that, that could possibly muck up your recoveries.
3:46 The gold from the neurological work we've done is just tied up in the ElectraMerkz tree gold and I've seen it myself, invisible gold. So it's a very, very clean system. So that's super from a neurological standpoint. That's great. And the numbers, I think, speak for themselves. Now, silver obviously was the more variable one coming out of this. So 70% on Dostomayo, 64.7 on Australia, and 80.5 on Capitol Inn. What do you think,
4:18 for the layman in the audience, including me, what's driving that kind of spread while the gold seems to be so uniform? Well, the gold, for instance, is either free or it's tied up with silver as electron, which is just a natural alloy of the 2 elements. But silver tends to form sulfide complexes. And so it's in the form of silver sulfides, or in one case, a mineral called aguilarate.
4:48 And it's a silver selenide, so silver, selenium, and sulfide. So the silver is still tied up in these sulfide complexes, and it tends to, it doesn't always leach that well, and it doesn't break out, it doesn't liberate as easily as the Gold does.
5:11 It's typically, Silver will often be processed through a flotation method as opposed to leaching. But you can't really separate the 2, or you can maybe do one in tandem, one after the other, but it's unlikely that we would go that route. So it's just whatever we can get out of the chain process. But even if it averages around 70%, that's still not bad for silver. Absolutely. And like you said, the gold's pegged to Electrum, the silver to Argentite, Dacontite, Aglarite. How much, just again in your experience, how much does knowing the exact mineral hosts change the way that you're approaching the silver side of the circuit?
6:01 Well, there's part of it. There may be some chemical additives or some things we can do to try and improve the liquidation of the silver. But the other thing too is just the time
6:19 in tanks, how much time you expose it to leaching. In this test run, we ran up to 96 hours, But in the previous point, it was ran up to 72, but the recoveries don't really increase all that much between 72 and 96. And in fact, most of the gold starts to get liberated around 90 to 92% actually is liberated after 24 hours. Whereas the silver has a slower release rate, So after 24 hours, you're getting maybe 60, 65% of the silver and you need that extra time, you know, take it to 48 or 72 hours in order to liberate all the,
7:13 you know, or most of the silver. Yeah. Interesting. Now I know every gold grain came in under 50 microns and silver under 80. Tightening the grind to 53 microns nudged those recoveries up. Have you found the point yet where grinding finer stops paying for itself? Are we still out there yet?
7:36 I think we're probably pretty close. The previous tests were run at 75 microns, and then we did another pass at 53 once we had those mineralogical results. And all of that, you know, it did improve the Gold recovers by about 2% because we were sort of averaging a little over 95% before. But, you know, as you go finer, you will increase it a little bit, but that curve would start to fall off or flatten after a while. So, I think we're probably pretty close. It comes down to the amount of power really that you're using.
8:25 The grinder has to keep it in the mill longer. As that mill is turning, it's just a power drain. It's the cost of the power versus how
8:36 much more gold you're going to get out. So if you have to keep it in there for another 24 hours, and you're only gaining 0.5% or something like that, then I haven't the numbers. For example, that cost-benefit analysis might not pay off. So I think we're probably pretty close to that. And As I mentioned, it's more, I think at this 0.1 question of the silver is starting to flatline after 24 hours. So then it's a question of how much longer do we keep it in there to recover more of the silver. And it's got that cost benefit analysis that's going to come into play a little bit more at this point. I appreciate that.
9:24 Now, one person had written in advance asking about the
9:28 likely ballpark capex for the plant rebuild. I had a question about it, so I'm going to loop them together. I know the gravity circuit actually seemed like it pulled recoveries down rather than helping, so it's coming off the table. Walk me through what dropping it takes out of the capital cost for the plant rebuild.
9:47 Yeah, That was a little bit of a surprise, actually, because we have seen visible gold. So there is free gold there, and the assumption was that if we could pull that free gold out, that the remaining material would still react to the leaching, but we'd be able to add everything together to improve the recoveries. But for whatever reason, that wasn't what came out of the tests. You know, We may run some more tests just to be sure on that, but from this first round, it seemed that that wasn't the case. So perhaps there's just not as much free gold as we thought there might be.
10:29 Taking that out, it's a gravity circle, it's not necessarily expensive. So maybe on a string of things, it's $100,000 or something for the ballpark.
10:44 Right now, we're looking at probably around $800,000 US, maybe rounded off to 1 million for the actual equipment, and then another million, 1.2 for the actual installation. In the scheme of things, the gravity is not huge, but it's nice to know upfront that you don't have to worry about it. Because there isn't 1 there now. So it would be an extra installation if you were to go that route. Hey, save money when you can. I think That's great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Now, I know you stretched the leach from 72 to 96 hours, and it really only moved silver from what I read in the release on 2 of the 3 samples. How are you weighting that cost-benefit call between tank time, which costs money, and the extra silver?
11:37 Yes, that's what I was alluding to before.
11:45 The Gold tends to start to flatline after 24 hours, so you're not really gaining too much with the extra time on the Gold side. The Silver does lead this a little bit more as you go along. So let's take a look at how much value we're actually gaining with that extra time.
12:06 Part of it's the leach time, but also the grinding time too. If you're going to keep stuff in a tank for 96 hours, but it only takes 24 hours to process it through the mill, well then, you're trying to push more material through the mill than you have room in the tank, so you need that many more tanks in order to store stuff. So it's a lot of different things that come into play. So we'll have to find the right balance. Just having received these results, we haven't done that yet, but that's certainly part of the next step. Sure. Now, speaking of decision points, I got another one. You raised the question of whether to blend the veins at the plant or batch process them to chase silver recovery.
12:52 Operationally, for me and the folks watching, what does that decision come down to? What factors are you weighing when it comes to actually making that call? It's largely scheduling more than anything else.
13:06 I know that at the neighboring Copium mine, which we used to operate as Great Panther, at that time we were operating up to 14 different lines and some of those had different metallurgy than others.
13:25 We had different stockpiles at the plant where the guys would come in and just dump the trucks into a specific pile. And then you would just wait until you've had enough ore there to batch process it. So you can't just switch back and forth on a daily basis. It's just not efficient. So if you have to do a week at a time or a few days at a time, you have to figure that out. But if there's a significant enough difference, either between the veins or with silver. The gold seems to be pretty consistent across all 3, but if it's silver, metal, or 2, it's different in the 3. And that's something that we could consider. But it really just comes down to scheduling.
14:18 No, I appreciate that. I think that's interesting. I don't know sometimes what goes into these decisions, but knowing that it's mostly scheduling is pretty interesting. What I had, the results from PR feeding straight into the flow sheet ahead of rebuilding the 100 ton per day plant. What's the next piece of the test work you need before we can lock down this design and get rolling? Well, we have a lot of the information for making the flow sheet.
14:50 But what they're still working on right now are some of the filtration tests. That will show the final water content of the tailings that will go to the dry stack tailings facilities. And then from there, that'll all be lined. And then any water that's collected in there will just be recycled back into the plant. So, We'd like to get the tailings down to a specific level of water content.
15:26 That's a key thing that we're working on right now. That should be finished in a couple of weeks, so it's not that lengthy. For the rest of it, we've done a lot of what we need to really start working on putting this flow sheet together and maybe even starting to look at procuring or at least placing orders for some of the long lead time items. Once we've got all that together, the larger pieces of equipment like the ball mill and the flushing, the mill course, that sort of thing. We're well on the way. Considering where we are right now, We're still aiming for the end of next year. So with 18 months to go, we're still in good shape.
16:15 Awesome. I want to just remind people of Pinnacle's model here, in my last question. And then I got time to jump to 2 from the audience. I know the earn-in has you as part of the plan at 50% the moment production starts, and then up to 100% from cash flow, rather than equity markets.
16:33 With the Met now pointing to a straightforward synodation flow sheet, how much closer does this pull you to a first pour?
16:43 Well, I think in terms of the overall schedule, it doesn't change anything. As I say, we're pretty much on track. It's the biggest wildcard is still this permanent, but it does give us more confidence in moving forward. And because a lot of the Permitting has already been initiated, but there's still work that needs to be submitted to the authorities and things like water balance and so on to submit. So this motivational test gave us the confidence that we can start to pull those reports together for submission to the government. So I think It doesn't change anything, but I'm feeling good about the offer schedule as it currently sits.
17:39 Awesome. I think that actually answers James' question from the chat. James, let me know if you feel like that didn't, but he was asking where permits are right now. How are you thinking about timelines? So I think we've gotten through that one. But T asked from the chat, says the Met's looking really good. When do you expect to have a maiden resource estimate so investors can size up the scale of the opportunity here? Well, a resource estimate will come out of the drilling, which has really just started. We're only a month into it and are just starting to get results back from the Attei lab from the first couple of holes. So, we still have a ways to go on that. And I think we'll probably be drilling for the balance of the year, but we'll be doing our own resource estimate internally initially.
18:32 And so, that may, well, our plan is, our hope is that that would give us enough confidence to make a production decision just on our own, based on the work that we're doing. So, you know, whether we come out publicly with the maiden research or not, I'm not sure at this point. We're going to have to go ahead and run for production decision without actually getting to that point. I've emphasized the point before that we'll take what the group will have. We have 3 QPs on the team as it stands right now. Myself and Jorge, our exploration manager, who used to oversee the resource system at Cape Grey Panther when we did those in-house.
19:20 And then Dave Salari, who's our QP on the metallurgical side of things. And Carlos, who has 45 plus years of building and running mines in Mexico and so on. So, you know, I'm quite confident that we can put this resource estimate together in a mine plan and to the point where, you know, I'm confident in what we're doing, and just go ahead and do it. So, you know, we don't want to take the time, you know, you know, for any kind of comments that we'll see on television. Yeah, to clarify what you already got. Well, I will say, as your announcer's going off in the background, Thanks so much for joining, even from the airport. Appreciate you being able to join us to talk about news. If anybody has any additional questions, please let me know. And one last chance to hit the request meeting button at the bottom of the screen.
20:11 But Bob, great to talk to you as always, and thanks for joining me, despite our odd locations to chat about today's news. So, always appreciate the extra context.
