I hope this isn't too off-topic, but below are some thoughts on Teck's Cu strategy and what that "might" mean for Schaft Creek.

Went to the CIM lunch today in Vancouver and Teck's Dale Andres (VP Copper Strategy and North American Operations) spoke. The talk was on Highland Valley Copper (HVC), the history of the mines in the area, how Teck Cominco consolidated the various deposits there, and the future of HVC. Very interesting as the grades have been very low for a long time at HVC, but the mine has still been profitable. As it stands, the mine can now go to 2027 even with the upgrade to processing a higher amount to the tune of 130,000 tpd in the near future (130k tpd sounds familiar, oh yeah, Schaft Creek ... I'm guessing Teck has very realistic idea of what this costs to build and operate - they are getting lots of brand new equipment, such as flotation cells and columns, etc.).

What I found quite interesting is that Teck has been largely ignoring exploration at HVC, and only recently have they started to look at the possibility that HVC might have a lot longer life than 15 more years (Dale Andres' guess is that it does, and they have an exploration team in place now just to work on exploring HVC). They are drilling 75,000m this year, or more ($25m program in 2013), and they're shooting some holes (or did in the fall already and are waiting on results, not sure) 1200-1600m down. At any rate, results from 2012 are pending and a nice program for 2013 is on the books. 50 years of operation may now go a few more generations (not my words).

I think this is interesting for Schaft Creek as the deep good grades of our deposit are surely on the radar of Teck, especially that they are open at depth. Dale, VP of Copper Strategy worked on Galore, so he's no doubt familiar with the remote challenges of the general area of Schaft, yet also the positives of the very decent grades when compared to some other deposits (lots of other positive factors too).

What this means at the end of the day for us and CUU, I don't know! I'm just glad that Teck is taking a long term approach to their own producing mines and thinking in terms of decades and generations of production. As many have pointed out including management, someone else will be exploring Schaft Creek decades after it gets into production.

One thing I didn't like was that they used $2.30 Cu prices when calculating the mineral reserves and resources for HVC in the presentation. However, Dale also showed a slide of a few options for the HVC pit, and how much deeper they could go economically if copper was above $2.70. There were some other even deeper pit options below the $2.70 line but he didn't elaborate and much of this is untested yet with drilling. My assumption is that $2.30 is just a very low baseline - Teck is looking decades ahead, but is probably clearly remembering the last 20 years of copper prices too. That said, copper over $3.50 looks pretty good when money is still being made at $2.30. I still think copper at $3.25 was pretty realistic for our FS ... I'd gamble that Don Lindsay and other copper bulls are correct on increased usage in the coming years.

Regarding Schaft Creek, I'm still amazed that I can't get much insight on it as I'm at a lot of networking events the last few months. I've been meeting quite a few mining engineers, geos, metallurgists, and most have vaguely heard of Schaft but I know way more than them. Still a mystery to me, and I'm just waiting. I did hear from one credible source that there is still talk of somehow combining Galore and Schaft, and maybe that's for the long term kind of like HVC bringing the old Lornex mill literally down the hill to their Valley operations once Lornex shut down (as opposed to trying to process material from each deposit at the same time).