Golden Opportunities
With Gold soaring over $5,000/oz, Silver at $100/oz, and Copper more than $6.00/lb, I wonder how these operators are taking advantage of this price environment.
I do see an uptick in capital project investments.
Suddenly:
– Lower grade deposits look attractive
– Higher risk operating environments make economic sense
– Margins justify projects that were unthinkable a few years ago
But there’s a problem.
It still takes 10–20 years to go from discovery to production. Even brownfield expansions can take 4-8 years.
The price we see today may trigger investment, but it almost certainly won’t be the price reality when those projects finally come online.
So, the real question becomes:
What can we do now to capture this increased margin?
And the answer isn’t always big, bold, or capital-intensive.
With prices this high, we don’t need step-change improvements to see meaningful returns. Small, disciplined gains suddenly matter a lot.
However, many of the “easy” levers are unsustainable:
– High grading
– Deferring maintenance
– Pushing throughput at the expense of recovery
– Burning future reliability for today’s tonnage
They boost short-term numbers, but they mortgage the future.
In the previous low-price environment, what low-hanging fruit did we ignore because the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze?
Continuous Improvement Efforts in things like:
– Minutes lost at shift change (hot seat changeout)
– Small chronic slowdowns (running a few percent below target to “protect” equipment)
– Short stops (Doesn’t stop production for long but really disrupts steady state operations in sizing, gravity, flotation and other separating devices)
– Conservative operating practices (“We’ve always done it this way”)
At today’s prices, those “small” losses are suddenly very expensive.
With very little capital, a lot of these long-standing operating and maintenance issues can be finally eliminated.
And we all know, commodity prices are cyclical and we need to use these “good times” to prepare for the “bad times”
So, I’m curious:
With this sudden injection of free cash flow, what else should we be investing in?
And how do we use it to make our operations more resilient before the inevitable down-swing comes?
