I like to see what it costs to produce as opposed to what a...

I like to see what it costs to produce as opposed to what a company thinks they’ll receive.
I’m not really interested in their return projections as long as the production cost is below safe market thresholds- if, as many of us including me believe, a battery maker for example needs supply surety then they generally pay an agreed price as opposed to the market price at the time.

Relying on $5 a pound when one’s own projected extraction cost is $5.60+ is interesting.

I noted that the now non binding binding financial statement ( not 100% if the S stands for statement but don’t really care ), used a 0.45% cut off while others are using the slightly higher standard of 0.5% when measuring resource. It’s not a big difference on paper but as a machine operator myself ( yeah yeah- excavators are different to processing plant but if it goes vroom in any way, has any moving parts, requires lubrication & comes in to contact with sand/dirt/stone/rain it isn’t all that different ), I can only see that having to run the processing unit etc for an extra few days each year ( based on 2Mtpa we can be really simple & say ok so there’s roughly 6,000 tonnes of material being processed a day ), isn’t as good as having those days up my sleeve for maintenance/repair.

It’s only a couple days but hey- every day counts & a few more days maintenance as opposed to a few less days ( compared to a competitor ), maintenance can wind up becoming a more expensive issue than those days worth of wages to perform the maintenance cost.

A bit of fun if no one noted it though- James Bond will be doing his thing in an electric Aston Martin in the next film so that’s good for overall sector perception. It won’t be long now until all movies tell the young/rich/wannabe cool types like me that if they want to be cool/up to date they’ll have to drive an EV.

The inflection point for the EV vs. ICE story will come & go before than any can say but I’ll put my name to the fact that I think such a movie using an EV is actually quite an important moment. The last movie that made me stop & think like that was ‘I am legend’, in which I learnt something quite different.