Transcript
Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:07 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bunker Hill's Live Investment Summit today. We're hosted by 6 and we're joined by Sam Ash, Bunker Hill's CEO, David Weins, the company's CFO, and Kyle Ergman, their head of geology. The team's going to walk us through their company presentation today, covering their recent news release from this past Monday, and after which we'll be moving on to the live Q&A session. You can of course ask your questions using the Q&A chat on the right hand side of your screen, and as always this summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards on six.com. So without further ado, Sam, I'm gonna hand it over to you to kick things off.
0:39 Thanks a lot, Cam. It's an exciting week for the Bunker Hill team. And we wanted to take the opportunity to just give a little bit more color to the press release that we put out Monday, and then the one that came out just before this presentation today. And just as a bit of a reminder, it's been a really busy year here at Bunker Hill. You know, In the last year, we've generated 2 43-101 compliant resources. We published a PEA with strong economics that generate roughly $20 million a year of free cash flow. And it's absolutely our strategy to leverage that cash flow to unlock the significant upside potential at the mine, both the depth and along parallel structures. But pretty importantly for us, we've had some very significant corporate catalysts. And I wanna turn it over to Dave just to run you through and give a little bit more color on what we've achieved here in the last, just the last couple of days. Dave. Great, thanks Sam. So viewers will be familiar with this slide. It's in our investor presentation on our website, but I think it's worth talking about right up front here because really this, you know, not only are these our near-term investment catalysts, but this is how we're planning to create value for our shareholders. And so that starts right at the top. And this demonstrates that not only are we talking about things that we're going to do, we're actually achieving them. Starting with the news release that we had on Monday. So right at the top, release a lifting of the caveat emptor symbol on our US listing, huge accomplishment. This has been a 9 year journey to have this lifted
2:09 and draw a clear line under historic issues. So I'd like to actually say thanks to a few people, Becky at B. Riley, Chris King over at OTC Markets, our US Council, our Canadian Council and our partners at FINRA. This has been certainly a journey and we're very, very pleased. There's been a lot of concern in shareholders about not being able to buy our stock in the US, very understandable, and we're very pleased that that gate is finally open. So we're not done yet, we've lifted the caveat emptor, and next step is to upgrade to the OTCQB. We submitted an application for that, and that is in progress as we speak with OTC markets and we expect that to move along quite nicely over the next few weeks. So very excited about that.
2:57 And second point, research coverage. We've been talking about this for a long time. Well, Monday that happened as well. Sprott initiated coverage on Bunker Hill, which we're very pleased about. We're in discussions with other US and Canadian sell-side brokers as well. So watch this space, onwards and upwards. The next 3 catalysts I'll just touch on briefly. Discussions continue to go well and constructively with the EPA. We're in discussions around the resolution of the liability in terms of the ability to pay that and potential restructuring of that, so stay tuned. Restart financing as we press release at the end of April. We are continuing with our structured finance process with our advisor Cutfield Freeman. We've had a lot of interest from different corners of the market that's going very well
3:40 and stay tuned on that space as well. And lastly, which will happen concurrently with both the resolution of the EPA and the restart financing is the mine purchase, which we look forward to finally closing on, hopefully sometime in the next few months here, to properly have the mine under ownership and move it forward as we contemplate in the PEA. Lastly, Canadian uplisting to the TSX-V that continues to be in progress and we look forward to resolving that concurrent with the other catalysts as well. Thanks Dave. We're going to talk a little bit about the direction that we're taking with exploration, and then follow it up with a couple of the operational catalysts. But exploration is critically important at Bunker Hill. This is an enormous area of mineralization. We have phenomenal upside, despite the mine being mined for actively for over 100 years.
4:36 Coyle is bringing a lot to the table in terms of that, and we're really excited about the work program that we're embarking on over the summer months. And we really expect that this is going to be a significant step towards unlocking the long-term potential, which is really quite amazing when you put it next to an 11 million ton resource that's already on the books. Looking at the upside, we get very, very excited about where we're going. And I'll turn it over to Kyle Erdmann, our head of geology, and he'll give you a little bit more color on what the next few months are going to look like on the geology front and the exploration side. Kyle? Thanks, Sam. Yeah, not the scope to get too technical on this, but very excited to give you guys the update on where we're heading in the exploration direction.
5:24 Slide here is kind of showing our plans for the summer regarding the geophysical program that we have set up. It's a ground geophysics program. It's going to be doing some very high resolution 3D IP surveying over the southern portion of the property. And the red portion there is showing more or less the overall footprint of the Bunker Hill mine to date. That's about 900 acres of over 5,000 acre contiguous land package. And you can see the IP survey boundary there. Our focus is mainly to look at the southern extent directly off of the current workings. We're looking for both extensions of known structures within the mine footprint, as well as kind of stepping out into virgin ground, where there has been no prior exploration to date. It's been some surface lithologic mapping and structural mapping, but as far as drilling and drifting on this property, it's completely undone to this point.
6:18 So we're looking for separate adjacent structures as well, and the upside potential of this is massive. We're hoping to have results on this kind of late summer, early fall time. The team right now is currently undertaking some brush clearing, line clearing, and working on the survey for the lines to go in, hopefully, within the next month or so. This is the second portion of where we're headed with our exploration and technical work at the mine right now. So really the last year was focused on preparing the PEA, the technical report and getting the mine plan and the digitization of all the historic workings to date. And this is shown by the green boundary and the orange boundaries there. It was massive undertaking over 100 years of mine maps, geology maps, and drill logs that had to be scanned, digitized, and put into 3D space for the creation of the resource model. And just now are we having some time to kind of look at these deeper targets in the mine, which is really where the intermine footprint upside lays. And these are high-grade, both zinc and lead silver veins that were mined and were ceased to be mined because of the mine shutdown. These are not mined out at depth. There is drilling below and inside some of these sloping areas that show over 20-ounce silver hits in the silver-dominant structures.
7:40 And we are finding some additional channel maps and car sample maps that correlate with the lower levels of these. So this is just kind of showing a rough long section based on elevation where we kind of sit right now on the development. We're hoping to put together a rough resource estimation for the extensions of some of these to go down at depth. Boca Hill is one of the more shallow mines produced in the district. The whole Coeur d'Alene district, Silver Valley proper, is known to be more of this polymetallic orogenic system. And what that really identifies to us is that there's massive depth potential. And having the mine that is historic development that can be rehabbed and extended down on existing structures really opens the upside there. Thank you, Kyle. And I'm just expanding a little bit on that concept of depth and Bunker Hill being relatively shallow. I think it's important to note and important to remind people that Bunker Hill was by far the largest mine in the Silver Valley in terms of tonnage produced. It's the largest tonnage producer and has the most extensive workings in the Silver Valley.
8:46 Despite that, it only went down to a depth of around 4,000 feet. So in comparison, the Lucky Friday mine is down around 9,000 feet. The Corgillena complex is down around 7,000 feet. And coupled with that, Bunker Hill was the third largest silver producer in the Silver Valley, 165 million ounces produced out of a district that has produced 1.2 billion ounces plus of silver. So when you look at that and you look at that we have, are absolutely able to, from a technical standpoint, extend down another 4 or 5,000 feet from the bottom of the current workings, you know, that is, and it represents an absolutely enormous exploration potential at depth. And what's interesting is that,
9:41 as Kyle mentioned, the historic production records indicate that the silver grade was increasing at depth. In fact, roughly 40% of the silver that was mined at Bunker Hill was mined from the 18 level down in the lowest third of the mine. So we're really quite excited about the upside potential at depth. Now, that being said, I do have to say that we are going to be pragmatic and practical about the way that we approach this, which is why the rapid restart and the strong cashflow generation is so important. You know, we need to conduct progressive rehabilitation and draw the water table down to put ourselves in the best position to explore from a drilling perspective. But as Kyle mentioned, there is a lot of work that can take place right off the bat with digitization and technical work and analysis of the existing data to really outline and expand on this potential and potentially generate some resource out of the existing data that's available to us. So we're really quite excited about that.
10:55 And I want to finish up by just talking briefly about some of the operational catalysts, because despite all of the work that we're doing on the corporate side and on the exploration side, we are continuing to advance towards restart. And really, you know, we're focusing on advancing the technical work in a couple of areas. We're absolutely going to be looking at expanding and strengthening our resource base. We're going to be working on modifying the geologic model, the resource model. That work is ongoing. With some of the re-assaying of some historic pulps, continued digitization and interpretation of the geology, we're expecting some good things on that front.
11:42 On the mining side, we're going to be working on optimizing the mine plan in the PEA.
11:49 A significant portion of the mining was envisioned to be cut and fill. We're looking through and going through the optimization process to see what we can convert to long-haul open-stopping, which is a much more cost-effective and efficient mining method, but there's a little bit of technical work that we need to do with that. On the CapEx side, we're continuing to look at optimizing what is already a pretty efficient CapEx plan for restart. We're looking at things like secondhand and used milling facilities. We're continuing to look and optimize the reuse of existing infrastructure, as well as quite a few other things.
12:35 You know, one of the things that we're also doing that's pretty exciting is we're looking for toll milling opportunities for the opportunity to generate pre-production revenue streams. There is a latent processing capacity here in the Silver Valley, quite close to us locally. And this could represent a very nice option to generate some pre-production revenue from those streams. Before I turn it over to questions, I just want to thank all the team here at Bunker Hill, our technical partners, MindTech, and our stakeholders that have been so great working with us, the EPA, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, the local community. Environmental quality, the local community. Everybody is really rallying around this project and there's good things to come. So thank you for your time, thank you for the update and really looking forward to answering any questions that people have.
13:31 Wonderful, thanks guys. I would like to remind audience members that at this point we will be moving on to the Q&A, so feel free to ask any questions that you have using the Q&A tab on the right hand side of your screen.
13:42 We'll begin with a question from Harar. What are the current mineral resources and what is the geological potential for additional resources? Our current resource base, the total inventory is 11 million tons and that represents, or sorry, 11 million tons of resource and that represents 11 million ounces of silver, just under 500 million pounds of lead, and just over 900 million pounds of zinc. And there is excellent potential for additional resources. What we're dealing with there is essentially the reserves that existed at the end of mine life that have been reworked and brought up to modern technical standards.
14:30 When you look back at the mine life and the history of Bunker Hill, it's really quite interesting. At any given time, they only had about 10 years of reserves on the books, formally, but the mine operated for over 100 years. So, when you think of it in that context,
14:48 and we look at the land package and the claim package and in relation to the footprint of the historic workings, and we've come to understand the geology a little bit, We are very, very bullish on our ability to increase resources. Although we have a 10-year mine life, I think that it's fair to say that we have the potential to have a multi-decade mining operation here at Bunker Hill, 1 that will absolutely be the cornerstone of a multi-asset company as we move forward. Wonderful, thanks for that great answer, Sam. We've actually had a question also come in ahead of time, but to the group, when do you expect your OTCQB application to be approved? Dave? Yeah, good question. So the application is in.
15:35 Obviously, with all of these things, you can never predict an exact timing. But with all that being said, it would certainly target the end of July. So we're looking at maybe a six-week time frame, maybe a little bit longer, maybe a little bit less, but we're pretty excited about that. And it's going to continue to increase trading liquidity as has the big announcement on Monday. So we're pretty excited about it. Wonderful. Thanks for that, David. I'd like to ask the group if there's any important takeaways from the summit today that you'd like to just reiterate with the audience. Absolutely. I'll take that one, Cam. I think what you have here at Bunker Hill is you have one of the only shovel-ready projects in the United States. And when I say that, we have the resource, we have the pathway to restart in mind, we have robust economics, and we're one of the few projects where permitting is not going to be, is not on the critical path.
16:39 You know, we've developed strong relationships and we have advanced this project
16:45 in a very diligent and focused manner, making sure that we do the technical work along the way to support the operational restart plans. We've taken a company that was essentially a dormant company and we have rebuilt it in a way that is very focused on ESG, environmental and social performance. And I think that we are poised to spring forward into production and become a significant operator in the Western United States. That's great to hear, Sam. We have a question from Howard. Do you have a timeline on the restart and what are the major milestones? So yes, the restart timeline is post financing. We expect to be in operation in the 18 to 24 month time frame.
17:35 And the key milestones along the way would certainly be securing the restart financing. And then after that, There's technical milestones associated to processing, acquiring and refurbishment of the mine. And I would also consider potentially the toll milling as a significant milestone where we can begin to extract mineralization and mill feed from the underground and generate pre-production revenue. That's another thing that sets Bunker Hill apart, is that on the mining side our access to the mineralization and the resource is really quite advanced. And we can begin the process of extracting that resource well in advance of having the processing plant up and constructed.
18:31 So
18:33 there are some significant milestones and we're moving forward and laser-focused on achieving those. I guess I would add in, Sam, just to clarify, when we say up to 24-months, we're talking 24-months from today. So there's obviously 15-months in the PEA. If we achieve financing, which will be a process of several months here, we could be in production for 24 months from today. Potentially, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, thanks guys. A question from Jonathan. If a shareholder happened to be visiting Kellogg, would there be an opportunity to visit the mine? Absolutely. I would say yes, there would certainly be an opportunity to visit the mine. We're here at the mine every single day. And I would just encourage to send an email out to our IR team and schedule as schedules allowing, we would be happy to meet with shareholders.
19:23 That sounds great, it'd be a good visit I think. Well listen guys, I think that's all the questions we have for today at this point, so I'd like to thank the 3 of you for coming on and presenting. I'd also like to thank the entire audience for attending. If you didn't get a chance to ask a question or if you think of 1 after the summit, please, we'll be sending out a survey so you can fill out your question there. You can get in contact with the Bunker Hill team. And of course, if you want any more information, you can go to the BunkerHillMining.com website to find out more there. And with that, I'm going to hand it back to you, Sam, for the final word before we close things off. Thank you very much, Cam. And I'll just close with saying that, you know, watch BunkerHill. You know, there's going to be some exciting advancements on this project as there has been over the past year. You know, we've achieved a lot in the last year.
20:10 And if anything, we're going to be using that as a foundation to accelerate and move forward in a very accelerated manner. So stay tuned and always look forward to engaging and talking with our shareholders and stakeholders on this forum. Sounds great. Thanks a lot. Have a good day guys. I wish everyone else a good day as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
