Updating a Legacy Feasibility Study — Re-Optimise, Re-Cost, Re-Finance

Commodity prices have moved. With copper and gold trading well above the long-term assumptions baked into many 2012–2016 feasibility studies, projects that were marginal or shelved are economic again — and developers are moving quickly to update legacy studies for the board, for project finance and for an ITR. An update done properly is not a re-type of the old document; it is a re-optimisation.

Why you can’t just change the price in the old model

Higher prices do not just scale the old NPV — they change the optimal mine. A higher copper or gold price lowers the cut-off grade, expands the optimal pit shell, brings previously-waste material into ore, and reshapes the schedule, the fleet and the cost base. Bumping the price cell in a decade-old spreadsheet misses all of that and is not defensible. The pit, cut-off, sequence and cost must be re-optimised at today’s assumptions.

What an IMC feasibility-study update delivers

• Refreshed inputs — resource/reserve, geotechnical, recovery and cost assumptions brought to current rates (with best-fit local specialists where the technical basis needs refreshing).
• Re-optimised pit & Life-of-Mine plan — pseudo-flow optimisation and scheduling at current price decks, exploring many scenarios in days, not weeks.
• Detailed first-five-year schedules linked to a first-principles operating cost model and an operating budget — haulage simulation feeding MineCost, not flat $/t assumptions.
• A bankable corporate financial model — a full three-statement model (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow) with debt, multi-jurisdiction tax and Bayesian risk, in the FAST/Modano conventions.

From a refreshed TEM to a bankable corporate model

Most study updates stop at a refreshed techno-economic model (TEM) — a flat DCF that returns a new NPV/IRR — which then has to be rebuilt by a second firm into a corporate model a lender will accept. IMC delivers the institutional-grade three-statement corporate model directly, tied to the re-optimised mine physics: bankable from day one, and cheaper, with no second engagement and an unbroken audit trail. (See Beyond the Spreadsheet.)

Best-fit local experts, not a captive bench

Where an update needs a local technical refresh — updated geotechnical and pit-slope design, tailings, hydrogeology, or current permitting — IMC hand-picks the best-fit in-country specialists for the jurisdiction (an open-cut copper sulphide project in Chile or Peru, a gold mine in West Africa, an operation in the Pilbara), integrated under one accountable signatory with named Key Personnel — rather than whoever a large firm has free on its bench. (See The Sovereign Consultant Model.)

One auditable workflow, ready for the decision

Because the whole chain — block model → optimisation → schedule → MineCost → financial model — is integrated, the updated study is internally consistent and re-runnable: change the price deck or a sequence and the cost model and financials update automatically. You get a defensible, boardroom- and lender-ready feasibility update across gold, copper, nickel and polymetallic projects. (See From Block Model to Corporate NPV and The Modern Bankable ITR.)