Excellent post General. I agree with your summary of how the BFS scenario will play out.

I really hope that BFS comes out in th later half of January for the selfish reasons of being on holidays over the the preceeding 3 weeks and TSFA purposes. The Euro situation is another reason. Iran is becoming more ominous in my mind. Europeans can print their way out of the financial situation.

The apparently accelerating Iran nuke stand off may be farther along than we think with the suspicious 'explosions' at key sites in Iran and the bad luck that Iran's scientists have been having with exploding motor bikes. The Iran situation has the potential to ignite the entire mid-east and beyond.

The 120 period which Teck has to decide will give us plenty of time to get all or most of the 2011 drill results. Teck will have the drills in mind and will be interested in each one till it is satisfied that it has seen enough. At some point the drills have to stop and a decision needs to be made. Looking back, a bigger, earlier drill programme still seems like a good idea...The third and 4th drills arriving in Sept for a couple of holes puzzles me.

The (potential) Teck earn-back and sale of CUU are two seperate events though they are not mutually exclusive since the value and sale of CUU depends on the degree of earn in (0%, 20%, 40%, 75%).

Tech may already have a really good idea about what it wants from SC & CUU due to their vantage point. They could make a decision faster than we think (i.e. the day of the BFS delivery) or they may take the entire 120 days.

Teck may even have eyes on the un-released cores for the obvious, visible indications of what they contain and how that relates to their understanding of the poryphry system(s) (i.e. visible mineralization vrs non-visible). Since CUU has not spoken of any of the visual characteristics of pending cores (as they have regularly done in the past with some of our best cores) they may not be as sexy as we would hope. It is also very possible that Elmer has left the visible descriptions aside for these remaining cores to keep our potentially wild expectations in check.

IMHO, the 'for sale' sign has been up on CUU for a while now to see what kind of interest is out there and to get a feel for the market conditions for such an asset - as well as pressuring Teck a bit. This is a somewhat half hearted attemp to sell CUU since everyone knows that the Teck Agreement is such a wild card.

As far as Teck needing to sign off in BFS... I read the agreement to mean that the BFS is to be set up using certain clear parameters (production tonnage, discount rate, NPV of $1 or more, etc). Teck may have added some operational suggestions to be incorporated. If all of the parameters and operational tweeks were put into the final, completed BFS, then Teck doesn't have any option but to accept it as it is. Elmer may well allow Teck a review of a draft so that Teck can verify its parameters are incorporated properly and sign off on those aspects. After that, the BFS is what it is, no going back.

jmho