Oppies are not worthless if you invested properly and covered...

Oppies are not worthless if you invested properly and covered your cost to be free carried or in actual profit. One great advantage of oppies is that they move faster than heads in the up cycle and that makes free carry much easier.
Your oppies are only good to buy heads at the exercise price - if you have the dry powder to do so - but if heads are substantially lower in price than the exercise price they can be bought much cheaper on market. Put simply you don't need the oppies.

Only if there is no supply or you had no dry powder to exercise anyway are the oppies really worthless.

From the Company's point of view the oppies expiring denies them the capital from exercising. That's tough, but read @Met2020 's post and see that AW1 does not need cash atm, with the Taurus deal on the table.

With oppies think about the spare Contential Sport tyre in the boot of your Merc. You go in for a tyre check and the Mitchie Pilot Sports are 5 years old and a bit worn and you decide to change them, but you are also told the Spare is now 10 years old and unroadworthy so you change that too. OK you never used the spare and it expired worthless, but it served its purpose. So too with oppies, if you dont need them they still served their purpose.

btw, when you are assessing AW1's storm as a quick DSO play take careful note of the location - the Storm tenement actually touches the water at a very convenient location to the expected mine sites, and on a short arm of the North West Passage, a major freight route from Atlantic to Pacific.

Easy coastal access to Europe, East Coast USA, West Coast USA and East Asia.

I will let others comment on how many months per year mining and processing can be done with suitable protection - more than current exploration in the open IMO - and how many ship borne cargoes of concentrate will be sent.

DYOR and snap this streak.