John,
In spite of the humorous replies you are likely to receive elsewhere asking this question, I'll do my best to try to answer it.
It all depends....[What is the best way to set up ones accounting for the most favorable tax treatment?]...It depends on the scope of work, the geology, the drill equipment, the operator, the geologist and the laboratory.
First thing to understand about any drilling/geological projects is that no matter how prepared one is Mother Nature often throws wrenches into the best laid plans. To think one has domain over her is to wear my namesake. Then there is the problem of not understanding the scope of the project: do they need to cut roads and drill pads into the side of a mountain to get to the targeted areas? How will drill operations get a water supply?
Next the question is what type of drilling does the company plans on doing? RC - reverse circulation? Core drilling? In the Reverse Circulation drilling one gets a hand full of cuttings (sand, silt & gravel sized pieces of rock) to analyze. This is like the wood shavings from drilling a hole in a piece of wood. One key difference however, the cuttings, as the rock pieces are called, are transported to the surface inside of the pipe (aka the drill string) that is attached to the bit. The theory of this method is that the sample (cuttings) is not contaminated by rock sloughing off of the borehole wall. This method requires someone to take samples at regular intervals or geological intervals identified by the changes noted in the cuttings or changes in the way the drill is reacting. It is less precise. Penetration rates for RC drilling could be as high as 50 feet an hour in very soft rocks to much less.
Alternatively the company might use a drill with a diamond core bit to extract a cylinder of rock. This would be like the cylinder one gets using an apple corer. Core drilling is a rather slow process as one uses a core barrel on the end of the drill string and recovers 5 or 10-foot long sections of rock core at time. Therefore the drill advances 5 feet, and then the driller pulls the drill string and core barrel out of the hole to recover the core. Once the core is recovered, the drill string is reassembled and run back into the hole for the next 5-foot section. Since drill rods are usually 20 feet long, one can see that if the hole is several hundred feet most of the time is spent taking drilling rods in and out of the hole and little time is actually spent advancing the core hole into the ground.
Either way the borehole has to be "logged" by a geologist. A drill/core log is one where the geologist carefully examines the samples (cuttings or core) and notes the rock types, structures, minerals, etc. The geologist can be on site logging the hole as the cuttings/core come out of the hole, or he might show up later and log the hole. Then samples must be selected/collected and prepared for the laboratory and finally shipped/transported.
Then comes the laboratory process, which depends on the analysis requested: different tests take longer to run than others and often multiple tests are run on one sample. Of course the backlog at the laboratory is a key consideration as in "hot areas" everybody and their brother is out there drilling their properties, sending samples to a laboratory.
So rather than just speculating, why not just ask the company what their project schedule is or the anticipated time will be for the first results from Peru? That will be a better educated guess than any armchair engineer will come up with.
Good luck,
H3 |
