RE: 4seerActually what Rio is screwing up on is insisting that the feasibility and the EIS are linked by agency requirements. They are not.
What Rio is saying is that because both documents contain some of the same information, you have to have one to have the other.
Assume for a second that you are a very wealthy individual and wanted to put a mine on a piece of ground for which you owned unpatented mining claims, but whose surface ownership was the USDA Forest Services. In this example you have gobs of money so you simply pay to explore, find ore, hire an engineer, draft a mine plan, hire an environmental consultant, do a baseline and then you decide you want to mine. You will not have prepared any feasibility study, not a scoping, not a PFS or an FFS, you just decide that you wish to mine the ore you found in your drilling.
If Rio was right, you could not do so because you would have needed a feasibility document in order to prepare your required permitting documents for the Forst Service. Rio's problem is that all over the Western USA, small mine owners are individually doing exactly what I lay out above. The spend their own money and make a mine, do their EA's and EIS's and never have any feasibility documents ever drawn.
Public companies are not in the same boat. Their managements have to answer to shareholder and they have to be prudent with shareholders funds. In the larger firms, they skip stages, by not bothering with PFS's, but will do a Final Feasibility Study, just in case the mine looks like it might come out a cropper.
Midrange companies will do all the steps, as well the juniors with any smarts. Its prudent and can tell them they ought to give up on a project by identifying insurmountable obstacles.
And conditions can change, new technologies come to light, better prices for metals or cheaper techniques for extraction, etc. Some firms will back burner a project for some time and then revisit the project with a new PFS. Noranda did exactly that on the Blackbird in 1994, changing their parameters to considering the data and the mine not as a cobalt play, but as a copper mine (There are indeed seperate higher grade copper deposits associated with the Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide Deposits of the mine sequence that are lower in cobalt and not consider in either Noranda or FCO based reserve blocks.).
The reason junior and mid range firms do FFS's is also related to the need to finance a project. Though the term Bankable is not really proper, its does indicate a feasibility ready for independent audit by financial institutions or other debt or bond investors.
Where FCO is right now is waiting for the USFS to finish its work. They could wait until that is done and then prepare their FFS, in which case they would have to add months after the permit comes in for that report to drop on their desks and then they would have to go out and raise mine finanace to go ahead with building. Or, they can figure which of the EIS Alternatives is going to be the one selected, craft the FFS document now based on those assumptions and be ready to head out putting money on deck as soon as the FEIS and ROD are finished.
If you look back through Rio's postings he has suggested that they will be unable to get a mine on line until 2009. The problem with his time line is that with the FEIS complete and the FFS done, they can raise money this coming winter and build the facility in 2007. They can speed up their process with small gains from doing the FFS early, doing the decline (The USFS rejected the decline because they knew it was not really about bulk testing ore but about starting to get the workings in place early, which is why they insisted it be placed back into the EIS phase of the project rather than in the Exploration EA phase.) ;and a host of other needed things that they have money for prior to financing the rest of the operational plan.
The thing is that though FCO has been in the minerals business for years, its been as an exploration company. They have had to transition to this their first ever mine and that means that they have stumbled occasionally along the way, but they have never fallen.
If you were investing in a company that has several mines on line and lots of that sort of management expertise, you would not be buying it for dimes, but paying dollars and your potential for share increase in company growth in the next few years wold be a lot less. FCO has hired experianced hands, but they are being only now welded into a team.
You see, Rio wants to tear these guys up because they are junior and new to the game and have made mistakes. Under Rio's sort of routine, Teck wold never have formed, bacause when they first got started they also made numerous mistakes. Thats part of the learning curve and why the people who believed in Keevil and his ideas have been so richly rewarded, because companies who can recover and learn from their mistakes have a chance to build as battle scarred veterans.