Quote:
You see two tables summarised at the start of the document, further detailed on p33 into the geographical locations (or cuts).
The difference between the tables is the terms 'Resource' and 'Reserves'.
The top table "Mineral Resources" is based on the total quantity of minable material that is known to be in the ground that exceeds their cut-off grade of 1.7g/t and within either the extent of the reserve, claim, or orebody. Values here are estimated with varying levels of confidence. Various techniques are used, I think in NTL's case boreholes and some scanning by the looks, don’t quote me, I'll visit this later.
Regardless, the resource quantity is further broken in to Inferred, Indicated, and Measured classifications, with increasing sampling and drilling determining the confidence factor and the volumes in these categories. Exploration is expensive, Geo-techs cost money, hence there is no point drilling the [****] out of your whole reserve unnecessarily when you have good numbers on Ore reserves already and no money coming in. Every borehole costs something ridiculous, as you need survey there too to set it out. Basically the Resource is relatively confidently known to be there, and the quantities are estimated with some confidence off some samples.
You could say "Further exploration is needed, but here's what we believe with these varying levels of confidence, that we are sitting on. (Measured being more sampled than indicated, indicated more so than inferred...)"
The second table, "Ore Reserves", indicates an amount of the ore from within the 'Indicated' and 'Measured' rows of the "Mineral Resource" table. However, this is ore that they know is there with high levels of confidence, the 'Proven' row representing ore that has been extensively drilled and sampled, the 'Probable' row they are less confident about due to less analysis. The term 'Reserves' indicates this quantity of ore has been analysed and valued using the current or recent average gold/silver prices, and basically is what they are using to do their current numbers. I.e, it is profitable to mine.
The thing with resources is they are unexplored and I guess with gold the speculation is where you need to trust expert opinion.
It's different with coal, which has such a uniform distribution, I can calculate what is in the ground to a high level of accuracy from three boreholes.
To summarise:
Gold
With the levels of confidence, 82,500t of material has been sampled, containing Gold at 10.8 g/t, or a total of 891kg.
With speculation (no economic study as to any mining costs being profitable etc), there is potentially 917,390t of minable mineral in the ground with an average concentration of 6.9g/t, or 204,760oz (their fig)
Silver
Confidence - 127,800oz (their fig)
Speculation - 798,840oz (their fig)
Whether the speculated amounts are there, the investor decides..
SURVEY MINING DUDE
So NTL are confident of $50m of gold and $3m of silver... More exploration required to measure whether $351,777,680 of gold and $18,373,320 of silver is there.