Hi
@Hiro - Much much higher grade PGM's in South Africa than what we have seen in this announcement so far, and as you say, high enough grade to be mining deep underground, but remember they started mining there over 100 years ago at surface. The Bushveld Complex is a freak of nature, and a world-class series of deposits, TM1 possibly doesn't have that yet, but the suggestion is that there is at least a long length of continuity starting at fairly shallow depths, so the criticisms from others that the strip ratio would kill it is just lazy hyperbole/downramping, the high grade zones ar skinny but not as high grade as the Bushveld, and the low grade is wide, but is actually low grade, from what we have seen in the drilling so far.
Thanks to
@Oz1964 we also know that the price of Ni lately has given BHP reason to pause and think, with all non-pig iron Indonesian Ni production rendered uneconomic/uninvestable at the moment, if there were any higher grade Ni results without Cu or PGM's in TM1's drilling then those samples would be going straight back down the drill hole/not worth reporting, the last thing anyone wants to do now is find nickel sulfides. As he says - they are redoing the numbers as a long life Cu project and aren't rushing out spending tonnes of money on it yet until the DFS.
Given the strike length and lateral extent, I am still thinking that its possible that some horizons might have variation within them, or adjacent horizons might turn up with higher grade and thicker mineralization of hopefully PGM group elements and/or copper or possibly even gold. It is still early days in the drilling, but might take a while and quite a few drill holes to do this given the huge strike length.
If the follow-up TM1 holes hit very similar style of mineralization, thickness and grade from the existing drill holes, then the exploration target will be super arm-wavy with broad drill spacing, but that's the idea of having conceptual exploration targets, and no-one is expecting them to go straight to an indicated or measured resource until more drilling happens.
