Ash,Excellent summary. I was writing something very similar on...

Ash,

Excellent summary. I was writing something very similar on here yesterday and then i got distracted and it vanished. This style of Almanac has been on their website for some time, but this one has been significantly updated very recently as i only looked the other day and it certainly didn't have as much detail as this one does, especially regarding the Deeps / Lens 6 and their sequential mining over the next 10 years. I'm slightly surprised it wasn't described as 'market sensitive'.

Main take outs are are you state above. The J3 Lens idea seems new and noteworthy.
The double ore development drive into Lens 6, I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before but is clear both in the text and in the diagram. Looking forward the next 10 years it is certainly very clear that a lot of ore will be coming from the deepest parts of the mine at Eloise, hence perhaps the remnants strategy to top this up from shallower sources?

Back in November they clearly stated their intention to drill further around Lens 6 in the first half of this calendar year. We haven't heard much since, perhaps this will happen soon? It also seems clear from the diagram that the first couple of years at Lens 6 will be at slightly lower grade to most of the Lens 6.

There are certainly potential 'gamechanger' issues with mining at this depth, and these are clearly laid out. Potential heat and geotech/rock movement issues could turn into 'grey swans' overnight, but at least they aren't hiding them. This said if one were to occur / come to realization then production would fall dramatically. And without wanting to sound too negative, and whilst these ore bodies seem to go for ever at depth and get richer at depth, at some point they always become unviable....so it wouldn't be a shock. But to counter this they are clearly putting out a 10 year plan in the Deeps /Lens 6 which is very encouraging.

I would certainly be very interested to learn more about the Box cut at Jericho v the direct underground route via Eloise and Swagman. Numbers please AC!? If the current Swagman drilling comes out positively then we will be hearing a lot about it including numbers of all varieties. If Swagman doesn't materialise? At least they have somebody thinking about different angles / strategies which i think is very encouraging, and to some degree brave...ie putting new ideas out to a price sensitive market without 100% knowing the realities...brave in this market.

The SP has run hard, like others, perhaps mainly on sentiment and sound management to date. We haven't had a near death experience unlike AIS or AMI, and we are a producer so our recent run up in SP hasn't been as dramatic and we are quite unique as a small miner on the ASX. We are also essentially a single mine, single geography miner which i like at this point. (also to note is that other copper miners seem to suffer from management and Director incompetance....we don't)

But with the current SP upward trend it must be tempting and perhaps wise for AC to tap the market at some point in light of the aforementioned 'grey swan' events. A lot has gone 'right' for AIC in the last 2 years, and very little 'wrong'. Much of this can be put down to exceptional management, tick. I do think that from here things get much trickier for management. Many big decisions in the next year will define AIC for years to come. They seem to have the right team in place. I reckon they are bloody busy!