In the practice of designing mining enterprises often have to compare options with different intensity of construction and development of the design capacity of the open pit for ore. These variants may differ from each other in terms of construction time, duration of the period of development of the design capacity, the amount and time of investment, as well as the amount of commercial ore extracted in the period up to the design year. When comparing variants with different volumes of marketable products, projects usually do not comply with the requirement of identity of effect, i.e. comparability of variants in terms of volume and quality of ore. Approved in 1969 Model Methodology for determining the effectiveness of capital investment proceeds from compliance with this requirement, but does not indicate ways and means of its satisfaction.