Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:41 our investors and interested people in Power Nickel. It's a tremendous time to be getting an update on the story. And if you're new to the story, it's a tremendous time to be learning about the story because it's a story that can make you a lot of money, pure and simple. And that's what everyone that's on this call is here for. They're ultimately here as investors. They're trying to evaluate whether I should buy the stock, sell the stock or really go heavy. So we'll give you as much as we can, the straight information on that. And let's start rolling into it right now. So our headline is the world's first carbon neutral nickel mine. We'll pick that up as we go through the presentation. As always, we're not going to tell you anything we don't believe is true, but it's always coming upon us all as investors to do our own due diligence.
1:28 Why invest now? As a personal investment strategy, I've always found I've made the most money when I got the macro right and the micro right. I think that's what's setting up now for PowerNickel and for many other companies I think in the battery metal space. Today, I know everyone's sort of terrified with what's happening with the regional banks and all that uncertainty. I'm sure all of us have looked at our portfolio and it's down and we're a little bit depressed and feeling poor. That's there, that's fear And it's in the streets and it's palpable and we can feel it. And it's already reflected in the stock prices of many companies out there, including our own. But this is where real money is made folks. And this is where, you know, I'm telling you, you gotta get some courage and you gotta start to find these special situations like Power Nickel, if you feel it's the right one, or others, and you've got to make some significant investments because it's going to pay you big time, and all your current problems with your returns are gonna disappear because you're gonna make a lot of money.
2:37 This chart on the left is the commodity to equity ratio. And you can see, as you look at it, we're down here, this is the commodity sector right now. This is where it gets when it peaks. And you can see this is sort of when it's just sort of like average somewhere up in here. So this is gonna rip and it's gonna rip along long ways. And it's not just fantasy, because right now, my second point here is on the massive commitments that are happening in the battery metal space, as an example. Something like $50 billion of construction is already happening now, building battery plants across Canada and the United States. So that's money that's going to be completed and done. And those battery plants are going to have huge demand for battery materials, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphene.
3:33 So there's going to be a lot of demand for those products and there's just not enough supply. So especially for class 1 nickel. So that is going to be a big, you know, sort of what I call tides coming in. You want to be investing with that tide. What's driving that is, of course, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was the 1st US policy which basically set aside some massive incentives for individual consumers to switch to buying electric cars. Now, the way they set that up was that they were giving you, I think, 7 or 8000 dollars per individual, per purchase, as long as it met a certain minimum North American supply line. So it started off fairly benign, I think 40 percent, and then over the next few years it goes up to 90 percent. Well, as it goes through that period of time, if you don't have, as an example, North American nickel in your car, you just won't qualify. It just won't have enough North American material. So, those are the little nuances that are really important to sort of understand as investor. Because what does that mean? Well, it means that everyone's going to be scrambling to secure North American supply. So if you are a North American nickel supplier, you're going to be winning the lottery ticket and that's what we got.
4:44 Okay. Second thing, government incentives, not just the United States, not just in them giving, like the Department of Defense giving $115 million to a nickel company called Talon Metals, which is one of our peer companies, but also saying that they would do that for Canadian companies. And what's even more profound is about 3 or 4 weeks ago when the federal and provincial budgets were pronounced in Canada and in Quebec, they made an enormous statement that has gone completely, I think, unrecognized by the markets. So the federal government is committed to providing a 30% tax credit to build critical mineral mines, including nickel. So to build the mine and to put the equipment in there, Quebec is going to provide up to 25% tax credit. Tax credits are basically like cash.
5:32 We can turn those to cash. So think of it, all of a sudden, we're gonna get 50, 55% of our capital cost of a mine paid for by the government, okay? So in our case, simple nickel mine would be maybe $250 million. A actual mine that we'd like to build at the end of the day that actually can produce high-end nickel wires, powders, and anodes that the actual patent industry uses will cost 400 million dollars. So in Power Nickel's case, we could be the beneficiary of over 200 million dollars of free government money to build this mine. Mind-blowing. When you think that our market cap is 25 and we could get a gift like that, if you think we're gonna get commercial. Now we're gonna switch to the micro and I'm gonna show you that we're gonna get commercial and that's why you really need to be getting long, power nickel. So the first thing I'm going to point out is we're extremely undervalued compared to our peers. That slide's a little hard to read on this one, but we'll get into it a bit more in depth.
6:25 But the point of the slide is that we're trading at 1.6 to 1.20 of our peers. OK. And we're going to be every bit as good as them, or maybe better. So that's the flashpoint. What is going to be the catalyst for that to actually happen? Generally speaking, it's probably going to be when the new 43-101 is posted, which will basically say, we've got somewhere between 8 to 10 million tonnes of 1.5% Nickel. But along the pathway, it's the drill results. Because we've been putting out killer drill results literally the entire year here, and there's more killer results to come. Some more next week, some more in a month's time, some more in 8 weeks or so. And that'll be the last 3 sets of assays in this current drill program. And as each set of assay comes out, as we post all of our drill colors and assays, so people can model it themselves. We've actually posted our own leapfrog model so you can get in and have a look at it.
7:19 This is where we get this data and this confidence that we're going to have this much tonnage. As these results continue to come out and support big intercepts with a lot of Nickel, a lot of Palladium, a lot of Copper and Cobalt, that should give you confidence that yes, in fact, we are going to get commercial. And that's just the beginning, folks, because this thing's not going to be a small Nickel mine. It's not going to be 8 to 10 million tons. We're looking, our comparables are already Lynn Lake, 22 million tons, and Voisey's Bay, over 50 million tons. That's where I expect we're going to be at the end of the day. This will make this a billion-dollar deal. Today you're buying it for 25Mt in the U.S. So spectacular opportunity. Let's dive into the details. For those of you new to the story, obviously the existing investors will know we're fully running in Quebec. This is a Quebec story.
8:09 We're basically our mine. The NISQ project is just outside of Namaska, Quebec, which is sort of, as you can see, sort of center of the province, but it's considered Northern Quebec. It's just east of James Bay. Quebec is without doubt the best place in the world to be looking for critical minerals right now. A number of reasons for that. Firstly, they have done a tremendous job in working with local communities, in particular, the Aboriginal partnerships, in this case, the Cree, who are our partner in this area. And they've educated them and incentivized them to basically participate in the mining sector and profit from it. So right now within this probably 100km of the NISQ project, there's 4 mines being built or already built. So that means you've got great community support. So community support is critical and is often a risk factor in building a mine. So we don't have that. So that's awesome.
9:05 The other thing that's really done a great job is infrastructure. So you can see that we're just outside of this town called the Namaska. There's an airport there. And basically, that's 8 kilometers outside of town. So all these supplies are basically being set up and supply chains. We can obviously get to that. That's really great. In fact, right across from our project, which you can get to off of 4 lane highway and our drillers when they were drilling there, you know, just last week, they would go home at night, stay at a very nice Cree built lodge, a resort lodge. So for junior mining, that's fantastic for that. So it's obviously going to be easy to build. Right across the street from us is a major Hydro-Quebec substation. So infrastructure is really fantastic in Quebec in this area in particular.
9:58 The third reason, and probably the fundamentally the most profound reason is the financial incentives to explore and to build in Quebec are unmatched anywhere in the world. So we just closed a round of financing of about $4.8 million or so, where we raised money at basically 50 cents and our stock price as of today is around 25 cents. So how is that possible? Well, it's possible because of the incentives, the various tax credits federally and provincially that are available in Canada and in Quebec and the deductions. And so we were able to basically get, you know, high income paying Quebec investors to invest at 50 cents. And they immediately sold the unit, which was a share and 0.5,450 cents to our end investors for 25 cents the very next sort of second really. And then that first front end investor, the net impact for them was they effectively went from a 54% tax rate to about 42%.
10:56 So they were up at 12 points after tax, no risk, they move on. Great, Thank you for your service. We got 50 cents in so that helps us and all of our existing shareholders, a lot less dilution. Now we can go forward with exploring the project and proving up more tonnage. And this round of investor who paid 25 cents, he puts a dollar in, he's got $2 working for him to make his investment prosper. It's a win-win all the way around. And obviously that's made possible by the government policies who are really trying to inspire the change and the carbonization of the economy. And they want the critical minerals sector to prosper. So I criticize the government a lot of times, but they are really doing a good job, I think, in critical minerals and what they're doing there. So now that was fantastic.
11:47 Now, in the opening, I talked about, now it's not just about exploration, it's also about building. So projects like NISQ, if we have a $400 million capex, up to $200 million in tax credits will be generated there. So that'll make this project really easy to get going, provided of course, there's a valid mine there. And of course, everything sort of depends on that. We're gonna get to that in a second. When I opened up, we talked about the world's first carbon neutral nickel mine. You know, obviously environmentalism, The green movement is a big thing these days. But we're not wrapping ourselves in the flag. Of course we are. But we're not doing it just to be sort of flag wavers. We're doing it because it's actually good business. And we believe it'll be a strategic competitive advantage for power Nickel to be the world's first carbon neutral Nickel mine. How are we going to get there? Well, first thing we did, we basically were the 1st mining miner to offset our drilling costs by getting Vera certified credits to offset our use of diesel in our drilling program. So we used a very innovative Canadian company called CarbonX and their program can drill green. And we basically, we increased our drilling costs from $200 a meter to $200 and 25 cents. So yeah, we're paying an extra 25 cents, but now we're drilling clean, okay? So that's an important part of our whole methodology here because we think there's money to be made for our shareholders by being perceived as the greenest nickel on the planet. How else do we move forward?
13:15 We think with the technology we're using, we're using state of the art technology to find our nickel and to drill it up and prove it that it's there. We're using a company called Fleet Space Technologies and their ambient noise tomography. We're using airborne EN. All this will minimize our drilling and allow us to maximize our discovery. Okay, so less ground disturb, less issues. Thirdly, obviously we're in Quebec, we're just south and east of James Bay. So the world's best hydroelectric power is right at our footsteps, literally across the road. So we're gonna use green hydroelectric power to electrify our mine. Generally speaking, most mines are off the grid and run by diesel, both their power and their trucks. So we'll be all online and everything will be run by electric.
14:05 Processing wise, we're looking at a number of different processing solutions for the nickel that we're finding. And we're at this point looking focused on the most environmentally friendly 1, which will be an amazing process that will be, it's been around for about 17 years and It will be the most efficient in terms of no effluent, in terms of the air, recycling the water. When you design them in that front, it doesn't cost you, it can actually be beneficial. And then the fifth point I would make is the fact that ultramarine deposits, such as what we have in power nickel, by nature, naturally sequester CO2. If you hit them with some oxygen before you put them on the tailing pile, it'll actually triple the sequestration of the CO2. So we're gonna verify that, and we've been in touch with it, but this is now accepted science.
14:59 And everything we'll do will be verified, and we'll prove out that in fact, you know, we're going to be able to accomplish our goal of having the world's first carbon neutral mine. But we'll do it with a view to basically profiting from it. Why do I say that? When I was in Korea 3 or 4 weeks ago, meeting with all the battery manufacturers over there. I met with several that had done deals with Indonesian lidarites. I'm not throwing rocks at Indonesia, they're doing the best they can with what they've got. But that is a heavy CO2 drag. They have to use a lot of CO2 to make the mines to build them. And then they have to use a lot of CO2 to keep them operational. So that's competing against us, which will be carbon neutral. So you can imagine if you're a Ford and GM and Ford buys from Indonesian nickel and GM buys from power nickel.
15:55 Do you think the marketers are gonna use that to their advantage and say, hey, Ford's using dirty nickel? That's gonna happen. So at the end of the day, people want to get associated with clean nickel. And this will be a very big selling point for us.
16:11 All the environmentalism in the world won't do us any good if we don't have a fundamentally strong business. In mining, that starts first and foremost with the core deposit. We've got to have grade. We've got to have quantity. So we're going to show you what we've got. We started with 3.1Mt of about 1.6% Nickel EQ. That was a great start. We then drilled 8 holes to verify that historic resource, prove that it was valid. And we had great success there. And drilling 18, 19, 27-meter sections, all 1.5% or better. So that gave us belief that this was something special. We ramped up effectively a 30,000 meter program, of which we're about almost halfway through now. You see sort of gold spots and purple spots.
16:59 These are holes that had been reported, and this is the shape of the ore body. And you can see, and I'll walk you through 3 of the most recent assays that were released. So, when we released a 43-101 in August of last year, and it showed 4 million tons of 1.5% nickel and about 5 million tons of, at $8 nickel and 5 million tons at 960 nickel. We had to pull that 43-101 because it used tenure and older metallurgical study, which wouldn't have been a problem if we were a Quebec company or Ontario company, but because we're a BC registered company, they have an obscure rule that says if it's metallurgical studies more than 10 years old, we can't use it. Our QP didn't know that, we didn't know that, So that's why we ultimately had to pull that 4,301.
17:48 Nonetheless, the ore body was there and that's what we're really building on. So from that sort of model, this particular hole, 2209, was 150m away from the nearest resource. This is a 40m hole of over 1.6% Nickel. So an amazing sort of hole. One of the top 5 holes in Nickel. 60% of our holes have 1% Nickel or better. The next release we posted was, I think it's basically 10m of almost 3% Nickel EQ, a monster hole. So again, all this, another 90m away from the 150 away. So all this is adding big tonnage. And then just recently, like 10 days ago, we released about a 16m hole of around 1.5% Nickel EQ, again, in this same sector, but 90 metres further west.
18:39 So adding a lot of tonnage by basically filling in these pods. This particular square that we're looking at, that's about 1 square kilometer, okay? So this is in fact what the nickel, what we call the river nickel looks like. So like rivers in real life, there are lots of twists and turns. So you can see that if we don't catch one of these turns, we could lose a lot of tonnage. So it's very important to get those tonnage. So I want you to keep that in mind when we talk about the fleet airborne ambient noise tomography in just a second. The importance of identifying all these twists and turns to pick up the maximum number of tonnage you can for each of our pots. So this is a top view down of about a kilometer stretch. And this just shows you how, you know, the thickness works, you know, and it's basically goes, you know, really from 40 meters, you know, to 5 meters, you know, and all the way up and through. So this river, Nicoll gets wider or narrower, it gets shallower and deeper and it gets clearer and cloudier. So that's just the nature of discovery. So when we're trying to sort of prove this out, we're trying to find the widest intersection possible and the deepest, but of course, it'll be what it'll be.
19:56 That's why not all of our drill holes are successful, nor should they be. If they were, then we wouldn't be doing our job of pushing the envelope to see how wide things are. But nonetheless, we're getting tremendous grade across this whole thing and tremendous widths. So that's why we're confident that when we update our 43-101, we're going to have a mineable ore body right now with just this one pot, but that's just the beginning. This is our sort of a map of our property. And it's actually, there's gonna be some new changes to this because now this 3.5 kilometer section is now stretched out to 5.5 kilometers of ultramarine rock. We've been exploring 1, maybe 1.25 kilometers of it. And that's what we we've just flown an airbo section and M. Basicl 4 bodies. So massive s looking for with our nick So this thing lit up like a Christmas tree was very exciting stuff. And that'll be part of the technology we'll use to find the next pots. Because interestingly in nickel sulfide mines, every single nickel sulfide mine in the history of the world is always multiple pot.
21:09 So, hey, it could always happen that we'd be the first that's not like that, but it definitely doesn't look like that. It looks like we're gonna find multiple pots and this thing's gonna be a whopper. So in the ultramaffic world, our comparables in Canada, Lynn Lake, 20 million tons, Boise Bay, 50 million tons. We think we're going to be in that mix, 20 to 50 million tons. How do we get there? Well, obviously stuff like airborne EN, downhole EN, IP, and this new technology called ambient noise tomography. So we picked up on this when Talametals, one of our peer companies, which we'll talk about in a second, used this in Michigan on their Tamarack deposit. And they used it because Elon Musk obviously has the offtake with with them and he actually put these guys in with SpaceX into satellite and what they do is they basically put these little platinum looking things over here called geodes And they put them in this contraption and they put them on the earth. We sort of put it into the earth and they're about 100 meters a piece. You put them initially across our core deposit where we already know we've got, you know, 8 to 10 million tons or whatever the math works out to be. And we'll do a sound pulse.
22:19 And basically, the pulse will go down 2,000 meters into the earth and come back as a sound map. And so these sound maps can then be correlated to our hard scientific data of our drill core, obviously the IP, the downhole EM, the airborne EM. And that allows them to capture basically a 3D image of our deposit at depth. That's really important for several reasons. Remember that point I told you about the Squiggly River, remember how the bends were and how each bend, if we missed it, would be maybe 1 million or 2 million tons or grade. So missing one of those turns could really be costly. Well, with this, we're going to be able to see, Hey, do we miss, you know, is there some additional easy times that we can add by just infill drilling this. Okay. Step number 1, let's do that. Step number 2, this gives us a signature that we can look at and say, okay, we know this signature correlates to massive sulfides have good grade. And let's look and see where are these other signatures similar to this, okay? And let's see where they're similar to this. And they also correlate with the airborne EN or an IP. Because then it's like, okay, now concentric circles are working. So that makes it much more likely that our odds are going to work for us and the drill bit's going to work out. But this could be deeper, because oftentimes rivers of Nickel are stacked. So there's a river up top and a river in the middle and the river down the bottom. So let's see.
23:44 Okay. It could also be on this whole 5.5 kilometer sequence of the ultramafic rock. It could be, you know, we've got several of these pods. Okay, let's again, see where it is again, tied into the airborne EN or the IP. And then we're basically at this point, just studying 2% of our land package. So ultimately we're going to explore the whole land package and look for these signatures in the hope that we can find multiple pods and make this into a 20, 30, 40Mt, 50Mt Nickel project. We certainly have this opportunity. We believe, as I said, we'll believe we're going to be between 20 and 50 million tons. If you believe what we're saying, that we're going to get between 20 to 50 million tons, if we're going to get to 8 to 10 million tons, then the valuation for Power Nickel is about to change radically in a very short time. We're talking that we think we've been saying to folks that we'll get the 43 one-on-one out in July. So sometime between now and July, our worst case in July, we're going to get this evidence out that eventually the market will react to. So right now, the nickel sulfide companies listed at the top, these are like us, undeveloped mines that have the market deems them as being commercial.
24:58 And they basically valuation somewhere between 140 million and 480 million US. Our financing was just completed at 25 million US. Okay. So that basically suggests we're trading at 0.167 to 0.05 of the values of our peers. Okay. And our peers are down 50% across the board. So I'm not suggesting these are bad nickel companies. They're very good nickel companies. I believe you should own the whole sector, honestly. This nickel stuff is highly undervalued. But within the sector, we're the best value. Okay, we have the most upside. So relatively speaking, this is the time to back up the truck and load up on Power Nickel because we're so undervalued and the news flow is strong and the evidence is strong. What's our action plan? Okay, let's talk about that. We're gonna release drill results over the next, we've got 3 more sets of results that will come out over the next 8 weeks.
25:55 We're going to announce our spin-out, which is basically, we'll get into that in more detail in just a second, but our projects in BC and ultimately in Chile. We're going to release our airborne EM6 survey, which we talked about as we were going through this, which shows there's a lot of interesting, highly magnified ore bodies at or near a surface that need to be explored. We're gonna release our metallurgical study, which will show that, yep, we can process this ore efficiently in an economic way, so that can be mined. We're gonna use gravity, seismic airborne EM, ambient noise tomography to find these other pods and that's going to happen in Q2 so that we can start drilling again in Q3 and probably by mid-July we'll be back in the bit and we won't stop drilling until December and we hope to add a second rig. So this thing is going to start to crank. Okay.
26:48 We'll update our 43-101. We hope to get it out, you know, I think at this stage, early Q3 is like, you know, in July is like, that's what the target looks like because of some delays in getting the metallurgical study done. And then, you know, the eighth point is we'll hope to deliver a PEA or better by Q1, Q2 next year. What do I mean by or better? Well, or better, I mean that it's possible that we'll go directly to a more advanced phase, i.e. A feasibility study. We're certainly having those conversations with industry now. That's what I think people are missing. People are reflecting the stock market and say, oh, the stock market is down. Maybe the trillion dollars are great, but no, that's not it. Stock market is down because there's a lot of fear out there and because there's short sellers in this marketplace.
27:37 You know, they say it's bad form to talk about short sellers, and I've not talked about them for a while, but you know what? I'm now talking about them because these guys are bane on our existence and of many junior mining companies. Okay, not just Power Nickel, almost across the board. These guys need to be put out of business and the governments need to wake the hell up. You know, it's frustrating. We've been, you know, Save Canadian Mining's been campaigning on this for 3 years now and very little to nothing has been done. So we're highly frustrated. However, we're learning some new tactics that can help us help ourselves. Okay. I'm going to share a couple of those ideas with you today. So when we do this spin out, which we're gonna get into in just a second, it's gonna be spun out and the company that comes out of it will own our BC project. And this project will be listed not on the TSX fee, It'll be listed on another exchange, probably the CSE.
28:33 And the reason why we're doing that is to have a hard physical break so they cannot just do their paper games and say, oh yeah, we're covered in paper. Bullshit, you're not covered in paper. You certainly, if there's, I expect there's maybe as much as 40 or 50% of our float is naked short, okay? That's my gut feeling. And those guys can get away with it because they have more money than God. They can always have more capital, keep on turning over the stock. So they're able to somehow skate this through the regulators despite our objections. And that works to some degree for them. However, when you have a dividend that isn't on the same exchange, now you've got to, only people that are gonna get that stock are my shareholders, our shareholders, okay? Bonafide shareholders that have a DRS in their account, okay? Not an IOU for a DRS, a DRS, okay?
29:26 That's like a stock certificate. Either you have the stock certificate or you have a DRS, which is the digital form of stock studio. Either one of those 2 things, you're going to get your dividend. If you don't have them, you're not going to get it. And now you're going to be angry. You're going to say, Hey, to your broker and say, Hey, where is my stock? I paid for it. Where is it? It's because these guys are shorted and not delivered. That's the whole thing with short sellers. They do not deliver. That's a lot of failed to delivers. So this is one way to sort of stop them. Second thing, we hired a company called Share Intel. Share Intel is an accounting firm out of the US. They've developed an innovative new approach to quantifying short selling in any individual company stock. So they basically, with bonafide CDS and browser's data, they collect the information and they expect to get a report in the next week or 10 days on Power Nickel, because we've been doing this, where they'll actually be able to tell us, you know, the, here's the brokerage firms and the locations within the brokerage firm where accounts are naked short.
30:34 OK, and here's the proof of that. And we'll be able to take that information and we'll be sending cease and desist letters to those the compliance departments of those brokers and saying, hey, guys, you're probably unaware of this. OK, here's the evidence of this malfeasance that's happening on your watch. Here's exactly where it is. In 2 weeks, we're gonna have more evidence of that. In 2 weeks, this needs to be gone or you're already part of the problem. You're part of the malfeasance, okay? So that's been done with a handful of companies and the brokers are cooperating and actually closing these guys out as they should. So this may be an important new tactic in our war with the shorts. And I think that, again, I don't think people should be buying power nickel because of the shorts one way or the other. You should buy this because we're going to become a nickel mine and we're going to get paid regardless of the shorts. But these are some of the tactics we're going to use to sort of deal with them. And I think that could be super beneficial for us going forward. Let's talk about the spin out.
31:36 So the spin out is gonna be first our project in BC called Golden Ivan. Golden Ivan is this yellow project up here in the, it's really the Mount Rainey. It's Mount Rainey, the top of Mount Rainey, which overlooks the town of Stewart. Stewart's over here at the port. And this is the start of the Golden Trial right here at the base. So Ascot Resources is a building of mine right here. Scotty Resources right next door to them and to us is one of my favorite junior goals. It's got as many 50 grand goal holes as Great Bear did, obviously the huge goal success of a couple of years ago, that at the same time of its existence, strike points just beneath us, and they've had some good results as well. We did some sampling and the sampling showed 3 different sets of half-ounce Gold at surface.
32:24 That's exciting. As I said, we're in an area that's never been drilled and we've got permits now to drill it this summer. So our intention is to spin it out and we'll value it at what? Well, it's probably going to be somewhere between, this is like StrikePoint was 17 million, Scotty is 65. We think it will be probably somewhere in the 10 to 15 million range. And we'll raise 1 million and a half dollars and that'll be separate from Power Nickel's kitty. And then we'll drill this project up and that company will have its own management team that obviously will be on the board and oversee it. But that'll move forward. Now, what we'll do with the stock is, let's say we're left with 88% of the stock. Well, that 86% will stay with Power Nickel and 22% will be dividended out through a plan of arrangement to our shareholders.
33:16 So there'll be a nice little bonus here for our shareholders. And that'll we expect to hopefully formally announce this the next 10 days. And then basically, it would ultimately be approved at our annual meeting in early June. And then the plan of range takes about 45 days. So call it 1st of August or something, sometime like that. This'll be up and running. We think it'll be a great time for, we think, you know, basically gold and copper exploration companies are finally gonna get a chance this fall, and this'll be a great timing for us. The second part of that strategy will be to do that with our Chilean properties. It's really expensive to do it all at once. It would cost us an extra $300,000 of just wasted money, wouldn't create any value for anybody. And it would be a pain in my neck to have to go through all this paperwork and crap.
34:06 So it makes no sense to do that. Instead, we'll hire a fairness opinion, probably cost us 40 or 50 thousand bucks. And then we'll transfer the shares over to the new pubco. And so it'll have both the Chile properties and our BC property. So that's how we're going to do it. Now I'll tell you an interesting story about Chile, why we're super excited about Chile. It's obviously got still the issues with the nationalization of the lithium and stuff like that. You know, that's been over said really. I'm not really a big fan of the current leadership there. I think Chile is an amazing country and I love the Chilean people and we've done business there for a long time. And I think they're, they've got some fantastic business opportunities.
34:51 The interesting part was the constitutional reform was rejected massively by the audience, something like 0.667 to 0.333. So this current leadership is running on thin ground. I doubt he'll be able to get that approved through the Senate. We'll see. It's certainly, lithium was basically nationalized anyway in Chile. So it's a bit of, you know, not really major news. If you actually worked there, you'd know this. But they didn't obviously touch copper or gold for obvious reasons, because they didn't need massive investment in there and they can't do that. And I think this guy will be gone. So I believe politically, Chile is sort of at its nadir and that it'll come back. What's interesting for us from a actual science side of things of finding the deposits, when we're going through, you know, you look at these huge land tracts, 4, 6, 8,000 hectares, it's in the Atacama Desert, okay? Desert exploration is very difficult. Why is it difficult? It's difficult because, you know, there's a mineralized limestone in the sand called caliche.
35:57 Caliche basically acts to restrict IP and gravity signals, which is how you usually put together a regional place. And so it's very tough, short of using little blaster rigs to get down underneath the surface and do samples, it's really tough to get a regional view together. Now, when we're doing our due diligence on the fleet ambient noise tomography. One of the things that we learned was they basically had been using it for a couple of years in the West Australian desert, very successfully finding copper mines, finding lithium. And I said, so I know from other previous business experience in West Australia, that it basically has Caliche as well. So I said, well, what about Caliche? And they said, no problem. You know, the sound waves go down, they come back at sound maps, Caliche does not obstruct that. So, I mean, that's really something.
36:46 That could be a game changer for Chile because these are vast land tracts. I mean look at think of the size of the city of Toronto that's the land package we control of any one of these. So you obviously have to vector that down in terms of where you're at. So you know so basically it's it's a it's an interesting new approach And so when we're done with using the geodes in NISQ, we're gonna ship them down to Chile and obviously it'll be going into, at that point will be the new company, but it'll be creating value for power nickel shareholders is the point. And it could be significant value. And basically this stuff is free at the moment. So it'll be a hell of a bonus. Last point to talk about just in terms of refreshment is we do have a very nice royalty in Chile, 3% NSR, tech can buy 1% for 3 million and has the first rights on it. We're in discussions with another royalty company right now, hopefully conclude this in probably Q3 at this stage. And that would see us get between 5 to $7 million, I think US, great capital to have at this stage while the royalties worth a lot more in the long run. If we're selling NISQ to, you know, keep the royalty, that's the wrong move because NISQ is really the thing that's gonna make us a lot of money as shareholders.
38:07 So this could be a nice little, you know, cash injection. And again, most people have no clue that this is even something that we own. Management team hasn't changed, you know, we've kept it very lean at this stage. As we start to grow here, I suspect we'll start to add some key team members, but for now in Ontario, or in Quebec for example, we use GeoVector. Joe Campbell and his team, Adam Finley and Eric Herbert, they've been just sensational, really fantastic guys to work with, very professional, done a whale of a job for us. And honestly, we probably couldn't buy that tunnel, but we can rent it. And it's actually cost effective to do so with the way the tax vehicles work in our country. And the same thing out West, we use Apex, another highly esteemed scientific engineering firm to manage that process for us. So again, that's the way to go for us in Chile with Jimena. We operate directly.
39:06 Our board's been very supportive, been with us for several years and their board owns 4% of the company stock. So obviously they're key stakeholders. The key shareholders, the Lynch and the Lynch family, you know, the last 2 rounds, we've been the biggest single investor and all of our core investors have invested. So the core investors, the critical elements, the Stern family, BT Global, Palace capital have all added or increased their holdings. So each round we've taken 60 to 70% of the round. So I think it's really, when I look at investing, I like to see management with skin in the game. I like to see key stakeholders continuing to maintain or increase their stake because they know the deal better than anybody. So if they're buying, you know, and it's like, you know, these markets like they are right now, that's a very good sign. So here's our cap structure. We got 130 million shares out, generally speaking.
40:01 1 point I would note is we've got about 28 million warrants at about 20 cents, most of them 70% owned by those stakeholders. So at 40, they become callable. So we'd expect with the news we've got coming out over the next several weeks, that this thing is going well north of that. This will obviously add to the capital we have to work going forward, but we're well set up cash-wise to drill through to 2024 and then beyond. I think what will happen is we'll end up probably doing some interesting feasibility study with a major company here shortly. And that will allow us to totally sort of re-envision what this thing can be when it grows up.
40:49 And yeah, I say to people, it's entirely possible that we'll never have to go back to the market to finance again. People say, how is that possible? Well, it's possible because industry is gonna come in and finance it. If the market's not there, industry will be there. So this is the point that people are missing. And that's why, you know, I know I'm pounding the table and it's self-serving because obviously I'm a big shareholder, but I'm saying to you in all sincerity, this is the time to buy. Like, you know, I'm giving you the checkered flag. It can't get any more obvious. You'll do what you do. Let's wrap it up. 10 reasons to invest in Power Nickel. Power Nickel's got a phenomenal nickel sulfate discovery. Okay. We're trading at a massive discount to our peers. The drill results have been excellent and continue to sort of come out every 3 or 4 weeks. And that's always great, getting news out all the time.
41:38 We're fully funded to drill another 15,000m starting in July, moving into results starting to come out in Q3, Q4. So again, lots of news in this story. We're gonna find new pods. We're gonna, we think grow to a, between Lynn Lake and Voicespace size. That would make us 1 billion dollar company. Batter mails are hot and we got them all. Nickel, copper, cobalt, palladium and platinum. NISK has it all. Spinoff offers excellent bonus potential, and it's also going to be a way to, I think, sideline the shorts. It would have been a bane to our existence. The leadership team is well connected. We've been able to pull these things together because of our connection in the sector. And by God, we're in Quebec. And that is the place where you can get 2 for 1 exploration dollars. And where it's possible, we can build this mine with up to $200 million worth of support from the governments.
42:28 So, I mean, it really is an amazing story. We're thankful that you guys have been with us along the way to support us and give us your capital to work with. We're working as hard as we can to bring the bacon home, so to speak. It's not there yet and we continue to fight the good fight, but we're highly confident, never been more confident that this thing is really going to be a huge, huge home run. So Cameron, without further ado, why don't we take some questions and see where we go from there? Yeah, absolutely, Terry. Thanks for going through the great presentation. And as you say to everyone in the audience, if you have any questions, please feel free to submit them to the chat that's found on the right hand side of your screen. First question that we have, are the operations or future development of NISC project going to be affected by climate change, for instance, cold weather?
43:18 You know what, cold weather for us is good because we can operate in cold weather. The only time you can't drill up there is basically, you know, right now, actually, sort of, they call it the goose season. It's the ground soft and sort of late April to end of May, sometimes early June. It changes year to year, but it's ground soft. So that would be the only thing that would happen there. Operating in cold weather is not a problem for us because, you know, obviously we'll engineer around that. And we got to assume it got, when we were drilling, it got as low as I think 30 and 40 below and we were still drilling. And safety, we enhanced our safety protocols. And so we did all that. So That would not be a problem for us at NISQ.
44:08 Okay. Adrian wants to know, why move forward with the spin-out now and why not wait until the mining sector is more obviously in favor? Yeah, We did pull out last year. We were planning to do this last year and then we held up. I guess this year we have a sense that 2 things. 1, We believe that the mining market will turn because it's just basically on supply and demand fundamentals. Copper in particular we are bullish on. And if you look at all this uncertainty in the banking world that we're seeing today and for the last few weeks. Gold is obviously steady at $2,000 and looks like it could go north. So we think there will be a junior mining market and if it's not this fall, it's coming soon.
45:00 The other thing we're doing is we're doing this to separately sort of move those assets out so they can stand on their own 2 feet and that they can be valued independently at Power Nickel and financed independently at Power Nickel. We want power nickel to be all about nickel. And then we'll obviously, we want to maximize the value of our copper gold assets, but we feel this is the best way to do it. And then lastly, this is gonna be a vehicle to trap the shorts, and that's a big part of the strategy. Okay, great. Adrian has another just question. How new is the ambient noise technology and can it be used for greenfields or undrilled properties or is it just mainly used for confirmation and expanding knowledge about already assayed drill holes? Yeah, it's about I mean, they've been working on it for several years, but I would say it's been fully operational maybe for the last 2, where they're really making discoveries and running it full steam.
46:01 It definitely has been used in Greenfield. Every Greenfield has some sort of geological information. You've got some, you know, usually government maps or government, you know, there's always something that you start with, so you would start with that. So I don't know, you know, rhythm and verse on how successful they've been on greenfield exploration. I do know they've been successful in particular with adding resource to existing operations. And that's where we fall in. So that's why it was attractive to us. No fair enough. Kenny wants to know if you could share more on your discussions in Korea with battery manufacturers. Is there any talk of investments or offtakes? Yes. You know, we've signed 3 NDAs already.
46:47 Since we've been to Korea, 2 things happened of significance. The Korean government has given the battery manufacturers a $5 billion program to draw down upon to make investments in infrastructure, i.e. Mining. So as soon as they announced that, we got a flurry of NDAs. The second thing that happened, of course, was the federal and provincial budgets said that they would pay up to 50% of our mine costs to build a thing. So that's a changing dynamic and people haven't figured this out yet. It's reading material because generally with a bankable feasibility study, if you had 50% equity, you could bank the rest. So all of a sudden the need to have the Korean investors or the offtake investors or the Glencore's of the world that come in at these types of stages or these intermediaries maybe changes the game.
47:48 And now we're dealing with basically right now we're dealing with an end user that actually makes products, final stage nickel products, high value final stage nickel products, like triple the economics of, you know, what we get if we were making just the nickel concentrate. So they've come to us because now their clients are saying, we want to make sure you guys have nickel. So they've got to now move upstream. So there's some paradigm shifts happening in the space that because we're in Quebec, because we're in North America, we've got a chance to really hit the home run here. And it could be a grand slam that wins the World Series. It's amazing. Okay. Adrian wants to know, can the LME be relied upon to set a realistic nickel price in the future or will price setting and trading move to a different market over time?
48:41 There's a lot of speculation on that, you know, and LME lost a lot of credibility. No question about it because of the debacle last year. That's all you can call it, really. So I don't know what the answer is on that. Still seeing contracts based on LME at the moment, but I would not be surprised to see perhaps Chicago or some other exchange develop an alternative nickel pricing mechanism. It would make sense to me that that happens. Possibly Shanghai. I don't know. The LME is effectively controlled, I think, by Chinese investors and there's been a lot, they let that, you know, that major Chinese firm off the hook, really, and there's lawsuits and litigation on that. That's really why there's people lost confidence in it. So yeah, it's a good question.
49:34 You know, so they'll eventually sort that out, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some competition. Great. Thomas wants to know which resource, based on the drill results so far, are you expecting to release in June or July? And he's asking for some tons and grades if possible. Yeah, and again, all we can do is, you know, we can't, you know, we've been giving guidance that we think will be somewhere between 8 to 10 million tons of around 1.5 percent nickel EQ. That's all I feel really comfortable in saying. I don't know exactly. We won't know until we get all the assays in and run them through the model and spin them back out. But we were up to really sort of 5 million tons when we had to pull the 43-101 because of the metallurgical study. And we've drilled some massive holes since then. So I believe that that's a good number, but obviously the 43-101 will be out shortly and we'll all know the answer.
50:28 Great. Question is, how many short shares do you think are outstanding and timing wise, when do you think that you can defeat them? Hey, you know what? Timing is always the toughest thing to predict in any business. I think there's upwards of 40 million shares short, which is I know sounds like people say you got to be kidding me and I'm saying Hey, and I wish it was only power nickel, but I believe that 30% is a very common number For a short positions undeclared in Canadian mining stocks I think that's a lot And I think it could be as high as 50% in some cases more. How to defeat them? I mean, I would just be happy to have them get the hell out of the stock. That would be victory for us. Because I just like to be valued for our good results or our bad results. You know, we can take the medicine if we don't deliver the goods.
51:22 I would hope that over the next month, the tactics of the spin-out, The share and tell pressure, the enormous good news that we're going to be having over the next 8 weeks would basically make these guys say, you know what, there's better people to be shorting than power nickel. Let's get out of the way of the freight train. That would be good advice for those guys. Fair enough. Now the question of assay results met your expectations from 1 to 2 years ago. And do you think that a phase 4 might be required to find more discoveries. Absolutely. You know I mean I think assay results have met and exceeded our expectations. We're super happy with these assays. This is a robust deposit.
52:12 It looks like we've tested off to the West and off to the East and had great hits on the ultramagnetic sequence. The airborne EM has given us lit up like a Christmas tree. We're very excited about what we see there. So a lot of potential for additional exploration. So, yeah, we expect there'll be 0.25 phase and 0.2 phase and 0.167 phase. Because if we expect to get to 30 million tons or something in that order of magnitude, it's going to take a lot of drilling. Basically, you figure that theoretically, 1 rig could drill 100m a day but doesn't, ends up averaging around 70m. So you figure that's basically 2,000 to 3,000m a month. So that's 15,000m.
53:01 So maybe we've drilled 13,000m and maybe we're going to go from, let's say, 4 or 5 million tons to 8 to 10 million tons. So we double it. So you start to get an order of magnitude and say, hey, if you're going to get to 30, you're going to basically have to drill 60,000 meters or 75,000 meters. And that's going to take multiple rigs and obviously some time. The key thing with drilling is that we've been very careful because obviously we're always tight for cash because we're a poor junior miner and your cash is always tough to come by even though we've stocked up now. So you can't be drilling willy-nilly. You got to be drilling with the science. Make sure, like we're probably hitting 60% of our holes, 50 to 60% of our holes. That's what you wanna be hitting on.
53:54 Because you're gonna miss some because you're trying to, as I said, make that river as wide as possible, as deep as possible. It's not always gonna be there, but you gotta try. And then you bring it in, okay? But yeah, so it would take several rounds of drilling to maximize this, but at the same time as we're drilling and maximizing this, we can be optimizing the plant and getting permitting going so that this thing can get into ground a lot sooner than people think. And that's the whole magic of it. Right. I mean, there's a lot of appreciation in the chat for today's presentation, but there is a pointed question. Is this presentation accessible somewhere that people can go and get it from a download? And there's also a question about if it's possible to have the Excel database of the press release disclosed with mineralized intervals. Yeah, we actually you can go to our powernickel.com website and look under NISQ and You'll actually see there's a spot there, access the data, and all of that data is available. Everything we've produced, the full Excel spreadsheet is there, and all the Asmis, So you can model this yourself. We actually put our own leapfrog model in there as well, so you can do it. We're not trying to fool anyone here. We're very happy to be transparent with our data. So it's out there for you to model with it and do as you like.
55:12 Okay. Adrian wants to know, do you have any previous experience with respect to government funding? And Does it tend to come with lots of conditions, possibly constrictive conditions, or can it be drawn down and used at will? Yeah, the way these structures are set up is just like the financing structure. So for example, we've used the last 2 financings. We financed at double the market price using the incentives the government set up. How do we do that? Well, we did it through the free market. So we basically, in this case, In both cases, we worked with Industrial Alliance as the broker. And they were the broker with the, I would call it the Quebec-based financial partners that had high tax brackets.
55:59 And then we brought, generally through a non-brokered arrangement, led generally by the core 6, shall we say, and then other brokers that participated bought these investments back. So that's an example of the free market system working, where the government had set the parameters, and then everyone sort of played within the parameters and got what advantages they wanted to see from their investments. Same thing would happen with the building. So it's open to anyone, as long as it qualifies as a critical mineral property. And I'm sure there's some process that we would go through to show that, hey, this is not a gold mine, it is a nickel mine. You know, So that obviously would be need to be proved up. But generally speaking, it looks to me like the way they've set this up, it's not like they are picking and choosing.
56:54 They're saying, if you build a plant in this timeframe, we've set aside this many billions of dollars to subsidize this with tax credits as long as you fit this criteria. So clearly you fit the criteria and then the rest is sort of in the math. I'm unfortunately at the point where I have to pick a final question, folks, just because we're coming up on time for the hour. We'll make sure that we pass along any questions that have gone unanswered to Terry and his team so that he can follow up with you guys individually after today's summit. But Terry, with just a couple minutes remaining, I wanted to pass things back to you, just for any closing remarks you might have for the audience, anything else that you wanna highlight? Yeah, you know what? I think, you know, as I was reflecting before I came on, I was thinking about what a challenging time it is for us all as individuals and in our families.
57:47 You know, we came out of COVID, you know, we're into this bit of a slug of a, like a recessionary environment. And we see, you know, a lot of fear out there. You got regional banking issues, unemployment issues, lots of negativity. And, you know, that seems to dominate the headlines, you know, and I say, yeah, you know, we have to understand that's the world we live in. But there is a tremendous amount of hope out there, you know, and the hope is, you know, there's there's a lot of great new technologies. There's, I think in the critical mineral space, Canada is gonna hit it out of the park. We're gonna have some monster wins where there's gonna be 10 Xs and 100 X investments. So investors can really make a fortune, like a life-changing, family-changing fortune.
58:37 And it's gonna take a bit of courage. You know, people are gonna have to say, hey, you know what? I'm gonna buy this and it might not go up tomorrow. Okay, it might take, who knows how long? It may take, it may happen in a month. It may happen in 6 months. But you gotta have the courage of convictions. You gotta sort of say, hey, if I make 5 times my money and it takes me a year, can I be patient? And if the investment isn't that good, if you don't feel fully convicted, this can make you that many times your money in the year, then don't buy it. There's bargains out there in many, many, many stocks. And you should be looking at those bargains and to be asking those critical questions, not can I make 10 percent and flip it next week? That's an idiot's game. You'll get buried, okay? The money in investing really is find great companies that are ultimately gonna deliver the value, okay? Deliver the goods.
59:27 And if you find those great companies, invest in them and hold them, then you're gonna make a lot of money. And You know who gave me that advice? Eric Sprott. I asked when we're working on safety and mining together, I had obviously some times to chat with him. I said, Eric, how'd you become so wealthy? What's your secret? Is it because you get to see all the deals. And he said, no, he's back tested because he's an actuarial guy. And he said, I back tested it. He says, not that. He said, I back tested great management teams and real sort of promoters. And wasn't that either. He said, what it is, he said, after the first round, he says, I call them very quickly down to the second round of guys where I think they've got a pretty solid chance of being a mine. He says, after the second round of results, he says, I know which ones are going to be a mine. And he says, I'm 20% the rest of the way.
1:00:14 He said, that's how I made my money. He said, I bet with them and I held them and I made a lot of money. And I said, well, there it is. Lessons from a multi-billionaire who's clearly the best mining investor in the world. And I thought to myself, well, this is why the Lynch family owns 20% of Power Nickel. So, I mean, that's the message, folks. This one's going to be a winner and you want to maybe check it out. Anyway, great having you here today. If you got questions, by all means, email us. We're pretty accessible here at Power Nickel and happy to help you. So in the interim, Have a great day and go Leafs, go Oilers!
