I am not sure if that is the case - "His boss has seen fit to...

I am not sure if that is the case - "His boss has seen fit to direct capital elsewhere on a number of occasions." They are not directing any capital anywhere -additional capital outside the TGO expansion. Their exploration budget is as if future 5 years cashflow will be $25m and not $500m.
I am not calling on them to be irresponsible and increase the yearly exploration budget by $15m. $1m-$2m yearly increase is nothing vs the projected future cashflow.
$1m-$2m extra is not much but can have big impact during early stage exploration at NMPP. For example, ALK can spend around $300k to negotiate early access (during harvesting season) at areas they want to drill - meaning no need to wait 7 months to drill follow up holes. Also, if needed to drill more follow up holes there are money around for few more holes. And they now have money to sink a hole or two into those new areas IC mentioned.

I agree that Nic could (we are not sure if this is the case but it could be) be on a leash by his boss but it's Nic's job to articulate the value of his strategy and convince his boss to support it. This is standard corporate activity and skill requirement for any senior manager.

Right now, in my eyes, they are not showing any urgency to de-risk the project in hurry. I hope this changes. Positive bit is Nic did mention de-risking which makes me think they may be looking at options.

While I agree with ALK that NMPP will be a mine and it does stack up, the reality is ALK did use spot prices in their SS and that makes the project marginal by default - when spot prices are at ATH. Regardless of the macro-landscape pointing to lot higher Cu and Au prices (particularly gold) in 10 years, any potential JV partner will have to commit now to dance with ALK.


At same time Nic talks about wanting to extract reasonable price from potential partners while offering marginal project.
Any potential JV partner will run risk analysis and while there will be lot of positives such as safe jurisdiction, nearby infrastructure, ALK's experience with approval processes (this is bigger than many think and Nic is doing good job in highlighting this point) and ALK's exploration team ability to make discoveries (any NMPP JV will cover all the NMPP tenements), they will also see the obvious risk which is the project is super sensitive to Au and Cu prices.
And the only way to de-risk it is for ALK to make shallow discovery of higher grade material. Good bit is, it does not need to be large discovery either. Around 50Mt at around 0.65g/t AuEq will move the project from marginal to safe.
At the end of the day, numbers will matter more than anything else.

Having said this, I am aware of few players that are desperate to increase their exposure to both Au and Cu and few of them are keen to take higher risks as they operate in high-risk areas and/or high-cost mines and will accept potential longer payback periods in an event Au and/or Cu prices fall. But ALK will not be able to command top price in this scenario.
The only way to attract strong price is to de-risk the project. Right now ALK seems to be relaying on more hope prices will continue to move higher than taking the matter in their hands.

And yes, I did approach ALK and proposed to slightly increase the exploration budget and to focus those funds on NMPP exclusively.