I'm trying to make heads or tails out of SBS and why it seems so cheap on an oz au basis. Must be something to do with the Koka deposit. Has great grades, but perhaps capex/opex may make it untenable? Deposit looks to be at 50 - 200m so depth not really an issue. How's access I wonder. Looks pretty barren out there. Or, is it the country risk?
So, 1m oz au in Koka, have 69% interest but could be diluted by up to 45% by the look of it, which will leave them with roughly 300K oz as a guide, with potential for a few more ounces.
kennas,
Looks like October 08 has been targeted by SBS as the completion date for the Koka PFS. Pretty tight deadline if you ask me. At least it's some good news for shareholders to see SBS advancing on this front.
All things considered, SBS have actually done quite well in delineating 1 million oz > 6g/t, with favourable metallurgical characteristics. Probably still scope for extensing @ depth and for another few hundred m's along strike.
In the best case scenario, if the PFS returns a favourable outcome, and SBS advance into a full BFS, and manage to secure finance
, we would still be at least 2-2.5 years away from production. And that's a best-case scenario.
What concerns me slightly is the surface topography over the resource, as a lot of the drilling looks to have been into the side of a hill, and the actual vertical depth of the a good portion of the mineralisation. eg ZARD108 intersected mineralisation from approx 140-170m down-hole, which when you factor in the surface topography would be a vertical depth of at least 180-210m. This is obviously more of an engineering challenge, I really don't know if it's possible to come up with an economic pit shell to mine the shallower ore, and then stope down to grab the higher grades. I'm sure it's been done successfully somewhere else though...
It looks like a dedicated hydrological search is underway, and that there may be an aquifer out to the west they can tap into.
I'm a little bit ambivalent about some of the Tanzania JV projects with Barrack, Barrick's exact motives here would be interesting to know. I am unsure if there is an expiry date on any of the JV's, raising the possibility that Barrick could just sit on the ground for a very, very long time relegating SBS to a somewhat of a backburner position.
Anyway, my
jman