Projecting the volatility of a mineral asset depends on its future cash-flow, and as such, should be estimated using its intrinsic economical-financial and operational characteristics instead of its past history. Because of lack of information, in many cases, it is assumed that the project and commodity (oil, gold, as well as other commodity minerals) share the same volatility. Nevertheless, this approach may give misleading results. This paper proposes a framework to estimate the volatility of oil and gold considering that commodity price evolves over time following a Geometric Brownian Motion Model or Mean-Reversion Motion Model. Main results indicate that project volatility is equal to that of its commodity only in very special cases, i.e., low operational costs and high prices, which is currently unrealistic for most industries.
petroleum and mining projects; volatility; stochastic processes; uncertainty; option pricing
