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It's an agenda with a whiff of desperation! If he's shorted this, he's in serious trouble!
With the amount of production stopes that will be open in the new year maintaining 1350tpd should be easy, as there will be consistently several thousand tonnes of broken ore to be mucked in the stopes. Providing the scoop and truck availability is there its not a problem.
With regards to holding the production levels, the key to that is mine planning - the mine has the personnel and funding to support that.
I think its wise to be Conservative the grade Tardis and yours is a fair shout. Personally I don't see an issue with the 2% as the drilling results from the LFZ are consistently above 2%.
The mine operates 355 days per year. Production is limited by a mill capacity of 1350tpd (480,000 tpa) The first stage to relieving this bottleneck is to add the ore sorting plant, which rejects the waste before the mill. This will increase production to 1850tpd (650,000 tpa).
Without knowing the funding criteria for the SPF, its impossible to know if grant funding is likely. On the first round of objective one money, it certainly would have qualified but on the following rounds would have been very unlikely.
It's possible the government could provide assistance for the water treatment plant build on the grounds of environmental improvements in the red river, where the water quality below the Roscroggan adit Portal is poor.
A lot of the problems at Wolf were pretty clear to experienced people in the area. MT has done the one thing that the management of Wolf didn't in the early days - listen to them.
Devon and Cornwall in particular are home to some of the world's finest process engineers - this is out of nessecity - wheal Jane had a mineralogy that nobody knew how to tackle and the latter days of crofty required a skill set that was verging on alchemy due to the depressed tin price. To not use this resource was fatal to Wolf - they handed the design to a company with no knowledge of the mineralogy, no experience of the friability and no know how of what techniques are successful in the area.
This should and probably will be a success. Ultimately a lot of people got their fingers burnt here and its a bit like the current situation at Rambler where people need to see it to believe it.
Just checked the council planning site, the submission has already been made for Wellington Deeps
https://planning.cornwall.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=R19RZTFG1FD00
I'm a strong believer that all thallenges can and will be overcome, but it will take a lot of time and effort - having witnessed and fought the challenges that crofty were faced with 10 years, I'm under no illusion how difficult it is.
People in the devoran/restronguet areas are a very different audience to Camborne/Redruth.
The former are generally very rich incomers who o will have no intetest in seeing a mine in their area. The latter are generally of local heritage, with mining etched in their memories, longing for the high paid jobs it can bring.
Wellington deeps would be heavily tin focused with potential copper, zinc and silver credits.
The biggest issue in the area will be pumping, while technically doable, public opinion isn't going to be as straightforward as crofty.
The aftermath of Jane's closure is still etched on people's mind - there was the initial release of heavily contaminated water and the longer term toxic rivers - so there will be a fight out there.
I've just read a letter drop from the twelveads area, they are currently preparing a GPDO application to start drilling the Wellington Deeps in the new year, with a public consultation event in early Novemer
From that interview, Steve is here for one reason and one reason alone - get crofty reopened.
Off shore wind is something being investigated, with a proposal to connect a trial onto the wave hub. The challenge for offshore wind here is the depth of water. Conventional offshore turbines are piled into the seabed, but the depth of water off of Cornwall is too deep for that to be feasible, so the plan is to create floating turbines, but if you imagine the forces being created by even a relatively small 2Mw turbine, they are enormous, so stopping the things moving is a challenge.
On the smelter front, a company investing in building a smelter in the UK would be taking a massive risk, as if the local mines failed, their own business would fail shortly behind.
By securing the baseload generation you wouldn't have intermittency
As you mention, moving power around is a massive issue in Cornwall. We have a massive amount of embedded generation, but the irregularities of it cause huge issues - sometimes we are importing power, others we are exporting.
The problem is you basically have to design for the two extremes, you can have maximum wind and solar generation at a time of minimum demand (say a Sunday afternoon) or you could have minimal generation at a time of maximum demand - say a January weekday evening about 6pm when we are sitting in an Atlantic High - so no wind or solar.
The next issue is the areas of maximum solar and wind generation are areas of minimal load, I.e. rural areas, as tgat is where the land is available for panels and turbines, so you then need to overcome the issue of moving the power around locally.
Storage projects such as batteries and pump store schemes are going to become essential to overcoming this issue, as is low footprint embedded baseload generation I.e. Deep Geothermal.
Getting significant amounts of power out of Cornwall is going to be a huge issue, as ultimately its geography makes large numbers of transmission routes difficult - the best options maybe DC interconnections to Wales/Ireland/France. Of course the alternative is to create large load customers in the area - battery gigafactories/mines/factories.
Nugget pond is the mill
Probably Ausmelt
It's definitely an exciting time!
Thanks VII, did they give any timescales on Carnkie?
9n a slightly different but related note, it could be interesting to see what todays news on heat pumps does for Kensa in truro