Think of it this way. Whatever you as the buying company pays for the project/company gets included in your costs when they run your NPV. So if a company ran a NPV for Albany without their acquisition costs and got a NPV of $180 million they could theoretically pay up to $3/sh and still make their normal return on the project. That said companies want to make more then their normal return so they would negotiate as low an acquisition cost as possible and pocket the difference as future profit.

A few words of caution. First, CIM recommends a discount rate of 11-15 % for industrial mineral deposits that do not have contractual arrangement for the purchase of their production because selling the product is not a given as with gold (5-6% discount rate). Second, we can make some comparitive guesses on capital, mining and processes costs but we don't know what they are. If they are high NPV drops and vs versa. Third, we don't know what markets we will be produce for or what the price of the various graphite products will be. All three factors can change the NPV calculation from being hopelessly negative to stupendously positive and everything in between.

The other factor is as these variables in the NPV become more certain the discount rate drops. If the buyer is someone like Panasonic they will use a discount rate more in line with Mark's 5% because they know the market and have existing buyers. If it is someone like Teck they might use 8% because they are sure about the mining side but not as sure about the product side. For us don't be surprised if we are in the teens for a discount rate unless we have an offtake agreement in which case we might see 7-9%. Also the more certainty around product specification, the closer we are to production and more certain we are of the nature of the deposit the higher the NPV will be in all cases.

So as you can see right know we don't have a lot of certainty around the NPV inputs and thetefore any NPV calculation is a loose working guess. The pessimists say all the costs are high and our product stinks and won't sell for enough to ever generate a positive NPV. The optomists believe there will be big margins between costs and selling prices and the NPV will be high. As ZEN releases more info we will known who was closer to being right. Right now all we have guesstimates.