Playfair Mining: New Nickel Exploration in Norway

0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to Playfair Mining's live summit today, hosted by 6. I'm joined today by Don Moore, CEO and Director at Playfair Mining, and Neil Briggs, their director. Don and Neil are gonna walk us through their presentation and after they'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, this summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards on Six.com. Without further ado, I'm going to hand things over to you, Don. Get us started. Well, thank you, Cam. And for everybody that's watching, welcome to Playfair's very first virtual event. This is something we're not quite used to. We're used to meeting you at the PDAC and all kinds of other events, but this, we're breaking new ground. We're breaking new ground in the exploration field, so we're going to break a new ground here and get us introduced to this virtual stuff.

0:58 First of all, I've been around for quite a while. I'm a born explorationist. I've been involved in all kinds of activities in the mining industry from being born in a mine office up in the mining town of Red Lake working there as a kid. Had the great fortune of getting involved with the brokerage business as a young man. Learned a lot in the brokerage business in the mining sector in Kirkland Lake. I went from broker to director of economic development where I had a chance to dabble in the goings-on of government-assisted exploration incentives. Was there for the beginning of the what we call the CLIP program, which is the basis of all the government funded exploration programs. And I was also there sitting at the table when Cabinet first approved flow through back in 1981.

1:47 Fortunately, after my tenure in Kirkland Lake as Director of Economic Development, I got involved as Executive Vice President and Director of a company called Corona. And as such, Corona was the founding company in the Hemlo District, and I was one of the early players and it launched me on a career which was incentivized by the fact that discovery means great wealth for a lot of people and there's lots for everybody. You have discovery, there's lots for everybody And that sort of has driven me for the rest of my career. The exploration end of the mining business is the one that has attracted me. It's a, Pierre Lassonde would point out, it's the end where the big money is made and after that then there's all kinds of different cycles, which there's lots more money to be made, but the exploration end is the high risk, high reward sector, and that's the end I kind of stuck with.

2:42 In around the 1980s, I was a financier in London, worked with the York and securities people and were among the first to finance junior companies for bigger money. In 1990 I came to Vancouver, worked with people like Bob Friedland, Bob Dickinson, Murray Pesham of world fame and eventually struck out on my own and got together with Neil Briggs. Neil is the geological brains behind this. We're going to introduce him a little bit later. And Neil and I have took off with one of our first ventures was actually a company called Latheel, which is the current Playfair. And Rupert Resources was another one we've been active with. And to this point, Rupert has done extraordinarily well. It's over in Finland now.

3:35 Playfair here, after a long evolution, has come to the point where we think we have an exciting and fruitful summary of a lot of years of experience on a couple of different technologies that we've been introduced to over that time we worked together. So part of getting into Norway involved Neil's visits there back in the 1970s and his knowledge of the area. We got introduced to EMX, EMX were the underlying stakers of this particular chunk of ground that we have. And the combination of Neil's presence there, the fact that there was a lot of good information, there's a deposit that was drilled off that's in a, called Vakrian, that has about 400,000 tons of 1% nickel and 0.4% copper that was drilled off by the Falconbridge people back in the 70s. So we knew there's lots of good solid information available from that Falcon Bridge project.

4:37 Falcon Bridge once again came back to the area in 2004 and did a big aerial survey and that was also very excellent background. And then the NGU had been through the area for a number of years and had a lot of showings and other say deposits of interest that we were able to look at and determine that this project was something to tackle. It was something worthwhile. But it was a big project. It had over 300 square kilometers involved in the land package. And it's very intimidating when you approach something like this and say, how are we going to have a look at this stuff and figure out what are the spots we should be concentrating in. As it turned out, Neil and I had been introduced to an AI technology called CARDS, it's Computer Assisted Resource Detection System, back about 18 or 20 years ago. We were in fact the very first people to try it out. We learned very quickly when you use a system like that, if you put bad information in, if the information you have is bad, you're going to get bad information out. So having learned that very early in the process, when we came to this RKV project, we understood the great potential that cards would have in determining where the other sweet spots were in this land package.

5:59 The card system, we particularly like for base metals. It seems to be much more reliable when it comes to base metals than it does for other metals, like the precious metals, but that's a personal preference. So even with CARDs, we knew that CARDS would give us some target areas. We further had been introduced to another technology called MMI, which is a geochemical process whereby samples are taken in a field and you're measuring parts per billion of ions. These ions are only generated when you have an oxidizing environment and very small amounts. And the theory is that these ions can be caught, measured, and you can look for anomalies within the blanket of the ground that you're looking at. So once we got to the point of having the ground tied up, the knowledge of the cards and the MMI, we gathered all the information together, Neil provided it to Windfall Geotech, which is the CARDS people, they produced a map for us and they took the 300 square kilometers, narrowed it down to roughly 2 and a quarter square kilometers, divided it into 27 different pieces and out of those 27 different areas, we just, we're the first people ever just to blanket the whole target area with MMI.

7:28 So once this MMI targeting area target samples were taken we sat back and crossed our fingers that there would be something that would show up. We knew in the past that there was other mines in the area that had been operated. There was Rosevangin, Borshoho was a project being developed and Kivikni was mined back in the early, I guess it was in the 1600s, and then there was another one down at the south end called Rodelon. So we knew that with all of these previous mines in the area, it was highly likely we were looking at a BMS district. And in fact, the information about these other deposits makes them stand out as BMS deposits, and particularly Beshi style BMS deposits, they usually

8:12 have a little smidgen of cobalt with them. So having that package together, we set about gathering the samples on our 27 different areas. 15 of those areas gave us something worthwhile to follow up on. We followed up on additional, with additional field surveys, came up with 7 different areas, pardon me, 5 different areas with 7 different targets, all of which look drillable. They're all drill targets as a result of that effort. So in spite of the fact that the project was so large, we've come to very, very specific drill areas. So we're now at the point of getting onto the drill stage. So, but before we go there, I'm going to let Neil introduce you to the technologies that we've used and how we got there. Neil?

9:02 Thanks Don and hi everybody. I've been involved in mineral exploration development and mining for the last 55 years since I came to Canada in 1966. I grew up and was educated in England.

9:24 I went to the University of Durham where I got an honors degree in geology. Then came to Canada where I've worked and lived across the country in Quebec for 13 years, in Newfoundland, in Manitoba. Now I've been out in Vancouver working in all kinds of places through the world for the last 25 years or so. I worked for Falkenbridge Nickel Mine for about 13 years, firstly in Northwestern Quebec, living in Rwanda and then later in Newfoundland, where I set up an office, an exploration office for them. Both of those have some significance as far as this project goes. When I was with Falkenbridge in Rwanda, I went to a meeting of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy 1 night in Rouen and one of my colleagues introduced me to someone he described as an enthusiastic young broker, and that was Don Moore.

10:38 So we've known each other for kind of a long time, that I guess was in 1970. We stayed in touch over the years and the last 25, 26 years we've been business partners on exploration.

10:58 When I was with Falkenbridge in Newfoundland, because the geology in Newfoundland is pretty well the same as the geology in a lot of Norway, and Falkenbridge had exploration operations in Norway, I was lucky enough to go over to Norway in the early 80s and see what they were doing and they had discovered a nickel deposit on our current project and had been exploring there at that time since about 1975. So I became familiar with this area which as you can see is just south of Trondheim, it's probably a hundred kilometers south of Trondheim, about 400 north of Oslo. So it's in the sort of central, south central part of the country which extends south of Oslo right up into the Arctic Circle and the border with Russia.

12:02 What we found, and there are a lot of mineral occurrences in the area, and it really hadn't undergone any recent exploration, but there was a very good database which was available at no cost from the government, from the NGU, the geological branch of the government, geological survey, had really good database which was all digitally available to us. And it seemed to us, knowing what we knew about Cards and MMI, that some kind of double filtering system would be a way to 0 in. And the one thing we liked about the CODS artificial intelligence is it uses all the existing data. We looked at a huge area, 300 square kilometers.

13:00 And the system, what I like about Cards is that it works in the same way as an exploration geologist. It looks at the data, the existing data on your property, and it looks at where you know there are deposits or mineral showings and what their characteristics are. And then it looks for similar places on the rest of the property where you only have sort of more general information. In this case, it works, I say, in the same way as an exploration geologist works, but it does things. It deals with more data than, certainly, than I can deal with.

13:49 It divided the whole area up, over 300 square kilometers into 40 meter by 40 meter blocks and applied 180 roughly blocks it ended up with, with about 441 different variables. So about 74 or 75 million pieces of data that it then examined in this way, and came up with areas that looked similar to known mineral deposits. And this, without setting foot on the land or doing anything other than working with the data that was already available to us.

14:38 And we ended up with 26 areas,

14:43 still a lot of areas even though it was hugely reduced. So we had decided then, Don mentioned, mobile metal ion soil geochemistry, MMI, which we were well aware of, and This is a way to go in and see if there's anything indicated in an area fairly easily. You dig a small pit, as you can see here, Take a sample of soil under a specific depth and using old plastic and things like this to not contaminate things because you end up measuring things in parts per billion.

15:29 And then fill the pit in and go away and there's no real sign that you've been there. So it's a very non-invasive, easy way to go and do things, and these samples are analyzed for 53 different elements. Now The advantage of MMI is that it's detecting loosely bound ions, metal ions, which are generated from decaying sulfides, and they rise vertically to surface. So a disadvantage, and what's an advantage is also a disadvantage in that it gives you very small targets, because they're not spread around. They're just vertically above.

16:21 It's an advantage if you find one, it's going to be right below you. But they're harder to find, which is why we did this two-step approach. And once we've done this, we ended up with about 15 or 16 areas that we went back and did more detailed MMI and refined that down to about 7, which we considered to be drill targets. In between, we went in with a drone magnetic survey to measure the Earth's magnetic field over 6 areas, just to refine the area for the drill targets.

17:10 So by this point what we've done has hardly involved much disturbance of the involved much disturbance of the land and these days particularly in countries which are outdoor oriented this is a big a big plus. Now I'll pass it back over to you, Don, to pick up on with this. Okay, well 1 thing that in that database, there was an airborne survey, and in that airborne survey there was literally tens of miles of MAG-EM on this belt of rocks that now is part of the AKV, RKV project.

17:55 So it was intimidating to look at all these MAG-EM

18:00 targets and not know where to go. So our approach is to try and narrow down and find the sweet spot. So when Cards was used, they used a benchmark of 85% similarity and if it wasn't, if it was anything lower than that, you can go back and have another look, say at 70% similarity and do the same process all over again. So already we know there's other areas on this property that we want to do further MMI and to further that whole process and develop more targets as we go forward. There was, these 7 drill targets that we've come up with are all drill ready. We've got all the notifications sent out. We do have a drill over there right now and in keeping with the environmental side of things, it turns out we're using a manned portable drill.

18:57 A little image of the guys in one of the first holes done. We're set up here on Rodelan and we've finished drilling at Rodelan now. The total area is, all the different targets is about 77 hectares and we zeroed right in on these specific targets that you see the guys setting up on here. The man-portable drill was a challenge because it is man-portable, you need people to move it, but we've got lucky and got a group of people

19:32 locally who we refer to as the muscle guys that are happy to come out and do the heavy moving for us. This all came about because of our Norwegian representative. We're very fortunate to have a very strong representation in Norway. Radar Gopas has a distinguished career in the police department, retired a couple of years back and is looking for other things to interest, he's a very active mind. And he's taken a liking to our project and our company and he has been an invaluable resource for Playfair in Norway. Without him, a lot of the things that we have been able to accomplish would not have been possible. We've also had good support from some of Norway's institutional people, and for that we're very grateful.

20:25 To have more local support is always better when you're in these foreign countries. I don't know what else to say other than that we've got our 7 drill targets to go after and we're on the second one now. Drilling is going well. We've adapted to the country. Incidentally, we have got a Canadian driller working with the Arctic drilling people, training the Arctic drilling people on how to continue using our machinery once our guys have come back to Canada. So Is there anything else you'd like to cover Mr. Briggs? No, here's basically a summary of what we've gone through I think.

21:13 It's taken us about 2 years to get to the drilling point, a little over 2 years, which we would have liked to have been there earlier, but COVID has been a challenge, getting things done without, for the last year and a half, being able to go to Norway. Luckily we have a good solid team of people over there, Norwegian geologists and helpers for various things in what we're doing. And that's made a major difference to us. I don't think we could have accomplished very much of this without such a good team. Normally, you'd be able to hire the people you want from wherever and move them, send them over to Norway to do the job, but not so these days.

22:08 These days we have to find more, have to be more inventive, I guess. Right? Okay, well I think that we've pretty well covered the basics. Cam, if you could take over now and we're open for questions. There's all kinds of information that we haven't passed on, but this is, I say, our first go at it and Let's see if anybody has any questions. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Don. Thank you, Neil. And indeed, I'd like to remind everyone in the audience that this is the Q&A session now and you can ask questions using the Q&A tab found on the right-hand side of your screen next to the public chat. But Don, Neil, we've had some questions come in in advance of the summit. I'm going to start off with some of those. The first one is, when do you think you'll have comprehensive drill results?

22:56 That's what everybody wants to know. That's a good question. Right now, we've drilled a half a dozen holes and we still haven't cut the core. Issues, COVID issues and getting a machine to cut our core has been an issue, but that should be resolved, I would hope even today as we speak. So there'll be no assays for at least another month.

23:19 In the meantime, we're continuing to drill. We've got roughly 40 holes laid out right now and possibly up to 120 depending on results. And they're on these 7 different target areas. We're on the store-born target area now, which looked particularly good from the MMI point of view. But Mr. Briggs reminds me all the time that, you know, targets are just targets until you put a hole in them. We call it the truth machine. So, we're putting the truth machine at store-born now. We think we understand what's happening at Rodellin and we're going to be going on to Rostov-Engin after we finish at Starborne. I don't know if that answers your question or not. I think so. And now Neil and Andon, you both touched on this but how has COVID-19 affected your operations, if you might be able to elaborate on that a little?

24:09 Well, I think it's slowed us down basically, in that it's made it harder to access the people and the other technologies we need or things we need it just it's just so much more difficult when you can't go over and sit down face to face with people, meet with the government people, and you have to do it all by either by video chat or just by writing or emailing back and forth. Luckily, I was able to get over there with another director who's also a geologist before COVID struck and we were able to visit the property, we were able to train the MMI sampling crews because both Greg and I were, knew how to do it, so we were able to train everybody up and at least meet a fair few people over there, but we haven't been able to go back. Normally we would have been there quite often and you know building relationships with people which now we're having to do like everybody differently. So we've been able to overcome it but it hasn't been easy let's say you know it was very difficult

25:40 for example to get our drillers in the country from Canada because basically no 1 from Canada was allowed into Norway and we had to get special dispensation for them to go to train the Norwegian drillers. So things like that have definitely slowed us down. Yeah, also even on the practical point of view of getting the man-portable drill over to Norway, we started that process back on February the 22nd and it had to be revamped and done over a bit and parts had to be ordered. COVID supply lines slowed everything down. So instead of having our drill turning back in June, we're just now getting going. So COVID really did impact the timing of what we're doing.

26:32 It's it slowed us down a lot. No that's fair enough. We've actually had a question come in live from Sven in the audience. I think you may have managed to answer it almost entirely with your previous answer but he asks please comment on your co-op co-work with EMX and the function or usability of the man-portable drill within working current working restrictions what's your expected news flow going forward and do you have any expected lab run times? What's do you want to start labyrinth times. What's, do you want to start with part of that, Neil? Well, I think it's gonna be some of it, certainly, yeah. The drill is doing a great job and is very good for areas with difficult accessibility, let's say, where you're into steep ground and all that stuff. And it's also something that because you can carry it in you don't disrupt the environment, you don't damage the environment very much so that less strains with property owners and neighbors and things like that and it certainly is working well for us that way. EMX, so to speak briefly about EMX, they're the company who we,

28:03 like a project generation company that we optioned the pro the acquired the project farm originally and they have personnel in Scandinavia and have made them available to us for doing field work and things like this. So we've had just excellent cooperation with them and it's been very useful and very good. I'm not sure if that was all of the questions. One more point with regard to the drill. It is a small drill, it's man-portable, and we're using it for this, what we're calling the scout drilling section of our exploration program. And it is producing, with good recovery, NQ core. And we've had holes down to 74 meters so far, which is in excess of what we were looking to do with, we set a benchmark of 50 meters is sort of the spot to aim for. And the drill has been acting and operating very well. This has always been a sort of a question because it's man portable, there's some thought that maybe it doesn't get you good core you got excellent core, good core recovery and we're making good time with it when we get it going.

29:17 That's great to hear. The only tack on questions that Sven had asked was if you had any expected news flow going forward and any expected lab run times if you wanted to elaborate on those. Well the lab run time is, they say we haven't got the course cut yet, so it's off, the labs are really backed up right now also, so I'm afraid to make a guess at that. What was the other part, the lab run time? Just expected news flow going forward. Okay, news flow, yeah. I think what we're going to be doing going forward, each time we drill our holes in any given target, we'll put out sort of a summary news flow, news release on that one as we did with Rodellan. And as we get information back from the labs and whatnot, it can produce more, say, conclusions, then we'll go forward with news releases in that regard. But I think each individual target area will have sort of a summary news release and what we're thinking about it as we go to the next one.

30:20 Fair enough, thanks Don. William in the audience asks, can you go over current share structure and future financing needs? Well, first of all, current share structure is about a $106 million outstanding. We're very fortunate we have some large shareholders. We have an institutional shareholder from Scandinavia with roughly, they declared the other day, 13.8%. We have a private shareholder who has been part of our, say, our support for a long time. Albremichome has got roughly 20%. EMX has got 10%. And our little group has got, say, maybe 7% or 8%. So there's some very large positions.

31:06 So the float being 106 million shares is scattered around a lot. The balance is scattered around a lot. The company's been around for a long time. At one point there was over 4000 shareholders. So that there was a rollback about 15 years ago. So 13 million shares were involved with that. So it's the company's in good shape. We get a good hit here. It will be game on. This, you know, the truth machine gives us something great, it'll be fun. That's great to hear. Are there any other targets that you're looking for? Well, first of all, we want to drill these 7 targets and see how we do. Neil has already laid out a couple of square kilometers around, who is it, around Kivikne or Rostovangan? Kivikne. Kivikne, that he would like to go at, but that won't happen until next spring.

31:54 And it'll be a repeat performance of the whole process as we go forward. As far as financing, yes of course, we're spending money, it's all going in the ground and it's expensive operating with a man-portable drill, but it's expensive operating in Norway. Norway is a very expensive jurisdiction, but it is an excellent jurisdiction. The state really wants to develop the mineral industry. They've actually promoted us back at the PDAC, the last one we had, about the benefits of Norway. They want to wean themselves off the cash flow they have coming from the oil patch. And the next, I would think, the next 20 or 30 years, Norway is going to be concentrating on building up their mineral industry.

32:40 It was a major contributor, we believe, to the industrial revolution of producing copper back at that stage of the evolution of our society. So it's very interesting. That dovetails nicely. The final question that we had come in in advance was in regards to if Norway was mining friendly and I think you've answered it just there, But is there anything else that you could elaborate on that? Well, Norway, as any jurisdiction, you always have glitches, okay? The state wants to have their mineral industry build up, but there's also, there's always the factions that the environmentalists don't want to have mining in Norway and the reindeer people don't want you anywhere near a reindeer. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're within 100 miles, they still worry about their reindeer, the wild reindeer. So there are issues, but they're no bigger than any issue we have to handle here in Canada or any other jurisdiction.

33:39 I would say overall Norway is a good jurisdiction to be in. I think they were rated number 1 in the world by the Fraser Institute there the last couple of years. But also there's an interesting thing about Norway and mining in that mining historically has gone back a long time. On the RKV project it started almost 400 years ago. You know, it's an old mining district. But in the last probably 50 years or so, 40 anyway, Since oil was discovered offshore in Norway, all the exploration and geological expertise shifted to offshore oil.

34:26 And in fact in the last, you know, probably 40 years there has not been very much exploration going on in Norway, particularly when you compare to neighboring countries like Sweden, you know, very little. So it's a very fertile area to find things, plus the government is encouraging people. They want to shift away from the oil and It's one of the richest countries in the world and it's all from offshore oil. But now they seem to be shifting away from oil and they're definitely encouraging mineral exploration.

35:14 Yeah, one more thing Cam is that Neil and I are both very accessible. Our cell numbers are on our website and you can you're welcome to call either of us to follow up on any of these issues. It's Great to hear. We've actually had another question come in from Sven. Do you have any marketing measures going forward? Well, we've obviously, we're slowly getting acclimatized to this new digital age. This is our first attempt at it. And I would hope, Cam, that if we pass here, then we will continue down this road. I think the marketing has been quite restricted with COVID but they're starting to open up a bit but I have no specific thing right now as I talk to you other than hopefully getting to you with another broadcast talking about a discovery.

36:07 That sounds like a great plan I think. But to the audience members I think that's all the questions we have for today at this point and I just want to thank everyone in the audience, as well, everyone who submitted questions. Don, Neil, thank you for coming in today and giving this great update and presentation. If you didn't get a chance to get your question answered, or if you think of 1 after the summit, we'll be sending out a short survey where you can leave your contact information and you can get in contact with the Playfair Mining team. Like Don and Neil just said, you can also of course find more information and reach out to them using playfairmining.com. And with that, Don, Neil, I'm going to hand it back to you for the final word before we wrap up today. Neil? Me? Okay, keep going. I'm a guy who likes to drill. I believe you only find things by drilling.

36:55 We're out there drilling, we're drilling good targets and we're hoping for success. Now, I was involved with the Hemlo play and hole number 76 was the good one. So I know that perseverance can pay big time. So I agree 100% with Neil, keep drilling. Wonderful. Well, I think with that, We're going to wrap things up for the day. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure. I hope you have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Thanks, Sam. Thanks. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Sam.