Banter and general comments, page-26583

Well if that is the strategy Core is going to press the go-slow button on BP33 development which is exactly the reverse of what appears to be happening. The last Mineral resource estimate had Grants at 2.91Mt. If mined at around 1Mt/yr that's just under 3 years of production. On planned production rates, Grants is delivering the ore the existing DMS needs for the remainder of 2023, 2024 and 2025. There might be a little bit of ore left going into 2026 particularly if the mineral resource is conservative around what's there to be mined at the edges of the deposit.

The timeline below was from July2021 and at that stage BP33 was a 1.5yr development from commencing box cut to producing ore. I'm going to assume this was a little optimistic and being in production 2 years from commencing box cutting is a safer timeline to work to:

• If you wanted to mine out Grants and then commence BP33 you would be doing BP33 at modest speed as you have 2.5yrs and would be targeting production in 2026 but not before as there would be no DMS capacity to process any ore recovered.
• If you wanted mine expansion from concurrent BP33/Grants you would be going full-steam ahead with BP33. Committing $45-$50m of early works before making a FID decision is going full-steam ahead and not consistent with trying to get first BP33 production in 2026. This box cut pre-FID decision is the sort of thing you would do if you wanted BP33 in production in late 2024/early 2025.
• If BP33/Grants are to run concurrently, another concentration plant will be needed but the timeline still exists to do this and IMO that will be part of the BP33 FID. I'd also expect to hear something in the next 6-12 months around which deposit would follow Grants if that is concurrent with BP33.

So with all due respect, I disagree with your gut assessment. If your gut assessment was correct, BP33 would be coming online in 2026. If an expansion decision was then made mid-2026 once BP33 was confirmed to be going ok, that expansion would not be implemented until late 2027/2028. I don't think Core is ready to tell the market "sorry about those expansion suggestions for around 2024/2025 we have just pushed them back 3 years."