TTM - Positive metwork, gold price keeps charging
Our gold-silver and copper Investment, Titan Minerals (ASX: TTM) just announced metallurgical testwork results from its Dynasty Gold Project in Ecuador.
Dynasty has a 3.1Moz gold and 22Moz silver JORC resource.
That should grow in a mid-year resource upgrade given recent drilling results too…
And with gold and silver rallying, it's a good time to de-risk the project.
Metwork is sometimes seen as not the most exciting thing for investors, but it is essential to a project's viability.
All of the testwork done during the exploration stage sets up the company to have the best processing flowsheet when the project is developed.
When it comes to metallurgical testing, we want to see high recoveries and more importantly conventional processing methods being used.
Conventional processing means low risk, and usually well understood costs.
TTM’s announcement today had a mix of both:
- High recoveries using industry standard processing - Initial metallurgical testwork achieved over 90% gold recoveries using conventional extraction processes
- Improved recoveries using flotation - delivering 94% gold and 95% silver recoveries to concentrate
(Source)
We see the above a good improvement on earlier metwork. (Read our Quick Take)
If TTM is able to devise a solid flowsheet, this will mean higher recoveries and ultimately make for a more profitable mine…
Metwork is also one of those things that a company is working on in the background all the way through to development so we would expect to see more news from TTM on this front over the coming months/years.
We noticed in today’s announcement that the next stage of works would include other aspects of processing to try and further optimise today’s results.
We think the ~90% recoveries are already solid, so any improvement will be welcome news.
(Source)
We now look ahead to further results across the following milestones…
What’s next for TTM?
More drilling at Dynasty gold project 🔄
TTM has ~2,200m of drilling left at its Dynasty gold project after completing 31 diamond holes for 7,780 metres of the 10,000m program as of its most recent drilling update.
We expect the company to complete this drilling over the coming period and set itself up for a resource upgrade.
Resource upgrade/update at Dynasty 🔲
By mid-year we expect TTM to publish a resource upgrade over its Dynasty Project.
Drilling results from the Linderos Copper project 🔄
10,000m of drilling has been completed.
We should expect the results of this project to be announced over the next couple of months.
Read our latest note on TTM below:
