Competitive Advantages of SORDMiner
The SORDMiner technology offers a number of compelling economic, environmental and safety benefits, which would make it commercially attractive. These include:
Economic Benefits
- Accessing resources currently inaccessible to conventional mining technology including previously uneconomic, inaccessible and environmentally protected deposits
- Exploration Risk removed - SORDMiner will predominantly be used to mine historically documented deposits.
- Low capital and operating costs
- SORD Head projected cost sub $2million
- Mineral sands operating costs could be as little as $1-3/t
- Deep Lead gold extraction at $US80/oz
- Low site establishment and decommissioning cost due to its limited entry ‘footprint'.
- Reduced establishment and decommissioning times
- Enriched ore delivered to surface
- Elimination of the requirement for overburden removal, resulting in significant energy and cost savings per tonne of ore mined
- Further enriched head grade during mining, as coarse material is screened out at the tool head
- No change to water table no pumping costs
