Medal Podium of Gold, Silver and Copper Production & Exploration

0:08 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Nicola Mining's live investment summit today, hosted by 6. We're joined today by Peter Espig, Nicola Mining's CEO and president. Peter's going to walk us through a company presentation and after we're going to move to a live Q&A session where we'll be accepting questions. You can submit your questions using the Q&A panel found on the right hand side of your screen at any time. And as always, the summit is being recorded so it'll be available to watch afterwards on six.com.

0:31 Without further ado, Peter, I'm going to hand it over to you to kick things off. Thank you. Today, since it's the first time that I've done this summit with 6, and it's also the first time that I've been or participated in a summit that is in Zoom. Please bear with me. I'll just go through the presentation. I'll try and keep it as simple as possible and then provide some updates and hopefully some insight into where the company, where we hope the company is heading towards. And from there, I'll just kind of go through the presentation, assuming that the participants are not that familiar with the company.

1:21 The way to describe Nikola is that we have exposure to all 3 key metals.

1:37 All the assets are in British Columbia. It's one of those things that we feel that it's best to really get synergies in assets. They need to be in the same jurisdiction. Having an asset in BC and then 1 in Ontario and Quebec, it's hard to manage all of those. We run a tight ship, Management is invested and we monitor and look over these assets carefully. The first thing that is unique about the company is that we have operational revenues. I'll talk more about that in a little bit. Last year, we came out with a NI43101 on the historic mine terraces.

2:25 We have multiple, so on the copper side, We own the historic Craigmont Copper mine. We've had several intercepts greater than 1% and we are currently in a drilling program as we speak with results pending. We also own 100% of the Treasure Mountain Silver mine, which is currently in care maintenance. We've been monitoring the Silver prices closely, as well as other opportunities with that asset. We just announced this morning that we had acquired 50% ownership or a 75% economic interest in the high-grade gold Dominion Creek project, which we're also pretty excited and looking forward to receiving mill feed from that project this year.

3:20 And and we are about to commence production via a profit share agreement with our partner Blue Lagoon, which will be shipping us material from Williams, from Smithers down to our mill site. My name is Peter Espig. I am the CEO and Director of the company. My background, I don't want to talk too much about the team, including myself, but I look at Nikola as a full circle of my life. If you look at the bottom, I worked as a diamond driller. I spent 9 years working on the rigs when I was younger. Went on to having a career in New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, and ended up back in BC and getting involved with Nicola Mining.

4:14 Art recently hired, or Sean Tome recently joined our team. He's an exploration geologist and we're very excited to have him, not just because he's an experienced and a very good geologist, but If you look at his resume, he was a regional geologist for the province of British Columbia. So he provides a lot of insight into dealing with the BC government and consultation of First Nations, because that's what he did while he was there. And one thing about our company, and there's no perfect company doesn't exist. And that was a weakness that we had in dealing with how to get things through the government and he certainly is paying dividends in that And we recently also hired Cameron Lilly, who's our new mill manager.

5:08 He has worked all over Canada, very, very experienced. He's been leading the upgrade for the flotation process that we have and getting just rid of some of the bottlenecks that we had prior to receiving and commencing milling activity. We've got a pretty solid board, Frank, Paul and Doug. And you can, if you would like to read these, the information of the board and the directors in greater detail, please feel free to go to the website because all this information is on our website. So Nikola has really has, has 4 assets and I'm going to go through them and not necessarily in order of importance, but just in order, just in order of, of the simplicity for this presentation.

6:06 Probably our key asset, really the asset that we believe is going to add the most value to the company is the new Craigmont Copper mine. We own 100% of it. There's 10,900 hectare permitted. It's a permitted mine set. We've got a permit M68. I just want to emphasize that having a permit in British Columbia, it is not easy to get a mine or a milling process permit. So there is a great deal of value in our assets, which are permitted. There are very few sites like this in British Columbia and I would even say in Western Canada.

6:54 I'll talk in more detail later on, but we know that historically it was a high-grade Skarn mine, but we also know that that Skarn is driven from a larger porphyry system. It could be multiple systems. We don't know yet. Treasure Mountain Silver mine, we own 100% of the Treasure Mountain Silver, which is a high-grade mine located about 90 minutes from the mill site. It is also a fully permitted mine site, has permit M239, and we have a resource estimate. I would say that it's an asset that is a permanent mine, but really the upside here is exploration.

7:41 There's still a lot more that we need to learn about the project, but I will get into a little bit of detail as to what that asset really is later on. We have the Merit Gold and Silver Mill facility, milling facility. We are the only facility in British Columbia that is permitted to receive material from anywhere in the province. We own 100% of the site. And not only that, we own 100% of the land. We own the land freehold, which was acquired in 2012. We have several milling profit share agreements. I'll get into more detail on our agreement with Blue Lagoon later on and we are prepared to start operations in June, maybe you know June-July.

8:30 We announced today, this morning, that we had completed the definitive agreement for the acquisition of a 75% interest in the Dominion Creek project. Initial grab samples were, and it's a very interesting asset in that you can see the vein at surface. We plan on applying for a bulk sample permit this year. So In getting to the Merit Mill, if you look at those dots, those dots signify or represent gold assets and then you can see where our mill is located.

9:16 Again, we're the only mill permitted in British Columbia to receive material from anywhere in the province. And I think the key takeaway here is that, you know, there's a lot of smaller, not everybody or every project is like a Bruce Jack where they can go out and they can, you know, raise 500 million to, you know, $2 billion to get a project moving forward. The majority of projects in Canada are smaller projects and I kind of like to view that this map here as airplanes flying around an airport. A lot of these projects can get a bulk sample permit, a small mine permit. What they will not get is they will not be able to get a mill permit and that's I think where in the long run we can add a lot of value.

10:11 This is the mill. You see the photos from inside and outside. So you know the inside I would say the what this picture the photo really reveals is that the mill was, was built for expansion. So, you know, We have right now the capacity to do 200t a day, but that 200t a day is really our ball mill. The ball

10:43 mill can do maximum 300t depending on the material, but it's a 200t a day ball mill. Our flotation capacity is much larger. Our external crushing capacity is much larger. So if justified at some point in the future, we could just swap the mill, the ball mill and increase our capacity, but it's a mill that was made to be expanded. We've invested $30M into the facility since 2011, and we have just invested another 250,000 just to get a few kinks out of the mill before we really start going into production. The new Craigmont Copper, there's a highway called Highway 8. That Highway 8 runs between Merritt and Spences Bridge.

11:35 That highway was actually built to bring material from the Craigmont mine to the coast historically. The permit is permit M60H, which is basically we were the 16th mine permitted in the province of British Columbia.

11:54 The grades were pretty significant. They had a cutoff grade of 0.7%. The key takeaway on this slide is that even the underground was closed to reopen at some point because of the underground halo that they documented. It closed at a time when copper prices were 60 cents a pound. The cost of mining really hasn't gone up because technology and machinery is better, but the cost of copper certainly has increased since 60 cents.

12:36 So here you can see a map of the highway system, the infrastructure that we have, where there's the new Craigmont Merritt Mill, Treasure Mountain. This is another map where shows we're connected to Highway 8. We also are on the power grid. BC Hydro goes right to to our site so we're not using diesel. It certainly decreases the cost of our operations. And then we will be adding to our map now, the Dominion property, which is located just outside of Williams Lake. I'm not gonna get into too much of the history. Feel free to go to our website and look at this, or you can actually Google Craigmont Historic Copper Mine.

13:30 It certainly shows you that this slide does highlight 34Mt at 1.3% Copper. So this is the Copper production that existed. Again, you can feel free to go to the website to look at it. This slide here, and the focus of our exploration and this year and going forward as well, is if you look, you can see that there is the red inside here. That is, that's magnetite. And so basically what they did is, all their exploration was focused on a magnetic anomaly that had a showing at surface.

14:20 Based on that magnetic anomaly, they drilled, they had some incredible holes there. There's the the 1-hole S15, which was 195m of 4.4% Copper. They really focused on the magnetite, scarn and the Chalcopyrite and Boronite associated with that magnetite. They never went beyond that. They never did exploration based on any other form of parameter, whether it be, they never looked for porphyry because they were really focused purely on the high-grade Copper. They weren't interested again in the Magnetite either.

15:06 They were only interested in the Copper and the Magnetite went out into the tailings, which was re-mined. But we've kind of gone beyond that, beyond the Magnetite. So we're looking at, We are looking at magnetic anomalies, but we're also looking at other indicators that could have Copper. Remember, this is a very large site that we own. I think the drilling program this summer as well, we're seeing that the copper is not necessarily all associated with magnetite. There's also hematite and some of it we've also found porphyritic type of mineralization. But I think that it's because they only focused on that one magnetic anomaly, what it does is it increases a potential of finding other forms of Copper mineralization on the property.

16:02 This here is, if you look at the predominant, so if you look at this the circle, the highlighted circle on the on the left, what you can see is you can see ore bodies that are non porphyry related scarns and then on the on the right you can basically see once you get up to that level, a certain level of size, that all these scarn mineralizations that have been mined are associated with the porphyry system. If you look at where the Craigmont mine site is, which is about 1 billion pounds of copper, What you can see is that that type of mineralization as a standalone scarn without a porphyry system associated with it really doesn't exist.

17:02 Now that's not to say that this may be the first one in the world, but we have seen porphyry types of mineralization on our property and we've had several groups look at it and they clearly, and I'm not a geologist nor do I attempt to be 1, but we've had several groups look at it and clearly say, yes, this is driven from the porphyry. And again, there could be multiple scarns and there could be multiple porphyry systems on the site, because If you look at Highland Valley, which we're adjacent to, Highland Valley has multiple pore-free systems in the batholith. This was drilling that was done in 2018 and 2019. You can see that the lower type of mineralization that we had is in fact porphyry type.

17:54 You can also see other types of mineralization that we had, which is scarn type. On the right, you can see some of our drill holes that we've had that were pretty significant. 85m, 1.1%, 116m, 0.54,100m of 1.3% and 73m of so, what is clear is that there's still a lot of high-grade copper left and that is not associated either with the historic pit. If you look at DTH-TH002, that is a distance away from, in an area called what we refer to as the West embayment or the West Craigmont.

18:51 And that was, it's a fault slip of the historic because the mineralization in the pit was cut off from a fault. And so what we were able to do is we were able to find the mineralization that was on the other side of that fault. And this is, you know, typical of alteration assemblage that includes scarn and porphyry. That is well known. It's a well-known document from Holliday and Cook and this is something that we feel that we can see at our site as well.

19:28 This is the, here we announced, we completed an inferred NI 43101 resource on the tailings or the historic dumps that are to the west of the pit. What you can see is that there's one of the, so there is a resource and we had a the average grade was 0.13% but A couple of key points here is that when we looked at the entire area, the average grade of the outside of where the, even outside of where the resource is, The fine, which is associated to 50% of the waste dumps, is associated with fines. Also again, at that site, and This is where when you have 0.23% or 0.13%, we did quite a bit of testing in 2019

20:40 using a TOMRA, it's called a XRT sorter, and that allows you to upgrade. So what you do is we were able to upgrade up to 10 times, but typically we were upgrading 6 times the copper grade by putting it through the system. So then you go, you know, when, if you're able to take the something that's 0.13% and you're able to upgrade it six-fold or five-fold, you significantly increase the value of that operation and the potential value of adding this to a successful drilling exploration program. We also, as I mentioned, have Treasure Mountain, which is a permitted silver mine.

21:30 There are 4 portals that can be opened, but in particular, we're really interested at this stage in level 1 only. There remains intact in situ in level 1. There was a drawdown that was to be done. There's about 12,000 to 14,000 tons. The average grade of that material would be approximately 39,000. Material would be approximately 39 and you can see here and I'm just basing this off of 4 3 01:01 where right here this is based on the 4 3 01:01 you know of 39 ounces so if you have 12,000 if you have 12,000 3101 of 39oz.

22:21 If you have 12,000t of potential material and you have the right Silver price, it would make sense to draw that down. After we would draw that down, we would certainly then focus on exploration because I don't want to over-promote this project. There's a lot that still needs to be learned. The exciting part of the project here is the exploration on the backside. We have the MB zone, you can see the soil sampling in 2010, 2013, 2019, 2020. Some of the grades are pretty exciting. Remember, this is at surface, doing chip samples across the vein at surface.

23:16 1 sample we had the gray highlighted 1 1300 grams silver which is 45 ounces 2.5 grams gold 1.16 copper 27 percent lead and we've had had multiple really high-grade showings along that fault or that anomaly. This year, we will be doing exploration. We're going to do another airborne survey of the property, specifically the backside of the property, to see, to understand that the mineralization and potentially target future drilling exploration.

24:02 So really, from an investment case or thesis here, we have a fully permitted mine mill site, which is the mine permit M68. We have an inferred copper resource on the historic mine terraces, but again, we need to do further testing, or we should do further testing on the fines that came back with an average grade of 0.23%. Average grade of 0.23 percent and we have the ability to upgrade that at source. Exploration highlights we're in the middle of an exploration program right now as we speak we're on hole number 4 and And we are in the middle of applying for a 5 year MYAB, which is a multi-year exploration application, which includes trenching the historic waste terraces.

25:04 We also have the fully permitted gold and silver processing facility, which is at the Craigmont mine site. And that is, we will commence production. So we were just informed by the Ministry of Mining, they put out a release today that the roads are open so Blue Lagoon will be able to commence trucking of their their mill feed to our site and We are discussing that as we speak right now. That's going to be moving forward very quickly. We had the M&A opportunity with Dominion, which we announced the execution of this morning.

25:51 We look forward to bringing that forward and adding additional mill feed. And there are other small projects. I think, you know, it's again, one of the reasons and one of the benefits of doing the Dominion Creek investment is that we control our own destiny. Because when we're entering into these profit and milling agreements with other third parties, they often over-promote or they over-promise and we end up getting excited and doing the preparation on our side and nothing happens. So, you know, between Blue Lagoon and Dominion, we finally have visibility as to our operations, which is pretty exciting.

26:37 The Treasure Mountain Silver Mine, again, we continue to monitor that. We'll go look at the site early in July. The roads still aren't open yet and we look forward to having a successful airborne survey there this year. And that's all for the presentation and I'm going to open it up for questions. Awesome, thank you, Peter. Thank you. As we move to the Q&A, I'd like to remind all audience members that you can submit any questions that you have to the Q&A tab on the right-hand side of your screen. Peter, we have had a few questions come in in advance of the summit, so I'll start with those and we can move on to any loud questions that might come in.

27:24 So the first question is, over the years what do you consider to have been the biggest hurdles on progress? I think, well the biggest hurdles that we've had is, you know, the difference between the way private enterprise and government operate. And so, and you see this in British Columbia where, you know, the regulations are getting stricter, they're getting more cumbersome. And so making any format of an amendment takes a long, long time. I mean, for us to get the permit to be able to process third-party meal feed, I mean, that took a couple of years, like 2 years. I think if we were to try that now, it'd even take longer. So, it's the regulatory hurdles, and I just want to emphasize that I don't mean this in a negative way. It's just, there's more and more things that need to get done every time you start something.

28:29 And so that's, That certainly has been the one. The other thing that I would say is that we have a fully permitted mill. Even when we have the fully permitted mill, then we're waiting for projects to bring us material. We can enter into mining-milling partnerships, but you're still reliant on the third party to execute on their side. That hurdle of having to wait for others to execute after we've executed everything that we required on our side. That's been both a frustrating and a high hurdle. Fair enough. Peter Epstein asks, how many tonnes per day will you be taking from the DC mine?

29:14 And when might that start? And when might that start? The so the the DC mine. OK, that's the Blue Lagoon. OK, yeah. So the so the Blue Lagoon, that's let me answer this in a couple of steps here, because in a couple of ways, because it sounds like a simple question, but it's a lot more complex than it is. The first step is that they have a stockpile. They have a stockpile on site that's going to be somewhere between, we estimate 6,000t to 10,000t. They're going to be moving that to us and If they can bring that to us at 100 to 150t a day. Our mill can mill more than that.

30:11 We can mill at 200t. We could even mill slightly higher, but we can mill 200t a day. If they're bringing us 100t and we're milling 200t a day, there's a mismatch. When they get their finalised mine permit, which they've submitted all their documentation, then their mine permit is for 75,000 tons. So they have a 75,000 ton mine permit, and we have a 60,000 ton a year essentially mill permit, which is the 200 tons a day. So now, you know, the question is, well, are they going to be able to mine 75,000 tons a year? I don't know.

30:58 The agreement or the expectation is that they will be able to bring us 40,000 tons a year, because it could be that mining 75,000 tons a year requires operations on 2 levels. I'm the type of person that I only consider what I can see. Right now I can see that there is a stockpile and I can see that they have the capacity to mine on the one side and they have the capacity to ramp it up and go to 75,000 tons. But I can only speak on what Nikola can do and Blue Lagoon can speak on what Blue Lagoon can do. And Ranavik, who's a very savvy CEO, would certainly be able to explain what his expectations of production. Because what they send us, we expect to be able to process.

31:53 Thank you for that. Gordon Moss asks, can you comment on First Nations engagement? I mean, First Nations engagement is the present, the past and the future. So I mean, we have... I have to be careful here because we have an announcement coming in the near future of some efforts that we're increasing that are efforts to reach out to First Nations and to do the consultation.

32:40 But again, one thing is that in order to do that effectively, we require to have the financial capacity to do so. So it's kind of like a, you know, chicken egg thing. So like, you can't, you can't be you can't hire a bunch of skilled people with the skill sets, until you have visibility as as to where you're, how you're gonna be able to pay for that. So starting May 1st, sorry, starting June 1st, we hired, we have a new member of our team. Her name is Vanessa. And Vanessa had previously worked for the NNTC, and she has a background in human rights. She worked for the United Nations, and she's going, she's with us full time to work to increase our First Nation efforts.

33:36 And then we will announce sometime in the near future, higher profile individual that will guide or mentor Vanessa and also to kind of lead our process on that. But we that's something that we you know hold very dearly and not and it's not just the First Nations. I think we also need to recognize it's the whole effort in the environmental. I mean, it's the whole ESG, right? I mean, you need to embrace environmental, social and governance. That is, you know, how you treat people, how you treat the environment is a very, very important component to our company. Wonderful, thank you for that, Peter.

34:22 Chris Clark asks, with cashflow beginning very soon, how do you plan to use these proceeds this year? So there's, you know, there are going to be, there's 2, I would say, key utilizations of that capital. One will be exploration. The other will be repayment of our debenture and debt. I like to see that before I start saying okay this is how we're going to use the cash so I want to see steady cash coming in and then create a budget based on that so you know we hit we don't have that yet but certainly the key is to to you know do as much exploration as we can without raising as little capital as possible.

35:25 And to expand our, again, our environmental efforts, our reclamation efforts, our consultation efforts. And so to become, to graduate from being a smaller company to being like a mid-tier, a producer. And that's something that as you become bigger, you become, you're able to allocate capital towards those. Thank you. Vladimir asks, how do you deal with wastewater? That's a very difficult question because we recycle our water. So we actually don't dump any water into any flowing rivers or streams or anything.

36:16 So, I mean, you know, For our camp, we have a septic tank and we have a septic truck that takes that away. For the mill, we've got a tailings facility. One of the benefits of being in the Nicola region is where the mine and the mill are located are in what's called the Sunshine Valley, Nicola Valley, and it's amongst the sunniest areas and hottest areas in Canada. So the water evaporates. We do have a lot of water evaporation, but we certainly are not putting wastewater into any of the streams surrounding us. Great. Thank you for that. Ben asks if you're working on deals to sell Copper to other countries and remove the Copper from the waste rock, or will you wait until prices of these metals go up so that it will be more profitable?

37:15 That's also a very good question. Our agreements to sell our Gold and Silver concentrate are to offshore buyers and smelters. When it comes to the Copper, before we can really think of starting to sell our Copper offshore right now, we need to get a better grasp of it. There's a big difference between an inferred resource and an in situ resource. We need to better understand how much Copper is in the finds, how can we sort it?

38:03 And at that level, and hopefully our drilling exploration is successful enough that people look at us not to off-take the Copper, but as a target, as a partnership target or an investment target for a much larger copper producer. Because the goal of the company can't be to monetize, simply monetize the waste piles. The long-term goal of the company needs to show that, here's another copper mine and we're going to move this forward. BC Copper is very sought after. Highland Valley is a good example where people are always intrigued as to how they can be profitable given their low grade. But BC Copper sells at a premium to other Copper because it doesn't have the Mercury, it doesn't have the Silurium, it doesn't have the Arsenic.

39:04 It's not just the Copper, it's what goes with the Copper that, or it doesn't go with the Copper that makes it more valuable. And we're certainly seeing that our Copper is as clean a Copper as you can get. And If you were to say what would your best-case scenario be or your best-case outcome, it would be to show that there is economic value in the waste piles and also to find an ore body that justifies, you know, or not an ore body, but a mineralized body that justifies more and more exploration and that it all becomes 1 package. Great. Jonathan Oppenheim asks, Will there be jobs available for mining and milling operations?

39:59 We're not mining yet, right? We have the milling operation. As we start a milling operation, we've hired several local people out of Merritt already, and we will continue. That includes hiring people And so, and we will continue and that includes, you know, hiring people locally from, especially when it comes to, you know, engaging, engaging First Nation consultation, consultation companies or companies that provide environmental services. I think that's very important because that augments transparency. We want to be, I think one of the things that Nicola does well and you know but again we can always do better but is that you know is to really maximize transparency because the more the community knows, the safer it feels.

40:56 And so jobs, yes, there are jobs for, We will be hiring at the mill. We will also be hiring for environmental monitoring and we will also be engaging companies that are providing those services as well. Thanks for that, Peter. One of the questions that came in ahead of time, what excites you most about Nickel and mining now? I think what excites me the most is that, in a way, the independence, financial independence. The independence, financial independence. I'm very excited about getting the mill going with Blue Lagoon at first.

41:42 We're very excited about the Dominion, which has at surface Gold grades that are very, very rare. We're very excited about that. We're very excited about our exploration program that is going on right now at the new Kregmont. But I would say what excites me most is the fact that we're going to get to a point where we can execute on things without having to go to investors to raise capital. What we want to be doing is we want to be telling investors about the company and hoping that they invest in the open market, which will obviously benefit the share price, rather than doing roadshows to raise capital to execute on things.

42:32 I think that financial independence excites me the most. Thanks for that. What is your greatest concern? The greatest concern would be permitting, you know, with third parties and because, you know, again, we're permitted. So I would say the greatest concern that we have is, cause there are other potential candidates to bring us material. So it's, it's, it's groups getting the permitting because it's just taking so long right now to get things done. And that, that's, I think what I consider to be the most concerning.

43:20 Fair enough. Do you have any predictions on Copper, Gold and Silver prices? Well, I invest in several other companies as well and I'm actively in the markets. To be honest, I don't like when CEOs of mining companies start telling me, Gold is going to go up and therefore our share price is going to go up, or Copper is going to go up and it's going to be good for our share price. I think that a high-grade project, first of all, is indifferent to fluctuations of metals. Wonderful. Thank you for that. Aaron asks, are there any M&A opportunities on the horizon for Nicola? Yes, there are.

44:10 First of all, my role and the board's role are fiduciary duty and directors and management's fiduciary duty is the shareholder. We hold that with great value. We've looked at M&A opportunities. We just did an M&A opportunity. We just announced 1 today. So, I mean, that's an example of a good M&A opportunity. There are others and we'll continue to look at them and if they make sense or not. And again, this goes back to what excites me the most is when you're able to accumulate cash, you're able to utilize cash to bring projects forward.

45:03 And so, depending on how much cash we're able to accumulate over the next couple of years, that will, I think, open more and more M&A opportunities. And it could also be M&A opportunities where we're disposing of an asset. So, we're pretty open-minded both ways. Wonderful. Well, thank you, Peter. I think that is all the time we have for today and all the questions. So I'd like to first thank everyone in attendance, but Peter, also thank you for the wonderful presentation and question period. To the audience members, if you didn't get a chance to get your question answered, or if you think 1 after the summit, not to worry, we'll be sending out a short survey where you can leave your contact information and the Nicola Mining team will reach out to you directly. You can also find more information, of course, at NicolaMining.com.

45:49 And with that, Peter, I'll hand it back to you for the final word. Well, thanks everyone for joining. Hopefully you were able to learn something and garner some new insight into the company. We're going to continue with steady news. There's a lot happening. It's very exciting time for the company. It's been a long wait, but we're very optimistic about the future. Great. Well, I hope you and everyone else has a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.