MACA started bluff in 2018. There is a lot of coal there. The...

MACA started bluff in 2018. There is a lot of coal there. The ground is highly faulted.

My ears from the old MACA site tell me that MACA was literally doing exploration by drill & blast and that these blast engineers were behaving as if the deposit was another contiguous Blackwater deposit without any faulting. Looking from the outside (I've never had anything to do with this site, although I've worked throughout region) my guess is that the exploration drill spacing used to generate the model wasn't tight enough, which is the problem in a nutshell.

Essentially, the deposit was opened up way to early by MACA. The price paid for this lease by BCB was a good deal as far as I can tell and they've probably got their money back. The real cruncher for them now is finding the next "shard" of coal in the bluff pit. I'm guess that their "steady state" statement was based on hope and a poor interpretation of extrapolations in the geological model.

There's some notion in the industry that exploration can be done on a 500x500m grid spacing because "thats how Utah did it back in the 1960s". This is complete and utter nonsense and is usually the sort of thing that management/finance/investors seem to believe. Exploration needs to be done on a 50x75m grid spacing across complex geological zones and if the exploration manager is competent then it can be pushed out to something like 50x300m. It's also like they misinterpret the word "exploration" for a game of luck in finding a deposit, when the reality is that we already know where all the coal is, we simply don't have enough exploration data to build geological models which allow us to sequence mining operations. There's literally coal from the Gulf of Carpentaria all the way down to Woolongong... all we need to do is have some competent people drill it out and model it up.

There's a lot of incompetent coal engineers & coal geologists who would believe this 500x500m mumbo jumbo (I actually want to call them custards, but, changing cus for re). It's actually scary how many morons have engineering/geology degrees, call themselves "experts" and then leech money from the system. I'm one of the very few professionals in the industry who knows how coal mine development works and can bring pits online... and my track record across the industry is friggin awesome because I've never worked for those morons at BMA... greenies must hate me...

Free comments for @mondyinvest anytime... because ... mondyinvest likes to share...

All this being said, Broadmeadows East still looks promising... again, I've never worked on it... but the location is much better than Bluff. It's also worth noting AGAIN that Bluff was a "free kick opportunity" for BCB and now it's up to senior management to sort out a stop loss for the project.

What I'd be looking for in the annual report is an indication that Bluff isn't bleeding cash at the expense of BCBs other projects. Ultimately, it's up to management to decide when to shut it down and stop listening to BS from incompetent engineers.