A pretty good summary there - once the last production from...

A pretty good summary there - once the last production from Skorpion, Lisheen, Century and a host of other Pb-Zn base metal mines works its way out of the system then we are locked into lower levels of supply for quite a while.

A lot of the replacement supply is either bonkers deep underground capital intensive such as Admiral Bay & Dugald River or in geographically/politically difficult areas such as Citronen. Other stuff such as Gamsburg in South Africa is marginal grade and economics and stuck in government approvals plus power issues in South Africa.

No new supply and 10+ years of no-one looking for Pb-Zn deposits at all, even if you found a world class Pb Zn orebody tomorrow it would take at least 2-5 years to drill out and then have another 3-10 years of regulatory delays plus construction, and that's if its in a place without any sovereign risk (so must be in Chile, Australia, Namibia, USA or Canada).

I would say that the Namib project in Swakopmund in Namibia (North River Resources) is the most likely to be able to fill the gap.

The only other consideration is the stockpile in China and LME quoted stockpiles, I think we know enough about Chinese stockpile accounting now to pretty much instantly discount any official or unofficial stockpile figures of metals as un-adulterated bullcrap, due to warehouse trading, double counting, off the books stockpiles and other murky practises in China.

Unless they work out a way to galvanise steel with US dollar bills - eventually the price of Zinc can only respond to a decrease in supply. The tough thing is to pick when this will happen.