New out today on how much the two big major mining conglomerates are cutting back and it's far from pretty. The world’s biggest mining companies are cutting expansion plans by about $200 billion as prices of metals, demand from factories and funding for projects collapse.

This is much like OPEC cutting back on the pumping of oil and likely to have same result which is firming up of metal prices. No doubt it will have some effect on exploration companies but mainly to the time frame between proving up resources and actual mining/extraction of them.

ROF is still very much in the 'proving up' stage and will be throughout 2009. Then we should see initial investment and infrastucture planing for extraction take place. Best I can think of would be 3 years before actual mining. Prices then will be a lot different than now.