Post-AGM views, page-96

I guess what I am getting at, is the question "what saleable products can can currently be produced with the plant as it now stands?"
Coarse NCu concentrate clearly can be produced, which can be readily sold to a number of buyers
Chalopyrite ore can be produced which can be sold to EHM, and probably MICO as well, although the extra trucking would eat into the margins (and raise the economic cut-off).

The DSO product is probably only marginally saleable given its mineralogical makeup (I doubt Isa would be interested in it, even if the OW offtake agreement wasn't a sticking point, as the isa smelter requires a clean sulphide concentrate or NCu, and there is no reasonably cheap way of getting the DSO to market in bulk.

62% recovery on NCu is not great, but it is not that far off many native copper operations, and importantly, the copper left behind in the tails isn't refractory, it just needs to be stockpiled and reprocessed when the plant is complete. So there is a penalty for double handling, of maybe $1-2/tonne, that is destroying value, but on the other side you have the penalty of an operation that is costing 10s of millions a year to run that is not producing cashflow, with those 10s of millions attracting quite a hefty additional cost based on whatever discount rate the financial model is using, or the interest on the loans that are being used to finance those standing costs are worth. Maybe the tradeoff studies have been done, and it is better to sit and wait for the plant to be complete, but I suspect that the NCu sales to Isa and the chalcopyrite ore trials to EHM are pointing towards the conclusion that (as I have almost invariably found when building execution models for mines) frontloading as much cashflow as possible whilst deferring as much capex as possible, even at long term cost to total production volumes and operating costs, trumps a high initial capex and a delayed startup.

And that's the tradgedy here. CDU have a shedload of copper that can be dug more-or-less straight from the ground and sold to smelter 100km down a sealed highway, and yet they continue to faff around with their bigger than Ben Hur ego trip. I cant help but be reminded of Shelley's Ozymandias "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'"