What do you need for a successful mine? Los Azules, TNR.v, CZX.v, MAI.to, AND.to

With a grass roots projects developing into a resource, and advancing to pre-feasibility reports and eventual production, it's a good idea to understand what's involved in a mining project.

1. The pit (ore body open pit)
(see left image)
Congrats, you found high grade % copper, now what?

The ideal scenario involves digging a humongous hole in the ground, via a systematic earth removal process such that you create the leftover open pit as shown on the left.

2. Transport the Ore (heavy rocks)

Ore, unprocessed, is worth very little. Naturally, you'd have your precious gold or copper mixed with ordinary rocks and other byproducts.

The idea here is to minimize the distance you have to transport these to your processing belt or factory, so you can start crushing and filtering out the valuable bits!

As you can see driving heavy duty 500 tonne trucks up these large pits can be quite costly on gas!

3. Start refining your ore

Once you have the ore at your factory it's time to fire up the conveyor belt. Crushing, refining, leaching, are all typical ways to separate your high grade minerals from the low-grade rocks. Do this well enough and you should be able to retain 90%+ of your estimated resource from raw ore - that is to say you don't waste too much in the way of getting rid of minerals within the ore during the separation process!

From there it goes through several steps of refinement until you reach a sellable end product for your customers - usually in forms of molly, raw mineral products, and in some cases finished pellets for melting into final products.

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4. Disposal of waste and tailings

Wait, you think the government and environmental agencies will let you leave a big hole with waste rocks lying around after you extract the valuable minerals? Not quite!

Tailings (also known as slimes, tailings pile, tails, leach residue, or slickens^[1]) are the materials left over^[2] after the process of separating the valuable fraction from the worthless fraction (gangue) of an ore.

To properly dispose of these tailings (often still riddled with chemicals from acid leaching and chemical separation processes), significant efforts are put in to make sure environmental impacts are minimized.
Some would argue, tailings and waste process facilities are the single biggest economic barriers to a mine being successful.

Further, you'd want to have a site nearby (ideally downhill) where you can, for a low cost, get rid of your tailings and pile them up for isolation processing later.

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Hopefully that's helpful!

Back to Los Azules, it sure makes you wonder how Minera Andes (MAI.TO) will get their pre-feasibility and mine started without ownership of Escorpio IV??

Last we checked, junior miner TNR Gold Corp (TNR.V) controls that project 100%. Given how important tailings pond facility and waste disposals are to a mine, you'd think Minera Andes would want to work with TNR?

http://www.tnrgoldcorp.com/s/NewsReleases.asp?ReportID=303323&_Type=News-Room&_Title=Escorpio-IV-Ownership-Update

From Minera Andes's very own Prelimenary Assessment, outlining their mine plan on Los Azules, we have pulled together charts from different pages.
I think from looking at images (from Minera Andes) themselves, that Escorpio IV is clearly not in their possession...and that their engineers are optimized the mine plan so that both the tailing pond and waste management facilities lie right on Escorpio IV.