RE:Rambling thoughts
It's not necessarily an open pit or a block cave, it can be any combination. Lots of mines around the world have caved under pits after they got to their economic limits. Others have phased in, often starting with a pit to commission a mill and ore transfer infrastructure, like some of the long conveyors or gondola systems out there. Best of all worlds is usually a nice shallow economic deposit to mine as a pit, pay down the capex for the mill and access while the several years of underground development required for block caving are constructed.
Seabridge has no plans to share access in the conceptual tunnel they had for KSM before Goldstorm grew across their proposed expropriation. That's one of the reasons why the vastly different valuations look a bit off - Treaty Creek is sitting pretty if they can produce good margins at Goldstorm in a starter pit, or at least it is looking like that is a good probability. If you were a major considering a massive development I'm betting the reverse is most likely - it's whether you make the access to Treaty Creek robust enough to support shared access to KSM, not vice versa.
TRQ and Rio Tinto started with pits at Oyu Tolgoi, commissioned and expanded the mill and infrastructure, now almost ten years later they are just about to start the undercut on the first phase of several planned block caves. Then the margins really take off, often the grades get better at depth and their is far less waste rock to deal with with as they target from directly under the ore body.
I don't believe the market has fully grasped the value of many deposits like Treaty Creek if copper and PM prices remain robust. As for that, have a gander at what one of the big talkers in the business had to say to the Saudi's a few weeks back - Friedland is trying to convince the younger generation there that they should be diversifying into clean energy minerals, and gold, well, take a hard look at the national debt in the United States and ask yourself, how can they raise interest rates to combat inflation without simultaneously devaluing the US dollar.
Its a long game. A PEA will confirm to more conservative speculators what you can figure out on the back of an envelope if you believe in $1800 gold being just a start of a long run for gold. And the excitement at Perfect Storm may be copper .. just wait and see.
https://vimeo.com/666511683/737ef490be
cg