Drilling Program, page-4

Matt, this is one of those difficult issues really.
There is a lot of historical drilling across their whole exploration area (from well before the VXL days) to show that CD's comments are correct and indeed the mining life and life of processing plant may be many decades. However, taking that to the stage of inferred/measured/proven deposit and then a mine reserve is another story because it will cost many millions. Clearly they could spend a few million and add multiples of that to the markey valuation of the company, but given funds are short it is certainly wisest to spend them getting into profitable production, knowing there is at least 8-14 years mine life (at 64kT/y) rather than worrying about proving what is almost certain upfront. However, once things are on a sound financial footing it would be well worth spending those $ to assure holders that the resource is there for many decades to come, and add value to their holdings to boot.

Other players have spent the millions proving up much bigger resources but have yet to even start the process of developing a mine and processing plant and a customer base. I know which company I would rather be holding.

The Pattersons report was quite good ona lot of this, but the one weakness was they didn't point out that VXL do hold a lot of partly drilled resource, well in excess of that needed for the current mine-life, and that the expectation is that life of the plant will be well in excess of 14 years so return on investment will be similar.