quarterly due...and good update, page-39

hey copperroad,

I spoke with a director last year and was advised that their target is 50Mt @ 1% across all acreage.

This equates to 500,000 of contained ore (not accounting for wastage/losses in the production process).

The above tonnages bodes well with the 30-50ktpa mine expectation advised in the presentation late last year. So nothing new there.

The only thing I would say about the 50Mt @ 1% across all acreage, was that it was before Agua Boa was drilled (and now seemingly left aside at the moment) and SV was drilled (and now considered to be oxide resource now).

So lets hope that AN is going to prove to be the company maker because, seemingly, SV and AB have been downgraded in managements expectations. That's my take atleast. What do you think?

I guess to take a positive out of things here, AVB are plugging 2 drills at AN, and only 1 drill at AS, so the expectation is clearly that AN will give bigger bang for our buck than AS at the moment.

So, based on my dumb arsed calcs, the resource previously advised of 8Mt at 0.83% for 66,100 tonnes of copper was based on 250 metres of strike, so double that and a bit more, we have got, say, 140,000 tonnes of easy dig oxide resource. Add to that AN, of similar strike length, and probably bigger intersections plus those great gold credits, we could easily be in the 200,000 tonnes category for AN alone. (DYOR)

So a resource of 340,000 tonnes based on my quick and dirty calcs seems eminently achievable. A base case even.

I am not prepared to stick my neck out and say that more tonnage will come from ground not previously plugged, that's for clairvoyants, but I hope it will come. But sadly, hope is not valued in the market at the moment. Hope was priced into AVB when it reached 23 cents.

Cant see any new drill results for another 2 months or so, but JORC is coming so lets hope for a big surprise.

Pure speculation here, but if AVB offset its TN payment of say $30m with Vale, for already proven up copper ground which Vale might want to move on, that could be the surprise we are all dreaming of.

We wait.

HB