Come on THALL, that reply was lame & way below your usual standard ...
<<Rock, you seem to suffer from the same affliction that many in the oil industry suffer from. Not understanding the nature or financing of mining.>>
Come now, we both do work / have worked in a major oil company - I am not going to underestimate YOUR intelligence ...
1) <<You can drill a wildcat oil well out in the middle of nowhere and if it produces, you can probably find investors or bankers falling all over themselves to invest in the potential new field.>>
I don't think you really believe what you said here. We both know that ACCESS TO A MARKET is essential. It is precisely for this reason that a basin like the Tarim, or the oil accumulations in Chad, remain full of potential but essentially undeveloped - they are effectively in the middle of nowhere! Investors and bankers who "fall over themselves" in these cases are either pure speculators, or are poor business people ...
2) <<You can't drill one hole out in the middle of Arizona and get a banker to lend you money, even if BDB has confirmed .8 oz ton from that hole>>
Again, we both know that neither of us is that dumb - see my last post to Claude (22017) to join the discussion
3) <<Mining is much more sensitive to reserves, recovery and the time value of money than oil operations.>>
I do not believe that AT ALL - I work in the North Sea, economic cut-offs are huge (we walk away from discoveries less than 30 MILLION BARRELS RECOVERABLE!!), recovery factors are CRITICAL (they can easily make or break the economics), and drilling rigs cost US$120,000 PER DAY!! And you say that mining is more sensitive to reserves/economics? I am surprised you would say this, especially before saying <<I worked for major oil companies for 11 years.>>
Paul Nicholson |
