i put a $40 call on this last january, page-31

"...there's nothing curious about pointing out what drives 90% of the economic answer and not wasting time on an encyclopedic answer."

True dat, but - whichever approach one takes (short-form or encyclopaedic) - it is important that the answer is correct.

Your's - moryn - isn't.

Because when the subject under discussion is that of cash cost curves for a given industry, the the capital cost base has basically zero bearing, contrary to your seemingly non-encyclopedic contribution ("the curve flattens because its lowest quartile projects expanding output at low marginal additional capex") [*]

Accounting standards dictate that the cost of capital is a charge called depreciation, which is strictly non-cash in nature. And which, therefore, has no relevance to the cash costs of a mining operation.

So - at odds with your post - the capital intensity is irrelevant to the shape of the cost curve (which, conventionally refers to cash costs).


[*] Actually, all other things being equal, operations that are set up with more capital, would tend to exhibit lower cash operating costs due to their better extent of capitalisation (better/newer PP&E, more advanced mine development, better resource delineation, etc. But that's another subject, and is probably just me manifesting my fatuous side again.)