I am very familiar with that ore Salty. Long before Tesoro De Alma or Nick were involved with it I viewed several authentic fire assays of that material, the material from the nearby Granite Peak Mine and 11 drill results from the strike going up the ridge. All of those are from the same deposit.
The Tesoro De Alma "mine" sits on Droltre Hole and is permitted to extract 25 yards underground of samples per session by hand and bucket - total 220 yards disturbance per year including road, access, tailings and pad work. I'm pretty sure Nick, like several before him, would like his "investors" to believe that the hole was dug by him and that the $50 limited "prospect and explore" permit from New Mexico means he has a "mine permit". There is no permitted or active mine there.
I only have a college level chemistry education so I'm not an expert on chemical extraction of ores but even with that bit of knowledge I can say no way in heck will HCl/H[SUP]2[/SUP]O[SUP]2[/SUP] succeed in processing that complex ore.
Back when the Granite Peak mine was in operation their returns were minimal, I think they were sending the ore to Douglas for smelting. Initially Granite Peak was operating their own leach pads. It was not a good refractory ore but it was rich enough to produce some receipts at the smelter. I've heard that Granite Peak was putting a sweetener on the ore by including Fluorite from the nearby Sunset prospect. In any case Douglas and the other southwest smelters eventually stopped processing small batches from outside mines and Granite Peak closed their operation.
The later Granite Peak mine site reclamation was being financed by sending the tailings to Montana for cyanide leach. That operation eventually became too expensive and was closed down. The receipts were not very good but there was a lot of experimentation going on to improve the returns. Just the expense of maintaining the semis carrying the sacked tailings that were getting tore up using the back lake road was a major expense for that operation. The mine isn't that remote but getting equipment into it has always been a problem. Of course trucking ore from rural central New Mexico to Montana wasn't cheap.
Word out of T or C is that Nick (Tesoro De Alma) finally got prosecuted and is now in prison. That's just a rumor but it seems to be one that a
lot of people are enjoying and the
local papers are having fun with.
Real fire assays don't lie and chemical reactions, no matter how complex, follow the same path given the same circumstances. The ore on that ridge behind Caballo is some of the richest I've ever seen but it's so complex it's never been very profitable to process. Nick claiming he used HCl/H[SUP]2[/SUP]O[SUP]2[/SUP] to process that ore is just one of the many reasons the ore is still in the ground. There may be ores being mined that are susceptible to HCl/H[SUP]2[/SUP]O[SUP]2[/SUP] but the Tesoro De Alma "investment opportunity" isn't one.
Heavy Pans
