I'd be interested in these lower grade projects you reference. Remembering that speaking in equivalents means nothing, it comes down to the individual grades of the saleable products and how they can be recovered.
At 0.15% Cu and a recovery of 84.5% you're essentially saying that your expected tails grade is in the order of 0.025% Cu. Even the most efficient processing streams for these sort of deposits would be lucky to tail anything less than 0.05% Cu. Let's assume this is the case for Boda, you would be looking at a recovery closer to 65% not 85%. Referencing Figure 7-2 in the scoping study we can see that the sensitivity analysis suggests a 10% reduction in recovery moves the NPV from baseline to A$1.45bn. This should be cause for concern by potential investors.
At the end of the day it's going to be a trade off - achieve the predicted recoveries at the expense of increased processing costs or maintain the assumed processing costs and accept lower recoveries, this is the nature of low grade deposits. Both of these options however will have a significant effect on the project's AISC.
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