Serengeti - Buffing the Banana

Someone asked me to look at Serengeti's Kerwanka project in BC.

You have to give credit, Serengeti's team have been hard at pounding the the bald-headed moose, cranking the shank, and feeling their way around Kerwanka.


However, the problem with dancing with the one-eyed driller is that once in a while you have to consulting with your silent partner to see if the project is good enough for a one gun salute.

So why don't we stop serenading Mrs. Palmer and her five daughters by letting go of the one-stringed guitar and have a look:

what a load of crap

Wow, the open pit resources are terrible and the the underground "resources" are just a Cu(m) stain.


So basically, they could define >10 billion tonnes at a similar grade and it would still be too shit to put into production.

For amusement, here is the Kerwanka underground resource plotted against the mighty proposed block cave operations

Well, someone has to come last...

So basically, all that hard work milking the moose, fly fishing and hoisting the petard still means that the project is crap. That's enough to make the the bald man cry

Pretium - another Brucejack fail

Joseph Ovsenek must be feeling a bit of a twat at the moment, not only did he tell us back in September that (link):

[Pretium quote]

They failed to do this (link) by falling 5% short of their lower guidance expectations, and just to top off the good news, we get a nice PR investigating the trading it is shares (link).

So how bad were the Q4 numbers?



Pretty shitty, there has been a consistent decline (but like my school grades) since the mine reached steady state production and the new grade control system came into place.

It is almost as if Pretium, by some coincidence managed to be mining some high-grade zones the same time. How fortunate.....

We can clearly see that only once (Q2), did production come close to the Feasibility Study number, and Q4 was a huge miss.




My bug concern, and I've mentioned this a few times, is what will happen to the grade once they ramp up to 3,800 tonnes per day?

If they manage to maintain the same average head grades (11.98 g/t Au) and recoveries (97%) that they achieved in 2018 (around 11.98 g/t Au) after the expansion we should expect quarterly production to be around:

• (90 x 3800 x 11.98 x 97%) /31.1 = ~128,000 oz per quarter

Ironically, this is approximately what they would have been mining if they had managed to match the grade in the Feasibility Study. 

However, the common thing that happens when a mind finds itself with a hungry hungry mill, it that they chuck any old crap into it and the grade plummets.

I wonder what will happen here?