U.S. Mine Makers Pilot Ore Processing Plant Currently Under Construction
U.S. Mine Makers, Inc. is pleased to provide an operational update for USMM investors regarding the company’s recent ore processing activities including research, testing and processing production plans.
For the past several months the company’s metallurgists, chemists and engineers have been actively engaged in gold and platinum group metals (PGM) recovery at a pilot recovery and test facility in Nampa, Idaho. The company has been conducting 5 pound pulls and sending recovered metals to independent labs for analysis. Their recovery efforts and testing have resulted in outstanding recovery results of 3.7032 grams of gold per 5 lbs of ore concentrate.
The company is constructing a portable pilot plant that will allow 500 lb. pulls per day and construction of that portable pilot plant is scheduled to be completed in mid September of this year. At that time, given the company’s verified and repeatable recovery results, USMM expects to begin production processing using the 500 lb. processing plant. Assuming the company processes one 500 lb. pull per day, the gold-only yield will be 370.32 grams of gold per day. At 28.35 grams per oz. the pilot plant will be able to produce 13 oz. of pure gold per day and assuming a 20 day work month, the company expects to recover 260 oz. per month. At today’s gold spot market price of around $914 per oz. the expected recovered gold utilizing the pilot plant will be in the neighborhood of $240,000 per month. The source ore concentrate the company will be processing contains high levels of platinum group metals, and recovery of those platinum group metals will yield additional revenues.
Revenues from the pilot plant operations will be used to fund operations and additional research, but will primarily be used to complete construction of the full scale production plant. The company expects the full scale plant to be operational in Q4, 2008. The full scale production plant will be capable of processing 5 tons (10,000 lbs) of ore per day. Extrapolating the gold recovery rates to the full scale production plant should yield 5,200 oz. of gold per month with a market value at today’s spot market gold price ($914 per oz) of around $4.75M of gold per month. The recovery procedure will also be applied to the extraction of platinum group metals from the concentrate yielding additional revenues.
U.S. Mine Makers CEO Ronald Bell stated, “We are extremely pleased the results of our metallurgists, chemists and engineer’s efforts in the last several months. We are recovering gold every day in a repeatable fashion in our lab. The pilot plant will help us realize substantial revenue and cash flow enabling us to fund the build out of our full scale production plant. This is an exciting time for our company and for USMM investors as we move from a research and testing phase into a production and recovery phase within the company. We expect to be up and running with our pilot production plant in September and our goal is to have our full scale production plant operational in the fourth quarter.”
About U.S. Mine Makers, Inc.
U.S. Mine Makers, Inc. is a mining and exploration company using “eco-friendly” technology to recover precious metals such as gold and platinum group metals from high grade ore concentrate and rock. Besides its precious metals mining operations, the company also prides itself as an “eco-friendly” mine restoration company that uses its own modern technology to clean up toxic mine sites. The company motto is, “We Clean the Planet — One Mine Site at a Time.” U.S. Mine Makers, Inc. has executive offices in Palm Desert, California and maintains a web site at: http://www.usminemakers.com.
