Under the old agreement they either had to do it or get off the pot.
I don't think that is true. There was nothing in the Salazar agreement that required them to put the mine into production, it specifically stated the decision was all theirs.
Under Salazar they had to declare their intent to earn back a certain percentage and then start doing work to fulfill that commitment.
Under Salazar they could have declared their intent to earn-back 75%, then put in about $10 million worth of work and given us no cash. We would have been in the exact same position we are in now but without having had any cash for the past year. We would not have had Van Dyke or Carmax and we would have been forced to dilute in order to survive and wait for Teck to make a decision.
At any point Teck could have decided they were no longer interested and stopped working on the project. They could have walked away and lost their chance at earning back, but presumably at that point it would have been worth nothing.
We would have been left high and dry and there probably wouldn't have been another major in the world interested in buying us out.
I think Teck is very keen on this project and that's why they structured the JV this way, and why they kept the Liard shares in their name, and why they transferred the claims into their name. I think they gave us the $20M to keep us afloat while they did their optimizations and will save that further $40M by buying us out before the production decision.