General Comments & Banter, page-8138

Good question re delay in PEA MM.

I suppose if one extrapolates backwards one can say that something’s not ready for PEA release.

Possibilities ?

If we go with Ur assertion that they going with a fast tracked stage 3 that would explain much of the delay, and thinking about JZs comment that fundamentals WILL prove a 10/15Kt operation then r we in a position of simply waiting for those fundamentals to be sorted.

The main ones for me might be:

* Hydro model and associated recovery rates.

I can only assume that they have completed the holes they were going to drill to potentially upgrade the resource. They mentioned this a while ago and if they do want to fast track THE PROJECT then they need the best resource data they can get. If they can move at least some of the resource and improve the recovery to a higher category this improves the numbers to those that require such things. Interestingly the US/Canadian reporting standards r higher than Oz ones.

* Final plant tweaking may increase production rate which may dramatically alter the finalised output. As one of the recent annmnts, and one of other guys reminded us not so long ago, the company was going to retrofit another piece of plant equipment to potentially up the plants output. If this has been done then we may even go from a stage 3 output of 10/15Kt to 20/25kt as was Ur want MM . It may indeed not have been a typo from that meeting, and to say the upscale has this potential production improvement would be very impressive to US/Global punters and almost certainly puts this project into the targets of those wanting to rationalise the industry. Not that JV wants a hostile TO. But if cashed up punters do want a piece they’ll have to pay more of a premium. If such a retrofit has taken place PA may need to do some downstream process tweaking and do a few production runs again.

What ever the case imo a strong circumstantial case can be made for a PEA release to happen in the shorter term rather than longer.

d.