Thanks Herb. A great post with lots of thought put into it (as usual). You state that Voisey's Bay sold their holdings for approximately 40% insitu value and you further state that, “There was zero infrastructure at Voisy’s Bay when it was sold for this amount”.
There is one item here that I feel is often overlooked and that is the government of Newfoundland then required the building of a smelter in Newfoundland and I think I saw figures in the billion dollar range bandied about for that smelter. On the other hand, there are three nickel smelters in Ontario – at the Kidd Creek mine in Timmins, and at Vale and Xtrata in Sudbury. Since the orebody is in Ontario and the smelters are also in Ontario I doubt if the government of Ontario would have any objections to shipping the ore to either Timmins or Sudbury without any building of a new smelter. Although these smelters may have to be expanded or the throughput increased in some manner, I would still expect that there would be substantial savings over the complete building of a brand new smelter. In that sense there is some infrastructure that pertains to Noront. Of course to realize these economies, Noront would have to be taken over by a company that has a nickel smelter or reach some accommodation with one of these companies.
