Renergen proves how hard mining is
Investing in junior miners isn’t for the fainthearted, but patience can have its rewards
Mining is tough, often yielding just a couple of grams of commodity per ton of rock extracted. And, at the end of the day, you’re a price-taker. You try to control costs and the process, but if the commodity price goes against you, even the best miners struggle.
Then there are new projects and they’re always mega in scale. The Gold Fields Salares Norte project took 13 years from discovery to production. The project was then halted by the Chilean government and ultimately Gold Fields revised production down from “the previously indicated gold equivalent ounces range of 220koz-240koz, to 90koz-180koz”. That’s a giant downward revision and in part depends on the weather, which is uncontrollable...
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