If Silver Wheaton chooses to terminate the contract with Barrick over a failure to meet its commitments, it will have a negative impact on its expected silver stream quantity by 2017.
Craig says that the shop talk among his fellow recruiters is that although they did fewer deals in 2012 than they had hoped, those deals that got done involved more high-end producers than was expected: a case of quality over quantity.
In the absence of the Keystone XL pipeline, there are no currently available alternatives for moving this large additional quantity of production to market, and at a minimum any such alternatives would be expected to have higher costs.