Re: Soon...
in response to
by
posted on
Oct 25, 2012 08:40PM
CUU own 25% Schaft Creek: proven/probable min. reserves/940.8m tonnes = 0.27% copper, 0.19 g/t gold, 0.018% moly and 1.72 g/t silver containing: 5.6b lbs copper, 5.8m ounces gold, 363.5m lbs moly and 51.7m ounces silver; (Recoverable CuEq 0.46%)
I think the reduced PP is a signal that things are wrapping up. The final outstanding bills for the drilling and reporst are coming in and the property acquisitions have settled down.
I don't follow teck that closely but I thought the recent conference call and supporting documents seemed a bit more copper centric than previous reports. Shelving QB2 to late 2013 is a point in our favour as well as the high cost - a lot of which is about building a port.
I see a push away from South America while there has been a subtle 'tell' that there is more interest in Canada. It is encouraging to see that Highland Valley is a good earner for TCK too.
Someone I can't recall recently mentioned that SC wasn't that long lived a project compared to some of the big South American tck projects. I think the current resource shaved down to about 900m tonnes as suggested earlier would probably be about 20 yrs at 120ktpd operation.
We have to remember that Paramount is open to the north, east and to depth. Generally, the best grades are at depth - and are a lot of our Inferred resource. Also Discovery and Mike are mineralized. Discovery is described currently to be a similar size to Paramount. Mike is only a bit smaller than Discovery. Together they amount to a lot of potential and a lot of needed drilling.
While I have no doubt that our BFS will be a robust plan in every regard, however it will not incorporate that mine beneath the mine where our 2010-11 drills stopped. Maybe an underground aspect could be justified for the rich depths of Schaft Creek but more likely a new super pit reaching these depths and beyond. I think that issue might warrant anyone purchasing the project to do more drilling with the very depths and extentions of mineralization in mind to come up with a new FS that encapsulates the entire life of the entire economic deposit(s). That is a further incentive to buy the project from CUU and realize the benefit from planning and mining it right from start to finish.
The close proximity of the Discovery and Mike mineralizations also confound the SC BFS as I think the new pit will encapsulate the southern ends of both - even though they are not in the RE. In order to go deep at Paramount the pit slope needs to encroach on these two zones so I think folks will want to know what that means to the operation (grades, processing, metals) and the economics. Another good reason for a majour to lift this sprawling project out of our hands and put it thru a robust 40 year plan which would include a lot of drilling and studies.
Luckily the scope of our Agreement with TCK only requires us to put out a BFS on the SC deposit and we can avoid the massive creep in scope of digesting all these issues into a single plan if that is possible.
jmho