News

June 09, 2008

Rambler Metals Presses On Towards Feasibility

By Alastair Ford

The scoping study at Rambler’s Ming mine is now complete. On to the pre-feasibility stage, as a more detailed mining plan for the eventual 4,000 tonnes per day underground operation that’s envisaged is now being devised by SRK. Thus far, the plan is to produce a copper concentrate with gold and silver credits, over a life of mine of 12 years. Some of the more potent zones have produced recoveries of over 98 per cent, although metallurgical work as conducted by SGS LaKefield did throw up some issues with other areas of the mine, and Rambler will now look at optimizing the recovery circuits in response to those findings. Full details won’t go into the public domain, however, as the scoping study was conducted on the basis of an historic resource not compliant with 43-101 standards, and can thus legally only be regarded as “conceptual” in nature.

Still, there’s a resource estimate in the market now, and there’ll be another one out later this year. Overall the Rambler property is currently known to contain nearly 230,000 tonnes of contained copper, nearly 150,000 ounces of gold, over 400,000 ounces of silver, and just under 7,500 tonnes of zinc. That’s enough to be getting on with, and even if the lawyers have laid down that the scoping study is only “conceptual” at this stage, they won’t have any such scruples by the time the...