From the recent AGM, Peel state they need a critical mass of...

From the recent AGM, Peel state they need a critical mass of resources of 12m - 15m tonnes of ore.
My thought is the critical mass of resource should be near 20m tonnes.
The reason being, to set up a plant to be able to process the suite of minerals that we have will be rather expensive compared to a plant that say just does gold and/or say copper only.
At present we have:-
May Day 1,128,000 tonnes
Mallee Bull 6,800,000 tonnes
Southern Nights/ Wagga Tank 4,950,000 tonnes
Wirlong -
Total 12,878,000 tonnes

All of the above resources are in the inferred category.

These resources need to be drilled more intensively to bring them up to the "indicated " category.
The inferred category does not meet the necessary level of confidence on which to commit capital to build a mine.

Much has been written about the business acumen of the incumbent board. Most of the criticism to me is warranted.

At the same time, on the exploration front we are still a penny dreadful. But a penny dreadful that has a realistic chance of transitioning to developer and ultimately to producer.
The difficulty in proving up resources in Cobar style terrain is that the ore bodies are narrow and deep. You have to drill through many, many metres of sterile ground to get to the resource envelope. Hence very expensive.
As enticing as it is to put in an exploration drill drive to generate cash flow and self fund, i believe to be a false dawn.
Costs of production, transport and toll milling would mean very little up side from this scenario.
It is a long road from explorer to developer to producer.
It also takes huge amounts of capital. One thing in our favour is that capital today is cheap, and is likely to stay that way for the for seeable future.
The other fact in our favour is that the success of exploration expenditure around the world is diminishing, therefore metals are likely to become more expensive as demand increases and supply diminishes.