Teck and Inmet, the Great Miners I was looking at an old Inmet 43-101 filed on Sedar 03/17/08. Page 37 shows a map with the tailings dump to the left of the Cu open pits. On their ground. The deposit reserves per Teck were only 950m mt then, as opposed to the present 2.3b mt. The deposit was less than half the present size.
It makes sense that as Inmet took over the project and preparation of the refined Feasibility Study (FS) that they might wish to refine it and improve the economics. And so they did. This is straight from Inmet's Basic Engineering Summary Report on Cobre, page 114, accessed from their web site:
"In late 2010, MPSA initiated its first modern, concession-wide exploration program by flying a recently developed airborne geophysical survey. This survey identified the known shallow mineralization and generated numerous additional similar targets. One of the first targets tested in early 2011 was immediately west of Colina. This drilling resulted in the discovery of the Balboa deposit. Within a year, this discovery had established an indicated resource of 602 mt at 0.36% copper and 0.10 g/t Au and additional inferred resource of 301 mt at 0.31% Cu and 0.08 g/t Au."
Teck had the original tailings pile centered over the new Balboa deposit, almost 1b mt of comparable grade ore. One can only guess that they never performed an airborne study on the property or condemnation drilling for the original tailings pile. This fact, plus the fact that the deposit had grown to almost 2.5 times the original FS reserves per Inmet as of this day (with room for expansion still, per Inmet again), explains why Inmet needs that land to the north for tailings--that they did not control and saw no need for when they dealt Molejon and other land rights to PTQ.
Inmet controls the property for how many years (?!?!?!) before they decide that maybe we need to have a comprehensive look at the entire property to see if there is anything we are missing. Balboa was discovered in early 2011.
I would love to be in the room during negotiations. I wonder if anyone ever flew an airborne survey over the whole property, or what else might have been in the UN development data that Fifer knows about that Inmet should or should have known.