Yeah, I lean this way as well.

The issue with carbon fuels - oil, nat gas and coal, is the unlocking of sunk/trapped CO2 which is geologically on a “millions of year plus” dormant cycle. Whereas burning of vegetation is only upsetting a short cycle which as JB correctly notes, can be mitigated by the affected areas becoming an immediate CO2 sink as they regrow. Even mistakes like intentional deforestation can be mitigated by replanting. And carbon fuels are dirty. Better to burn them in centralized oil and coal fired electrical plants with best technology in scrubbing emissions then live in cities full of dirty emissions.

The clean energy transition could be a technological leap forward with all kinds of unanticipated side benefits - just as the space programs of the 1960’s spun off revolutionary materials, chemistry, engineering and especially the silicon revolution. Pure research and development leads to benefits and advancement in the quality of life.

Bring it on, hopefully we are sitting on an asset that will be significantly revalued by several factors - not just the price of copper driven by global energy transition, but the rising value of copper reserves spurring the additional drilling and advancing development scenarios at OT that will also push our valuation up.

For 20 years Rio and Mongolia have known there is much greater value at OT, but were careful to put forward development scenarios just good enough to allow initial development to proceed. In the meantime they played games over ownership and profit-sharing that drove down early valuation, stifled further exploration, pushed optionality expansion scenarios off the table while they consolidated ownership … and it’s notable, for how essentially stupid human beings can be, that in the process they honed in on the moronic simplicity of 2/3 ownership for Rio, 1/3 for Mongolia, but given taxes and royalties we’ll split the free cash flows about 50/50. A bunch of kindergarten kids could have hashed that out in a sandbox.

It’s hard to say at this stage whether the delays will end up being a benefit - on the one hand deferring cash flows from JV production, but on the other potentially deferring them into a period of enhanced pricing for copper and gold.

Summer doldrums. We knew the price would get pressed again on nominal volumes, apart from some major market event occurring. I feel like my patience s being tested yet again, but by now it’s just duck and cover for another few months.

I’m engaged in wishful thinking to the extreme with regard to the slow drill results. Surely Rio would joyfully push out bad news on JV drilling. We are far beyond any reasonable timeline for assays.

Confirmation HNE Lift 2 continues significantly beyond the 725mN displacement fault (as in it isn’t such a big displacement at all)? Or the discovery of a shallow high value deposit somewhere else on the JV? Or who knows, it’s elephant country and contrary to the TRQ buy-out discussion as if OT was “fully explored” it has huge acreage of highly prospective ground, almost all of it licensed 100% to ETG, but subject to the JV which appears to have been an abusive relationship where Rio has treated it as a non-entity, presumably because they envision ETG as bought out and gone for some price … hopefully a very attractive price to us once full disclosure occurs.

cg