It seems that a share buy-back strategy is possibly viable. For example, if PRB would use about 1,000,000 million CN, they could acquire somewhere around 800,000 shares at current prices. Using the recent Jennings target increase of $5 to sell the purchased shares would reflect some $4,000,000 gain that could be used to further drilling activities or infrastructure costs. The buy-back could be done gradually over several days and with certain institutional investors in large blocks so as to not flood the open market with buy orders.

There could be a couple of problems: (1) institutional investors may not want to participate by selling their shares so cheaply, and (2) would the Canadian securities view such buy-back as manulative?

An alternative would be to buy back less shares than 800,000 at current prices and pay higher prices, say up to $2 to $2.50 on the open market, gradually over up to, say 15 or so, trading days. Still less than the Jenings target of $5.00.