Pretium - Getting back into the swing of things

Sorry I've been away for so long, I've been working on a large project that has taken up all of my free time.

I'm going to run through a few old projects, just to get up to speed

1st up, that old favorite, Pretium Resources, we've had a lot of good times at Brucejack

• A resource update (link)
• 2019 operations update (link)
• CEO resigning (link)

Let us first look at the updated resources!

TLDR version

What a fucking disaster!

Long version

We'll start with the good news

Tonnage went up, apart from a small decrease in reserves!

That's it, everything else was a disaster!

Grade

A massive decrease, the latest resources are virtually half that in the original PEA

Almost exactly the same grade as the original resources calculated in 2013

Contained Gold

This has given a small, 3Moz decrease in contained gold

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?

Pretium - at last....

Brucejack's Q2 production figures were released today (link), and from the nearly >C$2.50 share price increase over the last month (including 13% today) you can tell that the market was happy, as  for the first time, the mine has expectations!

At last the head grade is approaching the reserve grade!

Let us break down the figures.

Au production

Blue = actual; red = planned (PEA); Green - difference

They were slightly under (3,300 ounces) from the Planned production figure outlined in the PEA, but a 3% difference isn't a huge amount for a nuggety gold deposit.

Au Head-grades

A huge change

Slightly under (14.9 vs 15.4), but a huge turnaround from the previous quarter.

Recovery

Still great!

Mill Throughput - quarterly

Slight dip, probably due to a planned shutdown for maintenance (probably 3 days in total).

Mill throughput - daily

We can see a dip in Q2, the mill was operating ~100 tonnes below capacity (2604 tpd vs 2700 tpd).


Now the hard part - they have to maintain it, as they can't use the 'ramping-up' excuse anymore if they don't meet their projected production figures.