They've found that they can reduce costs and improve returns by changing some elements of the engineering identified in the FEED and that's bad? If they had of said that the FEED is being totally disregarded and no other engineering alternative is being pursued - that would have been a surefire way of pummelling the share price.
In fact, I'm quite impressed that they've analysed the FEED and found areas of improvement. The 6 month delay doesn't affect the mine start up date, you know, the date WR kept changing without any explanation.
Following a review of the FEED report and from information received to date, it has been concluded that further
changes and improvements can be made to the process plant design to optimise capital and operating costs.
An engineering firm has been appointed to commence this optimisation study. The process flow sheet has been
validated, but optimisation of the process plant layout and some of the equipment selection have been identified
as providing opportunity for significant construction efficiencies and associated capital cost savings.
In addition, the Company is considering a change to the construction contracting strategy adopted for the FEED
study, which was to provide a risk adjusted, maximum lump sum capital cost estimate for the project under an
EPC contract.
The target completion date for the proposed study is June 2012. Rail and port infrastructure options are
progressing in parallel with the engineering optimisation study.
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