Transparency and standardisation in metal reconciliation reporting

摘要

Metal loss linked to poor operational reconciliation remains a widespread problem across the mineral sector. Geologists, engineers and metallurgists often face contradictory information while attempting to balance metal independently or collectively for virtually all selected time intervals. A process which is meant to quantify and resolve differences between resource and reserve depletion, together with mill production, is often opaque at the minesite level. Despite internationally recognised reporting code requirements, little process awareness exists in most corporate boardrooms and virtually no reconciliation information is made available to the investor. Notionally reliable resource, reserve and metal production data are reported annually or are available from listed companies. However, in the absence of contemporaneous and transparent depletion data by deposit, independent verification of well-established resource estimation, reserve exploitation and metal recovery factors remain hard, if not impossible to determine. Considering the widespread acceptance of prevailing unit cost and global financial reporting standards, it's noteworthy that such conspicuous metal accounting gaps persist across an entire industry. To examine the level of public reporting adherence, an analysis of a series of listed companies was undertaken across both commodity and market capitalisation for their nominal reconciliation factors. Individual companies were also informally surveyed in confidence to solicit salient production statistics for reconciliation factor re-calculation and verification.