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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Bullion prices are at their highest in seven years, closing in on $1,600 an ounce. Gold held by exchange-traded funds is at all-time records and rising, thanks to worries over the economic damage inflicted by the coronavirus outbreak. Reserves, meanwhile, are depleting. It’s a heady mixture for miners, but perhaps not yet an intoxicating one.
Take Polyus PJSC, Russia’s largest gold digger. The $17 billion company said last week that it would pay down debt before beginning to spend seriously on its $2.5 billion Sukhoi Log project, set to add 1.6 million ounces a year to supply. That’s quite a statement. This is one of the world’s lowest-cost producers, generating plenty of cash, holding one of most impressive untapped resources globally, at a time of rising prices. The mine promises significant extra output for a company that aims to produce 2.8 million ounces this year. Even so, Polyus is resisting the urge to fast-track, with a roughly two-year “transitional period” of planning before it begins in 2023.
Granted, there are circumstances peculiar to Polyus that suggest conservative timing and financing is necessary. The miner is controlled by the son of Suleiman Kerimov, one of a handful of tycoons included in Washington’s 2018 sanctions list. A planned $900 million equity sale to Chinese conglomerate Fosun Group fell apart earlier that year, too. The project itself, meanwhile, is vast, and deep inside Russia, hardly a popular jurisdiction with foreign mining investors.
Polyus’s conservative approach is noteworthy, nonetheless. This is an industry that has in general become far more cautious with big-bang projects after a string of boom-time efforts a decade ago, begun in haste and regretted at leisure. Barrick Gold Corp.’s Pascua Lama in South America started in 2000 as a $1.2 billion project; by the time it was shelved in 2013, the estimated cost had soared to $8.5 billion. Polyus learned its own lessons at its Natalka mine. It was trapped by falling prices in 2013 and construction eventually paused, before resuming in 2016.
Certainly Sukhoi Log, first studied by Soviet geologists in the 1970s, comes with history and plenty of challenges. The size, at some 63 million ounces and as much of a quarter of Russia’s gold reserves, means it is the largest project on the industry’s horizon, by some way. For Polyus, it adds the equivalent of the annual output of its nearest rival, Polymetal International Plc. That gargantuan scale that leaves plenty of room for costs to spill over. There is processing to resolve, all on site, and transport logistics will be complex given the mine’s location. When I visited in 2012, the airport in the nearest settlement closed if it rained.