Auric eyes $4.5M windfall from final Jeffreys Find WA mining campaign
The ore is now being processed at Focus Minerals' Three Mile Hill mill in Coolgardie, tying a bow on Auric's 30,000-ounce total gold target from Jeffreys Find. The final push is projected to generate up to $9 million in surplus cash. Auric's 50:50 share is expected to be between $4 million and $4.5 million.
Under the joint venture, Kalgoorlie-based BML will again carry the mining, haulage and milling costs for Jeffreys Find. Auric says it has already invoiced BML for a $3.6 million interim distribution to be paid in July and August, with final accounting slated for the next quarter.
Auric has closely studied BML's toll treating strategy, as it looks to replicate the joint venture's success and mining practices at its latest and largest flagship Munda gold project, just up the road from Jeffreys Find.
'Auric will bank more than $17 million in total from its profit share of the mining at Jeffreys Find.'
Auric Mining managing director Mark English
Auric Mining managing director Mark English said: 'This has been a game-changer for us as we transition to becoming a gold producer in our own right. These additional funds will principally be used to support the operations already underway at Munda.'
The Jeffreys Find project has been a financial springboard for Auric. With its $17 million war chest from its share of gold sales, the company will now deploy its fully funded mining operation at the 125,000-tonne starter pit, which is already underway at Munda. The initial pit is targeting a minimum 6100 ounces at 1.8 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from a broader resource at Munda of 3.65 million tonnes grading 1.23g/t gold for 145,000 ounces.
The 145,000-ounce Munda deposit is one of the largest undeveloped gold resources in the Kalgoorlie region, which is a key factor in Auric securing a lucrative toll treatment agreement with mid-cap gold producer Black Cat Syndicate for the Munda starter pit ore.
Black Cat has opened its gates to Auric and will process ore at its currently under-capacity Lakewood mill in Kalgoorlie. Spare capacity is an absolute rarity in the region. The soaring gold price means toll treating options have become notoriously hard to find and the region's mills are reportedly backed up well into 2027.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
AU Financial Review
3 hours ago
- AU Financial Review
Famed tea growers' WA farm in new hands after sale exceeding $50m
The Oaks, a prominent West Australian farm associated with the descendants of a British tea entrepreneur, has been sold to a local farmer for more than $50 million after just 11 days on the market. About 45 kilometres west of Esperance, on the state's south coast, the 5,313-hectare property has been an award-winning sheep farming enterprise run by the Malaysia-based Russell family.
Sydney Morning Herald
8 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
The clean energy era is arriving. Is your power company ready?
As long as the lights stay on and power bills aren't too high, most of us aren't overly fussed about who supplies our electricity. That may be about to change, executives in the industry believe, as Australians' booming uptake of solar panels and batteries radically reshapes the market, sending customers searching for the most effective plans to help run their homes on cheap or free energy and profit from selling surplus solar to the grid. Origin Energy was first among the nation's big power companies to start preparing for a future that looks something like this. Five years ago, it purchased a minority stake in UK-based power retailing disruptor Octopus Energy and, with it, the perpetual licence to use its market-leading customer software platform, known as Kraken, in Australia. 'Just like in fintech, there is a digital revolution in energy,' Octopus co-founder Greg Jackson explains. The heart of Kraken is its advanced data and machine learning capability, which collapses multiple legacy customer-service functions, like billing, sales and meter enquiries, into just the one, avoiding the need to bounce callers between departments, and cutting down the company's 'cost to serve'. But perhaps its most important feature in the accelerating shift to green energy is its ability to give customers access to real-time variable power pricing (think Uber as opposed to taxis), and products that automate when to run households' solar panels or hot-water units, charge electric cars and discharge batteries based on when they will get the best price. Octopus, it turned out, was onto something. In less than 10 years, it has gone from a tech start-up selling energy to zero customers to 7.5 million accounts – more than a quarter of all homes in Britain – and is considered one of the world's most valuable unicorns. Its Kraken platform, meanwhile, has proven so successful that it is licensed to utilities in 18 countries. Now, Kraken is poised to be spun out into a standalone entity with a possible valuation of up to £10 billion ($20 billion), according to British media reports earlier this week. Australian investment analysts at UBS and Macquarie value Kraken considerably less than that – UBS's Tom Allen assumes a valuation of £3.4 billion ($7 billion) to £5.8 billion, depending on its growth in sales. Either way, he says, Origin had made a 'fantastic' investment and may be headed for a considerable payday. But Kraken is paying off for Origin in more ways than that, says Jon Briskin, the company's executive general manager of retail. Since Origin migrated its 4.7 million Australian customers onto Kraken in 2023, customer loyalty scores have lifted, customer churn has been falling and complaints to the ombudsman have been fewer. Loading In a fast-changing world where more customers have solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, the tech has also enabled Origin to become more nimble in developing and rolling out futuristic retail products, such as the EV Power Up. With more than 2 million EVs projected to be on the road by 2030, the product means customers can use their app to nominate when they want their EV charged by, and the software automatically chooses the best times of day to charge at an ultra-low capped rate of 8¢ a kilowatt-hour (that could charge up a Tesla Model Y for $5). With home battery uptake on the brink of surging since the Albanese government this month introduced rebates wiping 30 per cent off the cost, Kraken has also given Origin an edge in building out its 'virtual power plant' (VPP) network, whereby Origin pays customers a fee to let it aggregate the energy stored across thousands of their homes. Origin's VPP called Loop – a far-flung network of interconnected household devices including solar panels, batteries, electric cars and appliances that can be ramped up or down to inject bursts of energy into the grid or help address imbalances – is the biggest in the nation, with more than 400,000 devices under orchestration. Briskin says the Loop virtual power plant today sits at 1.5 gigawatts – bigger than a typical coal-fired power station. 'This orchestration is real, it's here, it's building fast,' Briskin says. 'I certainly feel like we are at a competitive advantage to have that technology that can move at greater speed.' While the value of Kraken to Origin's operations today overwhelmingly stems from the lower cost to serve customers, its ability to expand VPPs and co-ordinate household electricity usage and output would become increasingly critical in the fight for customers in the future, UBS's Tom Allen says. 'Energy retailing in the next five to 10 years will be won by who has the best technology to orchestrate behind-the-meter loads and be able to offer incentives to customers and dynamic pricing signals,' he says. 'That's what the future model will look like – it makes sense to be investing in that extra capability now.' While not everyone will be hyper-engaged and may not want to think about optimal times to run appliances, more than 80 per cent of Origin customers are already 'digital-only', Briskin says, with many simply using their app to track their energy usage, and receive alerts if it is trending too high. Origin is not alone in recognising the need to more efficiently manage customers and their energy usage in the shift to cleaner, more dispersed sources of power. We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision. Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer Last year, AGL snapped up a 20 per cent stake in the scalable and flexible Kaluza technology platform for $150 million, and has begun the process of migrating its 4 million power and gas customers in the coming years. Key drivers behind its adoption of the platform were the need to bring new and innovative energy retail products to the market more quickly in response to customers' fast-changing needs, says Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer. 'We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision … it's a completely different model,' says Egan. 'When you are working in a world like we are now, where the energy market is changing so frequently, the best situation is that you can deploy and innovate products quite rapidly and at low cost.'
The Age
8 hours ago
- The Age
The clean energy era is arriving. Is your power company ready?
As long as the lights stay on and power bills aren't too high, most of us aren't overly fussed about who supplies our electricity. That may be about to change, executives in the industry believe, as Australians' booming uptake of solar panels and batteries radically reshapes the market, sending customers searching for the most effective plans to help run their homes on cheap or free energy and profit from selling surplus solar to the grid. Origin Energy was first among the nation's big power companies to start preparing for a future that looks something like this. Five years ago, it purchased a minority stake in UK-based power retailing disruptor Octopus Energy and, with it, the perpetual licence to use its market-leading customer software platform, known as Kraken, in Australia. 'Just like in fintech, there is a digital revolution in energy,' Octopus co-founder Greg Jackson explains. The heart of Kraken is its advanced data and machine learning capability, which collapses multiple legacy customer-service functions, like billing, sales and meter enquiries, into just the one, avoiding the need to bounce callers between departments, and cutting down the company's 'cost to serve'. But perhaps its most important feature in the accelerating shift to green energy is its ability to give customers access to real-time variable power pricing (think Uber as opposed to taxis), and products that automate when to run households' solar panels or hot-water units, charge electric cars and discharge batteries based on when they will get the best price. Octopus, it turned out, was onto something. In less than 10 years, it has gone from a tech start-up selling energy to zero customers to 7.5 million accounts – more than a quarter of all homes in Britain – and is considered one of the world's most valuable unicorns. Its Kraken platform, meanwhile, has proven so successful that it is licensed to utilities in 18 countries. Now, Kraken is poised to be spun out into a standalone entity with a possible valuation of up to £10 billion ($20 billion), according to British media reports earlier this week. Australian investment analysts at UBS and Macquarie value Kraken considerably less than that – UBS's Tom Allen assumes a valuation of £3.4 billion ($7 billion) to £5.8 billion, depending on its growth in sales. Either way, he says, Origin had made a 'fantastic' investment and may be headed for a considerable payday. But Kraken is paying off for Origin in more ways than that, says Jon Briskin, the company's executive general manager of retail. Since Origin migrated its 4.7 million Australian customers onto Kraken in 2023, customer loyalty scores have lifted, customer churn has been falling and complaints to the ombudsman have been fewer. Loading In a fast-changing world where more customers have solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, the tech has also enabled Origin to become more nimble in developing and rolling out futuristic retail products, such as the EV Power Up. With more than 2 million EVs projected to be on the road by 2030, the product means customers can use their app to nominate when they want their EV charged by, and the software automatically chooses the best times of day to charge at an ultra-low capped rate of 8¢ a kilowatt-hour (that could charge up a Tesla Model Y for $5). With home battery uptake on the brink of surging since the Albanese government this month introduced rebates wiping 30 per cent off the cost, Kraken has also given Origin an edge in building out its 'virtual power plant' (VPP) network, whereby Origin pays customers a fee to let it aggregate the energy stored across thousands of their homes. Origin's VPP called Loop – a far-flung network of interconnected household devices including solar panels, batteries, electric cars and appliances that can be ramped up or down to inject bursts of energy into the grid or help address imbalances – is the biggest in the nation, with more than 400,000 devices under orchestration. Briskin says the Loop virtual power plant today sits at 1.5 gigawatts – bigger than a typical coal-fired power station. 'This orchestration is real, it's here, it's building fast,' Briskin says. 'I certainly feel like we are at a competitive advantage to have that technology that can move at greater speed.' While the value of Kraken to Origin's operations today overwhelmingly stems from the lower cost to serve customers, its ability to expand VPPs and co-ordinate household electricity usage and output would become increasingly critical in the fight for customers in the future, UBS's Tom Allen says. 'Energy retailing in the next five to 10 years will be won by who has the best technology to orchestrate behind-the-meter loads and be able to offer incentives to customers and dynamic pricing signals,' he says. 'That's what the future model will look like – it makes sense to be investing in that extra capability now.' While not everyone will be hyper-engaged and may not want to think about optimal times to run appliances, more than 80 per cent of Origin customers are already 'digital-only', Briskin says, with many simply using their app to track their energy usage, and receive alerts if it is trending too high. Origin is not alone in recognising the need to more efficiently manage customers and their energy usage in the shift to cleaner, more dispersed sources of power. We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision. Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer Last year, AGL snapped up a 20 per cent stake in the scalable and flexible Kaluza technology platform for $150 million, and has begun the process of migrating its 4 million power and gas customers in the coming years. Key drivers behind its adoption of the platform were the need to bring new and innovative energy retail products to the market more quickly in response to customers' fast-changing needs, says Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer. 'We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision … it's a completely different model,' says Egan. 'When you are working in a world like we are now, where the energy market is changing so frequently, the best situation is that you can deploy and innovate products quite rapidly and at low cost.'
