"Would you be able to hazard a "wild" guess as to the difference in grade between the Black Thor and the Big Daddy resource? .......please...nothing to involved, just a conservative guess.
Also
Does this translate into making BD a target superior enough for a Cliffs to move it ahead of their BT oportunity?"
Perhaps I could shed some light on this. I emailed KWG yesterday asking much the same question. Chris called me back and we discussed the advantages of Big Daddy. Hopefully I get the comparison right. He gave me this example.
Lets say you had an open pit on both Big Daddy and Black Thor, and assuming mining costs on both pits were equal (for comparison sake)
Black Thor is believed to contain 32% chrome
Big Daddy is believed to contain 38% chrome (conservative estimation)
If both open pits mined 1,000,000 tons of ore per year, the Big Daddy deposit would be giving you an extra 6% profit because the same ton of ore shipped contains 6% more chrome. I can't give you a dollar figure on that, because no one knows exactly what the mining costs will be, but Big Daddy would provide a bonus of 6% profit over Black Thor.The 1,000,000 tons of ore mined per year in Big Daddy would actually contain 60,000 tons more chromite than the 1,000,000 tons mined out of Black Thor. Do that for say, 10 years, and you can see that there will be a substantial amount af added profit for no additional cost over the Black Thor option.
Tell me Walmart wouldn't like to add 6% to their bottom line at no additional cost.
Also, when you're feeding richer ore in a refinery, your refining costs per ton are lowered.
Hope this helps
SRV