It doesn't matter too much. Whenever you exercise the options,...

It doesn't matter too much. Whenever you exercise the options, you're still going to be paying 28.5c. The 2 scenarios that change this are:
1) The price of the heads (VUL) drop below 28.5c. If they say got to 20c, then it would be cheaper to just buy the heads than exercise the options. You could either try and sell the options for almost nothing or let them expire
2) You've hit 20th January and you haven't exercised them, they're expired. Doh!

I guess the above is the simple case though, if you just wanted to buy the options and exercise them to get shares cheaper than they currently were. However, you could also use options as a strategy:
1) You've effectively locked in the price you can pay, but you don't have to pay it yet. You could wait until the start of January and see if Vulcan is actually successful. If so, sweet, exercise away! Or maybe the technology fails and the SP tanks. Instead of losing 90c a share, you can decide to not exercise and you've only lost 55c a share.
2) (and this is my strategy with VUL): Say you only have $5k ATM, but you really like the companies prospects and want as many shares as possible. Say the heads were at 50c and options were at 10c (to help explain this). Over time, the PFS is great, and the price shoots up to 70c. If you bought the heads, if you just made 40% and now have $7k worth. If you bought options instead, and they rise by a similar amount to 30c, you've just made 200% and now have $15k worth. You could now sell some of those options, and use that money to exercise the rest of the options, leaving you with many more VUL shares than you could originally afford.

Or you could sell them all and just take your profit. That's why they are called options, you have more options what you do

That being said, I can't emphasis enough that with a chance of greater reward comes a greater risk, options will usually fall much faster too (if they went from 30c to 10c, you've just lost 66% vs 28% on the heads). And if you forget about them they could expire.