Unfortunately ECU does not have funding like a Barrick or Goldcorp to put 15 drills on their property. They have done a wonderful job of drilling mineralized veins and have increased their 43-101 measured, indicated and inferred resources many fold in the last few years. Even though they have discovered this vast resource, there is possibly double the amount of resource that is currently in the potential category. It will require additional drilling to move this mineralization from the potential category to the measured category that will be neccesary for a feasibility study. In other words, it would be counterproductive of ECU to spend millions of dollars on a feasibility study before they know what they have.

Some of the major silver producers have minimal reserves and resources on their books, but mine large quantities of silver. This is the case for Couer and Hecla plus others. They focus their attention on mining and not on feasibility studies. Since they are majors, they are able to self fund or get investment money based on the fact that the operations have been profitable in the past and not based on feasibility studies.