closing price 18/9/09, page-14

Dell 1234 - whoa careful mate, one step at a time, I might be missing something here, but your comment below seems a just tad "stretched" shall we say.

"dr brooks, lets play a guessing game about price once we have a 375m aluminum smelter... all to ourselves, larger landholdings than Alcoa and BHP combined, MOU for offtake and shipping, and now lets ad fully funded for the next 3 years worth of capital expenditure and all infrastruture costs to allow the smelter and 3mpta exports....

oh thats right, we already have all these".

My understanding of the announcements is that capital raised is enough to cover the infrastructure enhancements associated with driving down the costs of the DSO (e.g. rail road and port), thereby helping increase bauxite shipping tonnages (great news!) and will go "TOWARDS" a BFS for an Alumina REFINERY. A DSO operation is very different to a refinery or smelter operation, with an aluminimum smelter being a hugely different kettle of fish investment wise to an alumina refinery. Vedanta are spending approx USD 5.65 billion on their proposed Jharasuguda II project (4 potlines) in India and "only" a cool USD 2 billion on their tiny Korba III smelter (just the one single pot line!). Smelters are big bickies. Where do you get the $375 million for a smelter from? Alcoa were going to spend over 1.2 billion merely on an upgrade to an alumina refinery (Wagerup).

Lets be realistic, BAU is a jolly good story, certainly an ambitious one, but one I think with a little luck they can pull off. But let's take it one step at a time, let's get those non binding MOUs turned into AGREEMENTS with dollars and tonnes attached (MOU have no legal obligation whatsoever), and get the ore on the ships, that in itself will be a great and historic undertaking. The rest as they say is a huge free carried bonus.