RE:My take on Thursday's Taconite News Release
your right, i exactly pointed out in the german stock board that "alternative production scenarios" are the important words in that news release. NML & Tata Steel may realize that under the current financial situation worldwide a capex of $6-7B (higher capex as you already suggested it would be in the TFS) is not fundable. and if we assume that the theoretical capex could increase in mining reality by 20% to 50% (e.g., see higher capex of the DSO project), it is good to see that NML & Tata Steel may not lapse into uncontrollable and risky gigantism.
a production rate of 5-10 MT per year as an first goal to achieve would be really great. we must consider that NML has such a high resource quantity of Taconite that we could easily grow in production rate incrementally with a good part of self-funding out of production for the next production aim.
underlying a $2.5B capex for 10 MT per year NML's capex share of the additional 16% paid equity interest would be $120M for equity financing.
and i also agree that we could skip pellet production and the ferroduct by some time as the Taconite project is a ultra long-term project and nobody is in a hurry. but for what do we need another, new NI43-101 technical report? do they relocate the production plants, nearer to Timmins or nearer to a rail track? NML & Tata Steel experienced hard conditions to rebuild the rail track for the DSO project, they may consider this?