AXG - Antipodes Gold [formerly GEL - Glass Earth]

[elZorro]

Here's a hybrid map of the area showing some topo detail. There is a curiously barren and slumped area just below GEL's permit space which could be where the last dredge worked, see the black ringed area. GEL has grabbed the ground beside this space, like they did at Drybread.

There is a permit covering the space where the dredge had possibly worked, MP 41772, and near the junction of Freshford Plains Station Road and McDonalds Road there is a small water race and a dam. Looks like more of a duck pond on closer inspection, and for a 9 year old mining permit there seems to be a lot of grass still available for sheep. No broken ground at all..so this mine permit restoration might be finished ahead of time.

https://data.nzpam.govt.nz/PermitWeb...x?permit=41772

[elZorro]

Here's a new suction dredge that has been built in Nelson for the Cold Gold Clutha Co. It needs about 6 people to operate it, but can only grab 30m3 of gravel from the river bed each hour. The suction nozzle is controlled by a camera from above.

http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central...edging-project

Expecting 4 oz a day from 13 hour operation, yields about 0.32g/m3. They could go for a 24 hour licence later, but even so it's not a great grade on the face of it. I saw a very old article saying that one of the big dredges from 100 years ago recovered 1230 odd ounces of gold in a week. That was a record for river-based operations, it was probably a bucket dredge.

Extra data:http://www.commoditytrademantra.com/...0-years-otago/

At least 4 Rotary gold screen manufacturers near Greymouth..

http://www.rotarygoldscreens.com/video.html

[elZorro]

More history - here is the Hartley and Riley dredge which was on the Clutha River gathering staggering gold amounts, from about 1898 to early the next century. This is an early photo, before the covers went over everything. You can see a trommel (the rotating screen) and the massive riffle areas should be where the two blokes are. The elevator to the left would have dumped the washed rocks and gravel back into the river, or onto the banks maybe. Not sure how they got the gravel from the river bed up into the top of the trommel, but it looks like this was an early example of a bucket dredge, which was quickly copied by other startups once the dredge began recovering over 1,000 oz of gold in a week.

This whole huge structure was run by a 10HP or 12HP motor, probably a steam engine.

A bit about the upper Waikaia in this recent thread about a Clutha mining permit for sale.
http://golddredgingforum.proboards.c...lay&thread=938

Dredge designs, IPENZ

The Lady Ranfurly dredge, an electric powered unit, apparently obtained the record weekly production of 1234oz in 1900, on the Kawerau River, now Lake Dunstan. It eclipsed the recent record of the Hartley and Riley dredge.
http://thefieldofgold.blogspot.co.nz...rom-river.html

A strong connection here to Bob Kilgour's family. http://thefieldofgold.blogspot.co.nz...-for-gold.html

[elZorro]

Glass Earth was on the TV3 news again this morning. It looked like a spare bit of video footage from last week, cobbled together in a similar article. So I'm unsure what that was all about. Short of new news?

This time the weekly recovery amount wasn't mentioned, but it was stated that each of the three GRUs is processing about 50 cubic metres per hour. They won't all be running 24/7 of course, but it helps with estimating the returns. Here's the video..

Text of the story..
(The item might have been about redressing some perceived treatment of the topic, there was a lot more about finding a hard rock deposit at the end of the item, that being the main object of the company).

Just spotted that Glass Earth has been granted Kakanui, permit PP53297. They'll need to take 200 BLEG samples, 200 gold pan samples, and 20 shallow gold drills within 2 years. No problem. The permit is 533,950 hectares, stretches way over the top of Macraes Mine.

Maybe they've been looking here already, see the Q1 2012 report:

A first pass program of stream sediment sampling was started in the

Kakanui Range (north-east Otago). 84 samples have been collected to date with 250 remaining.

So GEL now has 6801.81 km2 of permits, another 2121km2 in the pipeline.

[elZorro]

Not too much has been happening with the CVR permit areas Glass Earth holds. I remember GEL has a wholly owned company (Glass Earth Geothermal Ltd) connected to the geothermal side of the permits. They decided to put this on the backburner in 2009, because they can't secure the IP under current rules.

http://www.contrafedpublishing.co.nz...+thwarted.html

The implication is that Glass Earth knows of some prospective new geothermal sites, and maybe one day these will be worth something too.

Waihi Gold (Newmont) has dropped EP40687 recently, this was a small permit around Golden Valley Road, a short drive away from, and east of the Martha Mine in Waihi.

[elZorro]

The Manuherikia and Ida valleys are fully allocated for water uptake. The govt is part funding a search for new water sources and management systems. Funnily enough, the water allocation is related to mining use until 2021, must be an historical thing. I'm wondering if the data that Glass Earth provided from their aerial scans has been of any help here. GEL is placer mining in both valleys.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK120...ater-study.htm

Thanks to Andrew Hamilton at Glass Earth head office, an article in the ODT earlier this year.

http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central...ter-ida-valley

[elZorro]

CHFIR has just put out newsletter No.70, which has a small writeup on Glass Earth (first one since 2010).

http://chfir.com/sites/all/files/chf...07-26-2012.pdf

Here's the text, and I think the last line is encouraging: management are not wanting any more firesales in future, the placer gold should provide the bulk of the funding.

Grade is king, GEL should catch a good break there sometime.

[elZorro]

It's near the end of July, and Glass Earth set a target for placer production of about 84 to 100oz/week by the end of the month. After the newer placer sites get up and running, the target is 144oz/week (7500oz/year). I dug up an old email from Simon Henderson, which I've already posted.

February 2012: In alluvial production we quote grade in grains per cubic metre, not grams per tonne. (A grain is roughly 1/15 of a gram, and there are about 2.5 tonnes of gravel wash in one cubic metre).

We'd regard a grade of 3 grains/m3 as an acceptable cutoff point for profitable mining (high volume throughput, no crushing, gravity separation and so on all mean that far lower grades than that needed in a hardrock environment can be profitable), but of course can run into far more than this on richer leads - in fact we will have on occasion run into 3"g/t" ground..

Given the small size of these deposits and the difficulty and expense required to define an official resource (plus the sensitivity our JV partner has required us to have towards reporting grades in Otago, based on keeping results confidential to each landowner) it makes more sense to have a solid estimate of projected ounces per week production, and then the total net revenue we are achieving - net profit from alluvials measures for us what these deposits are worth in terms of what they add to our company. We're actually going through a significant (and exciting) overhaul of alluvials, I can't tell you more than that today but we are looking forward to some real progress, and profit, this year. Our placer mining is shaping up as a very useful and unique side to how we operate - it began as a survival tool but is starting to look like a true opportunity for self-funding meaningful hardrock exploration. So when laid alongside our current projects and land package it's very compelling.

Here is where the maths gets interesting (but not hard!). 3 grains/m3 is roughly the same as 0.2grams/m3. Each GRU processes 50 m3 per hour when it's online. Since it takes almost exactly 3 hours for each GRU to produce an ounce of fine gold flakes at the minimum cutoff grade, then the approximate running costs for a GRU is about US$300 per hour (we've also been told the cost of each ounce is US$900). The cutoff grade will change if the price of gold goes up or down, but it is low compared to other mining methods.

$300 needs to cover the wages of about 3-5 staff per GRU/hr, any downtime costs, maintenance, fuel. All GRUs need to contribute to the monthly settlement payments for Bob Kilgour, and at each site the landowners will have a small percentage (unknown, left out of my calcs).

But assuming GEL didn't drag the GRUs out there for anything less than the minimum cutoff, then running GRU#1 for 24/7 hours, and the others for about 60 to 70 hrs/week, will recover the gold they are talking about. There would be an annual profit of about US$2.6 mill at 100oz/week, at the lowest grade.

However, if Drybread sites offer 0.4grams/m3 of gold, the annual net profit from just the sites and gear they have going now, would be US$8.6 million. That's enough for everything that they normally do in a year, all paid for.

To put this into perspective, each excavator scoop of 1 m3 needs to be fed to a GRU at about once a minute. The dry weight would be about 2 tonne, 2.5 tonnes wet. At the minimum grade, 3 grains of gold (0.2 grams), needs to be present. A single .177 lead slug pellet weighs about 9 grains, or 0.6 grams, so that small weight of gold per m3 is three times the cutoff value.

Note: gold is about 70% more dense than lead, so Glass Earth are hoping to see no less than 1/3 of the weight of a slug gun pellet (in gold) in each scoop, and 1/5 of the volume of the pellet.

[elZorro]

L&M Energy confirms consummating Alton Block deal with NZEC
18 July 2011
The active petroleum and coal seam gas explorer L&M Energy Ltd (ASX & NZX: LME) last week announced reaching an agreement for AGL Energy Ltd to sell its 50% share in PEP 51151(the Alton Block) to New Zealand Energy Corporation (NZEC).The deal would be subject to gaining New Zealand ministerial consent.

L&M Energy earlier said NZEC agreed to fund 100% of L&M’s share of expenses in the currently drilling Talon-1 oil exploration well – estimated at $1.75 million, including $250,000 of completion costs in the event of a discovery. L&M Energy would retain its existing 50% interest in PEP 51151. Talon-1 is the first well to be drilled on the permit which is in the onshore southern Taranaki Basin “which also contains multiple further targets.”The joint venture is targeting mean reserves of 2 million barrels of oil recoverable in the shallow Manutahi Sands in a structure geologically identical to the adjacent Manutahi oilfield operated by Origin Energy. NZEC is a subsidiary of a privately owned Canadian company which earlier this year appointed well known NZ petroleum sector consultant Ian Brown of Ian Brown & Associates as an executive.

NZResources.com said in February that NZEC was going to focus on oil and gas exploration in NZ with a focus on exploring for both conventional and unconventional oil and gas in proven, but under-explored areas.

Why post this here? Ian Brown's consultancy was in the mix when Glass Earth first started up, and Ian was a director of Glass Earth. Geoff Loudon owns a good-sized chunk of LME, and has recently stumped up $5mill for LME to continue other gas/oil drills. The most immediate one of interest could be Kahili-2, a new drill into an already proven (but disappointing first well) field that has gas/oil takeoff plant ready to go.

Geoff Loudon has sizable interests in Glass Earth Gold too, so both will be keen to see how the rest of 2012 shapes up.

NZEC is listed on the TSX as ticker NZ. It has raised $85.5mill since the IPO in August 2011. It has its own gas production station tied in to a gas line, at Waihapa. 50% share of Alton Permit, soon 65% etc.

In March 2011 NZEC bought Ian Brown Consultancy, and the staff work for NZEC. This company was only conceived in 2010, they have moved very quickly.

http://www.newzealandenergy.com/Abou...C/default.aspx

Stock-based compensation for the year ended December 31, 2011 totalled $2,203,548 compared
to $9,996,000 recognized in 2010. Of the total non-cash charge for the year ended December 31,
2011, $1,000,000 related to the IRBA asset purchase agreement, on the valuation of the shares
issued, that was executed on February 21, 2011.

IRBA Agreement
The Corporation entered into an asset purchase agreement with Ian R. Brown Associates Limited ("IRBA"), a private company owned by the COO, pursuant to which the Corporation acquired certain of IRBA’s assets, including geological data, office equipment, personnel and an office lease in Wellington, New Zealand. In consideration for the transfer of the assets, the Corporation paid $400,000 and issued 2,000,000 common shares to IRBA, at a deemed price of $0.50 per common share (Note 12a).

[elZorro]

The AusIMM conference is on in Rotorua this month, the main part of it being from 27-29th August, in Rotorua. Here's the programme.

There are some industry heavyweights speaking at the morning sessions, including Mick Wilkes (OGC), Glen Grindlay (Newmont Waihi), Chris Baker (Straterra) Geoff Loudon (L&M Energy, L&M Mining). The chairman of the organising committee is Tony Christie (not the singer, the scientist from GNS). Dr Christie was the lead author in papers on the WKP area and the Coromandel.

Simon Henderson has a 20-minute slot on the first afternoon, where attendees have a choice of two sessions. He has chosen to discuss the Garibaldi discovery process, which could be a heads-up for that hard-rock area. On another day an Otago University student, James Stewart (who may or may not be of Scottish descent..) will discuss the morphology differences in placer gold between Nevis and Garibaldi.

That's something else GEL is good at, providing placements for geology students by the look of it. There will be another session by GNS covering new geothermal discovery work near Taupo. So plenty of links here to GEL, including some time spent on the blind Correnso deposit in Waihi, which may trend towards a GEL JV permit with Newmont.

Something for JB: a trailer mounted trommel system?