Northern Shield Resources: A Unique Opportunity in Eastern Canada

0:08 Today's panel is for Northern Shield Resources and it's a live summit today hosted by SIXX. I'm pleased to introduce the President and CEO, Ian Bliss. He will take us through a company presentation and after that we'll be accepting questions. So as a reminder you can submit questions in the Q&A chat on the right hand side of the screen at any point during the presentation. If you'd like to contact the Northern Shield team feel free to fill out the survey linked in the chat. As always, the summit is being recorded and will be available on six.com to watch afterwards. So without further ado, I'd like to hand things over to you Ian, so we can get started. Good morning, everyone, or good afternoon, depending on what time zone you're residing in. And thank you for taking the time today to take in the webinar on Northern Shield Resources.

0:57 As Kyle mentioned, my name is Ian Bliss, and I'm President and CEO of Northern Shield Resources. Through this webinar today, I will provide an introduction and overview of Northern Shield Resources and our flagship property, Root & Cellar in Newfoundland. We view Root & Cellar as a large-scale gold project leveraged by Tellurium, as well as a copper porphyry project leveraged by the gold. By the end of the presentation, you'll see why. Root & Cellar is located about a 3.5 hour drive from St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland. Recent discoveries in Newfoundland have shown the province does indeed host world-class deposits, but in the past it's somewhat unfairly suffered from the reputation of basically a lot of smoke, but no fire when it comes to mineral endowment.

1:47 I would say that was really of a fair characterization and it's not a matter of all smoke, no fire. It's more a matter of the province hasn't been thoroughly explored compared to some other mining jurisdictions like Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland. And so Northern Shields has focused its attention on an even greater unexplored tract of land in Newfoundland called the Burnt Peninsula. And to say our forte, our strength is going as far upfield or upstream as possible in the mining exploration cycle. We like exploring near virgin territory. And while many of you greenfield exploration as a risk, we see that as an opportunity, not an opportunity to find a tier 1 asset near surface or at surface and hence at relatively low cost.

2:39 And we've met what we call a model driven approach in our exploration to reduce any risk for ourselves, our shareholders and the environment. And that brings us to our primary asset and the focus of this presentation, Root & Cellar, which is a gold project with a critical edge. It hosts several recently discovered high-grade epithermal gold occurrences associated with significant tellurium and copper mineralization in a porphyry style setting. The property has all the characters of what we call an alkaline related epithermal system, and I'll get more into detail on this in a few slides times. And our vision on this is that we believe through involving interpretation and significant investments recently in Roots and Cellar, it is well positioned to become the next mining focal point on the island of Newfoundland.

3:28 Just starting at a more macro scale before we get into detail the root and cellar property. In the past, if you wanted to explore virgin ground or underexplored ground, you had to often go further afield where you wrote areas accessible only by helicopter. And that has a high cost associated with it. What we like about the Byrne Peninsula is it's vastly underexplored or unexplored in some areas, yet easily accessible by roads and trails and explored by foot. And yet, as you can see from the inside of the photograph, there's some excellent infrastructure nearby, including here 10 minutes from the property, a deep water loading facility outside the town of Marystown. Again, still on a macro scale, there's something that we also noticed that was very unique about the root and cellar area. The left-hand image there is a digital elevation model of the burnt peninsula of Newfoundland and as you can see there's a swath of terrain surrounding root and cellar that's a very distinct and sudden topographic low.

4:28 There's a variety of reasons for that one is probably some rifting going on there and then it's geological related. But in part, this may be the result of deeper erosion caused by a glacial surge. And that deeper erosion could have very important implications to our exploration and what we're seeing at Rooten Cellar. Again, on a macro scale, the Burn Peninsula, say the top right hand diagram, they're both diagrams are what we call a phasor filter VLF data from a survey flown by the government in the fall of 2022. And you can see here at root and cellar, there's a swath, a red spot there, that red smudge is an area of strong cognitive activity shown by the VLF survey. And it's quite unique in the survey area. You do get other areas that have very linear VLEF features. These are obviously structures, faults and things, but there's very few that stand out like root and cellar. And so you can see this hot spot here if we zoom in, That's a very large swath, about 10 kilometres long, relatively conductive material. And you can see all the yellow dots here are soil samples with, that are anomalous in gold.

5:42 And you can see how well they correspond to that red shaded area, which is the VLF conductive material. So again, as an indication of why we think there's a very large system at Rudensilver. As I said, we mentioned that Rudensilver has been explored for epithermal gold and porphyry copper. Epithermal gold and porphyry copper are actually end members of the same plumbing system. But typically when you see the epithermal gold, the copper porphyry is going to be several thousand metres below that. So if you're seeing the Gold, you're probably not going to be able to reach the Copper Porphyry. But there are a variety of methods that sort of telescope 1 on top of the other. So there at the end of the day, the Gold and the Copper Porphyry may be just opposed.

6:30 1 method of doing that, which we think may have happened at Root & Cellar, is you actually put a fault down the middle, or it doesn't have to be down the middle, but somewhere between the Gold and the Copper Porphyry, you put a fault. And then as you can see from this diagram on the right, one side of that fault has dropped down, in this case to Gold. And then later on, you get erosion happening and that erodes the top portion. Now you get the both the Copper exposed, the level of the Copper porphyry. And because the Gold has been down thrown by a fault, you get the gold and the copper essentially at the same level. And we think that may have happened at Rutan Cellar. I also mentioned earlier on the introduction slide that we have an alkaline related, we think we have an alkaline related system here as a very important because these Alkaline systems tend to produce very large Gold deposits and high grades. So Cripple Creek, Colorado, Porgar, Papua New Guinea, Emperor in Fiji are all examples of Alkaline related Gold systems. And I say They tend to have that rare combination of both large tonnage and good grades.

7:37 The other critical factor of Alkaline-related systems is that they often contain Tellurium mineralization and we certainly see that at Root & Cellar and that's becoming quite important as well. Just getting in a little bit deeper now, so we have 5 Gold zones over 6km strike length at Root & Cellar with a large Copper bearing system at the Western end of that trend. The mineralization is hosted in quite a large volcanic complex outlined by this white dashed line. As I say, the conquest, the Gold and the Copper is associated with Tellurium, particularly on the North flank, drop zone, windfall and probably Braxton Bradley.

8:24 We see very high Tellurium and the Silver-Gold ratio is very high. It's very Silver-rich relative to gold. In the centre of this, we have the conquest zone, which is the focus of our exploration right now. And the basis of this presentation, and it's a very large footprint and where all our attention has been focused to date. Another critical thing to keep in mind right now is that Northern Shield is really the first company to conduct methodical exploration on the property. It was all discovered by a prospector. The only portion that was ever touched by a mining company was up here, Braxton Bradley, and they only did a total of 3 drill holes, totaling 100 metres for very little exploration. But in the rest of the project, no mining company has conducted exploration on this project.

9:18 So I said mostly the focus is on the Conquest area. This is where the prospector originally discovered in a hand-dug trench, 48g per tonne Gold, including some visible Gold. Since Northern Shield's involvement, we've now stretched it out to about a 700 metre stripe length of near continuous gold mineralization. As you can see, some very high grades around with up to 111 grams per tonne that was just discovered before Christmas, along with some visible gold. Another sample of 31 gram per tonne, also with visible Gold. We've expanded it quite significantly in the east-west direction and we're also pushing now northward along some structures that we've since identified. It's over 700m north-south as well, so quite a large footprint that we're developing on surface mineralization.

10:04 There's a variety of mineralization styles. These are quartz vein, stockwort, spreadsheets and inseminated sulphide. It's important to see a variety of mineralization styles. It tends to mean that it's a long-lived system and long-lived systems often grow into very large deposits. So it was the conquest zone here that was the focus of the Maiden drill program in 2021. And you can see here, here's number hole number 5 drilled into the salt zone, which we'll take a closer look at. And I say the results weren't quite as high as we expected. The really the best result was 1.4 grams or just under 8 meters. But this is minimization all within 30 meters of surface. And a few more slides will get onto why we didn't get the results that we were hoping for.

10:52 But there was the individual highest sample was just under 6g per tonne. But the interesting too, there's a very strong potassium made associated with the Gold, which is not unusual with Gold, but it's a very good pathfinder. And we were seeing elevated Potassium very quickly start finding Gold with the structures containing the Gold. This is an image of the chargeability from the 2021 IP survey. It was actually remodelled after the drilling and all these hotspots, the pinks are zones of chargeability. And you can see our drill holes are basically drilling parallel to a number of these remodelled IP chargeability anomalies. When we first got in there and started drilling after the survey, the anomalies are essentially stretched out east-west a little bit like this one up here. What's happening is we thought it was east-west because the geology trends east-west, but it's actually composed of a bunch of tightly packed north-south trending chargeability zones. And so we see that now in the remodeled data, but we didn't prior to drilling. And so you can see a number of these holes, they got stiffs of gold, but they didn't get high grade because it didn't go through the heart of these chargeability anomalies.

12:04 So we've more recently run a 2nd IP survey to better delineate these things. I say, original survey was run North-South thinking the target was East-West, but now it turns out the main feeders are north-south. When you run your lines parallel to your target, you can kind of see where they are off to the side, but you can't really judge where they are. And so it's much better to run a survey perpendicular to them, which we've just completed. And that data is still being processed. We should be getting that in any day right now. But here's just an example of what we call a pseudo section from the raw data. And you can clearly see it's picking up some very nice charge abilities. Firstly, this one here, which corresponds to what we call the CZ1 target, which we think is one of the major fairly long North-South structures feeding a lot of the gold mineralization.

12:52 And this one off strong 1 off to the East is somewhat new. We had figured it was there, but just again, the last line of the 20-21 survey saw it something off to the side. And we had a very strong magnetic low down here, which is often an indication of alteration and mineralization. Now we're picking up a really strong chargeability number target just off to the east. This is essentially a new chunk of the target area based on the IP. We are quite certain the Gold continues past the 700m to about 1.5km strike length. Since the drilling, We found 3 occurrences of visible Gold in boulders or subcrop. You can see again how similar it is to the drill core. The grey and very light green modelling with silicification, a lot of disseminated pyrite in the surrounding rocks and then a little bit of visible Gold with the quartz stringers and these quartz knots.

13:51 We think we're very, very close to it. It's just a matter of turning the drill around and getting into the heart of these alterations systems and that's where we'll pick up the higher-grade Gold. Just a few more shots of some of the visible Gold. We've picked up as I say, the last 3 successive field trips, field programs at Root & Siller have come away identifying visible Gold. And this is an indication of our evolving knowledge and understanding of both the system and the geophysics. In fact, the last bit of visible gold, I think it's this one in here, was discovered actually through the snow. We were looking at the IP, we had a feeling of where that IP trajeability might come to surface, And it was one of the ones that we liked because it was near a North-South trending structure. We dug through the snow and through the mud and actually found VG. So for finding VG through the snow, I'd like to think there's a lot more around.

14:45 So Moving on to the Tellurium, we mentioned that there's a significant component of Tellurium to this project, which is again an indication of often a characteristic of an alkaline-driven system. The highest Tellurium value at the moment is a 700ppm Tellurium in the drop zone associated with Silver, a mineral called Hesite, along with Gold. We have 45g Gold there, a little bit of base metals, Zinc and Lead. And I say 700ppm Tellurium is extremely high. We have another high sample, 330ppm Tellurium slowly with Molybdenumite in what we generally call the Copper zone, but Copper and Molybdenumite are often again associated in these porphyry systems. So that's a very high value. And then again, at Windfall, we have 1450ppm tellurium. So some high-grade on the fringes, but we have a large zone again, in the conquest, both associated with the Gold and weakly elevated Copper outside the Gold bearing zones, where we're constantly seeing 10 or 20ppm tellurium. So elevated, weakly to moderately elevated tellurium is not something you see every day, but I'd say 50% of all the drill core samples came back with 10 to 20ppm, even 30ppm Tellurium.

16:02 So that's important, not only because of the potential added value to Gold and Copper at the end of the day when you deposit, but Tellurium is also a very good indicator of the fertility of a Copper porphyry system. It often leaks to surface above where you're getting your mineralization. So as I say, it's not only directly associated with the gold, but it's a very good indicator for the copper porphyry potential. And why is Tellurium important? It is now deemed a critical metal. It's actually one of the rarest elements on the planet. It's 8 times more rare than Gold. And it's probably one of the critical metals that's least heard of right now. But I think that's going to change very rapidly in the coming months or even a year because its main use is in solar panels and in semiconductors, but typically solar panels.

16:58 Most of our solar panels now come from China, with a small amount being produced in the United States, but it's used in the solar panel. So again, we're going to be needing a lot more to learn for that. But much more importantly is these experimental, very high efficiency lithium to learning batteries that are being worked on right now. And they carry somewhere between actually 3 to 10 times the energy for the same weight as a lithium ion battery. They're also what we call a solid state battery, so they don't have the flammability that some of these Lithium-ion batteries do. Now, there are a few wrinkles in the experimental stage, but the talk of the town is that these wrinkles will be worked out in the near future.

17:49 And so we have a battery now that's going to last, you know, your Tesla, whatever is going to be lasting, you know, 2, 3, or even 10 times longer because I'd have a much higher charge capacity, specifically at a lower lower weight. And that's again, important for things like drones, which are becoming more common and are very sensitive to battery weight. We think Fluorium, it's a critical metal and I think we're all going to be hearing a lot more about it in the very near future. Then moving on to the Copper, as I say, we have the Copper is a very distinct zone from the Gold. You can see it in here, where in this area here We have copper, both the squares are rock samples, anomalous copper, the circles are soil samples, but you can clearly see there's almost no gold within this, yet all the gold's on the outside. So a very strong zonation between your gold and your copper, which may be an indication of faulting, but also pretty classic of a copper porphyry system.

18:50 So we have actually now we have well over 72 samples, probably over 100 samples. They're greater than a 0.1% copper with a high of 10 and 0.5 percent copper. And most of the high grades that expose in some quarries down there, I'll have a little closer look at it later. So these are quarries that are being operated for preparing road crushing gravel. And that's where we're finding a lot of the copper bearing material at the moment. We take a closer look at the evidence for this copper porphyry system. Here's again, our copper bearing zone in the middle that on the flanks or the shoulders highlighted in these orange polygons are what we call shoulder anomalies. Specifically in this case, They're very anomalous in Arsenic and Atomony and these are classic Halo anomalies for Copper Porphyry systems. So you don't get it right above the main mineralization, you get them on the flanks or the shoulders. And you can see very clearly here, outlined by these orange polygons, these first digantamate anomalies are creating a halo around the copper.

19:53 We also have a lot of indications of the classic copper alteration shells that form around the deposit, specifically 1 propolytic alteration, which is dominated by Epidote Chlorate, a little bit of Carbonate. They often call it the green rock environment. You can see from this photo, all that green is caused by Epidote, that sort of potassium green colour. And obviously this rock is very intensely properly altered and we see that over quite a wide area again on the flanks or the shoulders of the copper bearing zone. So we got the classic Pathfinder halos to the copper and we're seeing the alteration to a copper porphyry as well. Another evidence of the copper for any of the geologists out there is something called B veins. This is something that we've learned. We actually had saw them in core. We didn't realize the importance of them.

20:46 This is not a B-vein on the top right, but the rest of them are B-veins. The bottom 1 actually has chalcopyrite copper sulfide in it, but B-veins are a very good indicator of copper porphyry systems. And as a, you know, we didn't realize it really the ports of these for more recently, But again, it's more evidence pointing very clearly to copper porphyry and likely a prefer to copper porphyry system. So just getting more onto the model of the copper porphyry, I say most of the mineralization has been found in these quarries. The top right hand image is a quarry say that they're blasting right now to create road crush. And these are basically what we call vent breccias or phreatomagmatic breccias. They're caused by the interaction of hot magma at depth. These will be called, this will be an intrusion of granite intrusion of sorts or some other alkaline intrusion that interacts with the groundwater, it creates an explosion. So all the other rock above it is broken up into fragments.

21:48 And that's where we're seeing a lot of the Copper today is where Copper is leaking up through all the fractures and void spaces in these breccias. They say they're pouring for road crush. And the fact that we're seeing up there suggests that either below or somewhere just off to the side is likely the intrusion that's causing these brecciations and it's just on top of those intrusions that you expect to find the main copper porphyry mineralization. But again, certainly we have the right environment, we have the alteration, we have the halos, and now we're seeing copper in these event breccias that were likely caused by an intrusion just below, interacting with groundwater and sort of exploding. And then all the copper sort of leaking out through those fracture points. Moving on to a good, this is a really good summary slide of what's happening at Root & Cellar.

22:39 And it's really an evolving interpretation supported by multiple data sets, not just 1 data sets. And it's indicative of an alkaline related epithelial copper porphyry system that's sort of been telescoped to be juxtaposed by each other. I'd say the work to date has defined a very large footprint of gold mineralization, often associated with tellurides, visible Gold becoming more and more common. But that footprint, say, with just the Gold minimization is about 700m up to about 1,000m North-South, the IP is stretching that further East and to the North. So, if you include the IP, which we think of a source of some of the Gold, then it's probably about 1.5km by 1.5km. So a large footprint of the Gold mineralization.

23:25 And I say this is not just 1 data set. We have multiple IP surveys now showing the chargeability zones. We have the geochemistry of mineralization, we have the magnetics of the cell-cell pellicle structure. So all this is based on collaborative evidence from multiple datasets. Then of course, you got the copper showing just to the west of the gold. And you can see underneath that, this is a 3D image. It's actually the topography has been exaggerated here, just to make it clear. But underneath that, we have a magnetic anomaly. That is probably the intrusion off from these granitic copper porphyry intrusions have a magnetic core. So you see a depth here underlying this copper zone and mimicking its shape. You have a magnetic anomaly, which we believe is that intrusion. And then hopefully you're sitting on top of that cap of that intrusion is the Copper Porphyry mineralization. So, you know, we have, here's this fault, you can very clearly see the topography, you see it in the magnetics as well.

24:24 So this may be that fault that has dropped down that epithelium Gold occurrence that would have been much higher, dropped it down and then erosion has eroded down to the level or near the level of a copper porphyry and also the level of the Gold that's been down thrown. So both on the Gold and on the Copper side we have an evolving interpretation. Our original work at Root & Cellar was definitely focused on the Gold. But as time progressed, we realized that the Copper Porphyry potential was very real. And one of the things that kicked it off was the realization a few months ago about the amount of tellurium we had at Root & Cellar and how important that was, not just as an added value, but as an indicator for the copper porphyry. So I'd say the copper potentials is supported by the pathfinder elements, the alteration, the geology, the magnetics, as you can see from this image, and the Copper mineralization itself that we're finding quite extensively in that green shaded area that sits right on top of that magnetic anomaly. So a very good summary of a root and cellar showing a large footprint for the Gold, as well as the Copper Porphyry.

25:34 The next phase is of exploration. The next big phase you want to get to is drilling. Hopefully by early summer, about a 3000m program. We already have drill permits in place for about 100 drill pads, which is more than what we need right now, but it gives us a lot of flexibility. So all the green dots are filled pads that we have permits for, you know, clustered around this, what we call the Eastern extension to the conquest zone down in here. This is the strong chargeability that was just revealed on the latest survey. And down, so what we call the CZ1 zone, so the central zone of conquest, where we have a lot of gold, a lot of potassium on surface. And it was quite a good chargeability anomaly that we can see extending for over 1 kilometre in strike length to the north.

26:23 Trenching and prospecting is going to be ongoing. We'll actually be starting some prospecting next week. Basically, any IP targets from the new survey that comes to surface. Well, first trench though, or prospect goes by hand. If we can't get to them by hand, we'll get an excavator and trench down to try to basically just expose whatever chargeability anomalies that come to surface. Most of them are at depth, not extreme depth, but there's a cap rock there that most of the minimization is not coming through, but we do occasionally see the IP come to surface. So we will be trenching those along with some targets that we think may be getting closer to the central portion of the Copper porphyry, both say hand prospecting as well as trenching. Geophysics is going to be ongoing.

27:10 The next phase, especially to follow up on the Copper porphyry potential, is to do something called airborne magnetic tolerance or deep RIP over those quarries in the Copper for free. But the real next stage, the real turning point, I think, for Root & Cellar is going to be a drill program to test these North-South features, which we believe are the feeders to the Gold minimization we're seeing on the surface. The investment opportunity, the vision that we have, we see this project as a large-scale Gold project leveraged by Tellurium, which we think is going to become much more important in the coming months, coming years. It's a large-scale Gold project leveraged by Tellurium, as well as a Copper porphyry target leveraged by the Gold and the Tellurium.

27:58 Multiple data sets suggest the mineralized system is Alpalloc related. Due to their associated size and grades, these things are highly prized yet rarely found. We have a handful of them in BC, but they haven't been seen on the East Coast yet. And certainly work to date has defined a very large footprint of Gold mineralization with some very high grades and sporadic Silver and Tellurium as well. And of course, the second phase of drilling plan for early summer is to expand on the surface mineralization as well as to test these most trending IP targets, which we believe became the main features for the mineralization. And so I think that's going to be a critical turning point for the project. And I say the Tellurium is now deemed a critical metal, not only significant in its own right, but it's a by-product of Gold and Copper, but a very good indicator for the porphyry potential.

28:52 And I say, we started off really focusing on the Gold, even though the Copper was quite evident, sort of in our face, we somewhat overlooked, perhaps overlooked it by focusing on the Gold. But there is very much a significant Copper 4-Pit potential that we'll start to focus on as well in our exploration strategies. So Just briefly touching on some of our other projects. Edithix is a Nickel-Copper PG project in Northern Quebec. Those that you know us from the past are already known prior to getting involved in Epithermogolos as Nickel PG explorers. In Northern Quebec, just west of Puget-Bac, It's really disseminated PG deposits where we see 100m true thicknesses running about 0.2, 0.1g per tonne of PG.

29:43 So low grade, but over considerable strike length, 5 to 7km. But that PG is only associated with very, very small amounts of Sulphide, typically 0.3%. There's a linear relationship between Sulphide and PGE content. You can just increase that 10 times at 3% Sulphide, you can suddenly be getting 2 or 3g per tonne PGEs. But we also have in that property, very interestingly, are these blebs of Sulfide running spectacular grades of Nickel Copper PGEs, sort of around 2% to 3%, 4% Nickel, 2% to 4% Copper and up to 53g Palladium. So these are bubbles of sulphide that indicate that would have come from a mass of sulphide pool when the mass of sulphide pool was still liquid. And so the question is, does some of that pool of massive sulphide still exist? So quite an interesting project with the current demand for Nickel Copper PGEs, but it's remote so it's an expensive to operate.

30:44 And if we didn't have to worry about dilution, certainly we'd be up there ourselves. But there's obviously a lot of interest in this project as potential purchases or joint ventures with Nolenshield. That's one of our projects on the back burner, we obviously have Shot Rock and Epithermal Gold deposit in occurrence in Nova Scotia. And that's what really led us to Root & Cellar. We first found the Shot Rock Epithermal occurrence in 2018 and followed a trend over to the Avalon terrain and Newfoundland and that's where we found Root & Cellar. But partly due to permitting issues in Nova Scotia, which is very slow, we've decided to focus on Root & cellar and we're just getting better values all around at root and cellar. So at the moment, Shot Rock is on the back burner, along with some 2 other projects, Salukeh in sort of North Central Newfoundland, which we believe is also an epicenter of occurrence. We'll be doing a little bit of work there but not high budget, not a priority, so it's not going to be getting into our exploration capital.

31:53 As well as Mayor Sheen with this very distinct gossam exposed for about a 200-metre vertical exposure on this cliff face. So those are our projects sort of somewhat on the back burner. We'll make a quick visit to Zulikia as soon as the snow goes in. You can mind. So we just, We have about 70 million shares outstanding at the moment. We just completed our first tranche of our financing last week and we'll be commencing a second tranche under the same terms very, very shortly. So that concludes my presentation. So Kyle, happy to take any questions if there are any, otherwise people can reach out at their own time at any of these contact addresses. Thank you very much.

32:43 Perfect, thank you, Ian. And We do have a few questions in the queue. Again, a reminder, please feel free to submit some questions in the Q&A tab if you have any. We did get some pre-submitted questions here. I'm just gonna ask them first. First question, in some Alkaline-related Copper and porphyry systems, Platinum and Palladium can be present. Do you see any PGEs at Roon Seller? That's a good question. We don't at the moment simply because we haven't analysed, but I was speaking to an expert in these fields, a research scientist from the UK at PDAC, and he said, it's a very good chance you have elevated, particularly Palladium, West Silver Platinum, but there's probably PGEs when you get an alkaline system like this.

33:30 And especially we have Gabbro, which is a magnetic rock, where you often get PGEs, it's a good chance that we could have Palladium associated with the Copper. So we haven't analysed for it yet in the past, but we are going to be grabbing some samples from the drill core and a lot of the samples we take going forward, we're going to analyze for PGE. We don't know yet, but stay tuned. We will be getting some samples analyzed in the very near future for PGEs. And obviously that will then add another significant component to the project. Thank you. The same individual has a follow-up question. What do you believe is more likely? The Gold or the Copper at root and cellar? It's really both actually. We've focused on the Gold for good reason.

34:18 But it can occur together in Colorado and places. You often get the Copper porphyry and the Gold juxtaposed for slightly different reasons, but you see them both in those camps. If you asked me a month or 2 ago, I would have said the Gold, but the work we've done is certainly highlighting that there is a copper mineralization around and then is it a porphyry? But the data is strong beginning to suggest that. So right now I'd say it's both. Perfect. And then one more question, then we go to this live Q&A session here, but what are the age of the rocks? Good question. We don't know specifically right now. The general terrain is around 560M years.

35:05 The other deposits, Epithermal in Newfoundland have been dated at that, but we have reason to believe that Root & Settle is going to be much younger. Same with Shot Rock. We dated Shot Rock, which was in the same age of rocks. I was going to assume to be about 560. It turned out to be about 320, I think. I think Root & Salado is going to be much younger. The rocks are, other than altered, they're not beat up like the rest of the Burden Peninsula. They haven't had the same deformation. They're actually relatively flat lined and some of them are really fresh. So I think they're going to come back much younger. Younger doesn't always mean better, but what it's saying is something different is happening here.

35:53 So we'll be getting some age dating on these and probably later on this summer, but my gut feeling is they're going to be quite a bit younger. Perfect. And we have a few questions on Tellurium here. So I'm going to start with this one from Brittany. What is considered an economic Tellurium deposit? What factors need to be considered? And does Northern Shield have a simple or complex Tellurium deposit? The first thing I say is we don't have a deposit yet. We don't know whether it's simple or complex. Tellurium is not mined on its own. It's only really extracted as a by-product of Copper and Gold deposits. The price of Taurium fluctuates all over the place. I think right now it's about US$80 a kilo, but it can shoot up over US$600 or US$700.

36:44 It's a market that's not very well understood. It's hard to say what the value is. I know there's a group in Colorado that are looking to get a high-grade Gold-Silver-Tellurium mine. I think they have on the order of 140-150 PPM Tellurium, but I'm not sure. So it's hard to say what grey creates a Tellurium deposit because you're not going to have a Tellurium only deposit. It always comes as a by-product of Copper, Gold or Silver. Rio Tinto is going back to their sludge, which is what the residue left behind from their Copper smelting, and now extracting the Tellurium from that. It's going to be extracted as a by-product of either Copper, Gold or Silver.

37:33 700 PPM Tellurium is extremely high. Thank you. And then on top of that question, Jim has one. What are the plans for the drop zone given the Tellurium you've seen? Well, We're going to be revisiting Drop Zone and also Braxton Bradley at the Northeastern end, which forms that Northern flank. Drop Zone was not included in the IP survey just because we did the IP survey against its cost management. We were focused on the conquest zone where it was a bigger footprint. So we will be getting over to drop zone at some point doing IP and eventually drilling. We will certainly be revisiting on foot and doing some more sampling, hopefully some trenching, you should sort of expand that. But the initial look, initial view was that it wasn't a large scale feature, the strong alteration, but not a large scale feature. And that's why we focus on the conquest zone, but with the tellurium and simply the high silver values, we will be doing more work on Drop Zone, as well as the Braxton Bradley at the Northeast end.

38:37 That's the only little showing that we haven't been to on the property yet. It's the only one that was known prior to Northern Shields involvement. Based on the chemistry of those rocks that I see, it probably has Tellurium in it. I think someone said they saw Telluride minerals, but it's never been analyzed. My gut feeling is it's going to be very high in Tellurium as well. We'll be doing some work up at Braxton Bradley as well sometime this summer. Okay and Jim has a follow-up question here. How close are you to earning 100% interest at R&C? We're very close. So by the end of this year we will reach the threshold for the expenditure requirements.

39:23 We are ahead of the pace there. The last year, we did require us to earn 1.25%. We have already eaten through a lot of that, so we're about 400,000 short of expenditure. So basically the next drill program will see us over the hurdle and have 100% on Moot & Cellar. Thank you. And the next few questions are more just direct questions. Any royalties on the properties? Yes, the prospector has a total of 2.5 percent royalties, which New Orleans Shield can buy back 1 percent. Okay, perfect. Thank you. And what's your anticipated dollar per metre drill cost? All in, it's probably going to be around $175 per metre.

40:17 Most of the drill trails are already in. So that was one of the bigger costs last year. We'll have to put a few more road drill trails in, but I think it's going to be in the order of $170 all in per meter. Thank you. And James wants to know, when are you cashed up until? We're basically cashed up for the next few months, not including any heavy exploration. So that's why we're doing the financing right now. We're actually waiting for the IP results and there's a few samples in the labs too, and more samples going into the lab that will begin to move the share price. The drill program will be funded after a series of smaller programs that we think will begin to move the dial on our share price and reduce the dilution.

41:10 Cash permitted, would you include 1 or 2 Copper holes in the upcoming drill program? Right now we haven't done geophysics and I think you could take a stab at drilling just on the magnetics underneath the quarry. We have cash permitting. We would probably also cash permitting, get in there and do a magnetic IP survey over the Copper-bearing target, even if it's a fairly simple IP survey. But yes, we'd like to take a shot at the copper, but it really needs to do physics done first. Unless we see something in the field in the next few programs that clearly show us where the Copper porphyry is outcropping. We do have an idea where we're going to go in and prospect and trench.

41:57 If that's the case, we'll probably throw a hole or 2 onto the Copper ideas. Yes. Okay. Thank you. That's it for all the questions. If you have any more, please feel free to submit them. I guess I'll leave this off by asking you maybe just remind the group what they can look forward to in 2023. Well, the next big stage, as I say, is the drill program. We do have some more surface samples of results coming. We'll be on the ground trenching some of these IP targets and optimistically, I think we'll be able to find some of those sources of those visible Gold boulders, which are running spectacular grades. Near-term trenching prospecting results, and then of course, drilling hopefully early summer, which I think is going to be pivotal in our understanding and the development of the Root & Settle project.

42:48 Perfect. Thank you, Ian, for taking us through this great presentation and Q&A session. Also, thank you for everyone who submitted questions. If you think of a question you'd like to ask, the Northern Shield resource team, You can fill out the survey attached in the chat right there. Today's recording will be available to watch on demand in the coming days, so feel free to look out for that. And again, you can find more information at Northern Shield by going to their website, northern-shield.com. Thanks everyone again for making this event successful and I hope to see you again shortly. Have a good day everyone.