ask yourself this, what is stopping Teck from putting this on the shelf for 10 years and focusing on South America? or shelving it forever?
The problem I have with this is that Teck could improve the value relatively easily for not much money and find a partner or sell it off, or even just keep it on the books with a higher value to shore up their credit worthiness.
About a million years ago I spoke with Mike when they were doing the FS and he said that Teck might be able to run their own FS capex with numbers that were up to 40% better because they could have economies of scale and better time their buys of equipment.
I always thought Teck did their own FS to parallel ours. Even without any more information from drilling or whatever, they could re-imagine this project and put out a superior FS. The Technical drills from last year might have been sufficient to allow them to do their own mine pit plan and capture some of that inferred without more drilling. (That is what I suspect is happening.)
Teck could follow through with the EA immediately, even on the CUU FS and that would improve the value. Why haven't they done that? It's not because they are going to shelve the project. It has to be because they are planning on improving it and then applying.
Shelving the project at this point in time doesn't make sense at all. At the bare minimum they should apply for the EA and then do nothing until it is approved. If they don't do that it is because they have bigger plans.
So ask yourself this, why aren't they publicly trying to improve the value now for little money?
