1. Share buyback requires regulatory approval and would take time and money for the filing and approval process. It's much quicker and cheaper to distribute the cash as return of capital to SH.

I agree that it would be more work, however I think it would be more valuable in the long run - unless we are, as many imagine (optimistically I think), we are bought out right after drill results. Given that they basically no longer have to do much work on SC as Teck is the operator - I don't see why they can't handle that amount of work.

2. From the SH's standpoint, many would prefer cash distribution as they can use the cash whichever way they want.

From a SH's standpoint, I would rather the money be spent in the way that generates the best value creation. It's sad to think that management thinks that straight cash is more valuable to shareholders for a non-cash generating company than reinvesting it into the company via growth (whether that's acquisition of properties in a down market or drilling properties we already have) or that they think there is more value in giving us our money back than in our own shares.

3. Finally, share buy back is not supposed to be used as a tool to manipulate the sp, that's illegal, and there are restrictions as to number and timing (how many and how fast) of the buyback process, just to avoid the artificial price jump.

I didn't mean to say that we should be looking to manipulate our share price. I believe our share price would just go up, and more so over the long term because of it. Increase in volume leads to more traders, upwards direction leads to those traders themselves creating momentum which attracts more players (increasing volume and share price). Even if that didn't happen - I'm sure everyone agrees that we're undervalued - if we even just got to $1 - that's a double on our investment from managements point of view versus 1 for 1 as cash back to us. Again, even if it does nothing to the share price, reducing the float by 20M (I don't think they'd get that many, but if it did nothing to the SP it would be something in that range).

To keep the numbers easy, if we got $1B for SC and we have 400M shares - that's $2.50 a share. If we had the same buyout price, but 380M shares, we'd get bought out for $2.63. Much more than 2 and a half cents there. Again, they'd be able to do this over time and if they needed the money for other things they'd have it opposed to potentially being in trouble with money at a later point too.