Flawed Leaching Strategy Decisions from Inaccurate Inventory Data

$20M–$40M per decision cycle from lower recovered ounces, higher unit costs, and lost premium opportunities in jewelry markets due to unreliable output and recovery shortfalls. • $30M–$60M per decision cycle in lost or delayed recoveries from suboptimal leach strategies, continued metal lockup in low‑permeability zones, and misaligned production guidance to battery customers that drives penalties, lost premia, and deferred revenue. • $30M–$80M per planning cycle from conservative under‑leaching or over‑leaching of pads, mispriced long‑term contracts, liquidated damages for missed deliveries, and unnecessary capex on new pads instead of unlocking existing inventory.

Cross‑functional reviews where mine planning, metallurgy, and finance manually reconcile leach inventories and recovery curves in spreadsheets and PowerPoint, often using rough recovery factors by ore type without explicit modeling of low‑permeability 'bad ore' requiring special treatment. • Engineering, metallurgy, and mine planning teams manually stitch together disparate data (survey tonnages, lab assays, limited column tests, historic leach curves) in Excel and ad‑hoc models to approximate pad performance instead of a hydrology-based 3D inventory model. • Historical pad performance assumptions, manual spreadsheet projections based on incomplete core data, email negotiations with smelter buyers