I post hoping to be corrected, or at least brought up to date....

I post hoping to be corrected, or at least brought up to date.

IMO BHP is bidding for Anglo, and for the same reason will ultimately prevail, because Anglo's copper in Peru and Chile is getting deeper all the time. And BHP are the world's experts in high volume deep mining.

All learnt at Olympic Dam, and I see the future of copper, as BHP sees it, as huge shafts, more like the width of a cricket field - well a small one anyway - and highly mechanised even autonomous mining.
I reckon BHP are looking to benefit in a 10 to 20 year time scale when their opex will be relatively low and the capex to catch them will be prohibitive.
Ultimately all the copper mined will come from deep shafts.

What is the fly in the ointment for BHP? - in the short term anyway?
Easy, its the discovery of new Tier 1 surface and shallow copper deposits in Tier 1 jurisdictions.

And its for that very reason I am still backing ICG - Rob Heaslop said that the ICG tenements in the Camel Creek area are sitting near the southern edge of the NAC, and are prospective for huge mineralisation for that reason. There has been so little exploration done there that our Inca could easily be first mover.
Now there is another copper play I belong to which is likewise - @Giovanni33 knows - its AW1's Storm prospect within the Arctic Circle in Canada, again little previous exploration and with copper outcropping - just sitting there because of its isolation.

Comments ? @mineralised - @Poet