Precious Metals Insights, H2 2025

0:04 Hi, welcome to the sixth conference here, Precious Metals Conference. We've got me, Joe Mazumdar, Editor, Analyst, Publisher at Exploration Insights. We're going to wait a little bit for the numbers to take up a bit And then we'll get started with contango or headwater gold and inflection resources so 1 cash flowing and 2 expiration and prospect generators We're talking about Alaska Nevada and also northern New South Wales So we'll give it a few more seconds and then we'll get going And just for anyone to know, I mean, you guys are watching it, so I don't know if it matters to you, but this session is recorded, and the 6 people will have it up later today, basically in a couple hours, in case you miss anything.

1:02 So yeah, let's get going then. So again, my name is Joe Mazumdar, editor, analyst, publisher, Exploration Insights. And with me is Rick Van Nuenhuis, president CEO of Contango. We got Caleb Strube, president CEO of Headwater. Alastair Waddell, president CEO and Director of Inflection Resources. So we're gonna start with them giving an introduction to themselves and to the company, a little 3 to 5 minute

1:28 blurb, and then we'll get into the Q&A. And also I can see the Q&A from you guys. And so if there's questions that dovetail with what we're talking about, I'll bring them on quicker. All right, go ahead, Rick. Well, thanks for joining us today. My name is Rick Van Nuenys, President and CEO of Contango Ore. We are an Alaska-based exploration company and we're producing Gold at our Moncho Mine. We have 3 projects we're focused on. Our Moncho Mine is in production. It's a joint venture with Kinross. Our share of annual production over the next 4 to 5-years is 60,000 ounces of Gold annually. We're making Gold for an all-in sustaining cost of about US$1,400 an ounce. So very, very strong margins. We're generating about US$8 per share of free cash flow.

2:20 That's in line with some of the most well-valued companies in the precious metal space like Royal Gold and Agnico. Our 2 development stage projects, Lucky Shot, We're working on a plan to get that up to about 40,000oz of production annually. And then our Johnson Track project, that's a little earlier stage. We're in the permitting process there. Lucky Shot is fully permitted. Our Johnson Track project, we just released initial assessment on, which is equivalent to the 43-101 in Canadian parlance. We're a US-traded company. But that initial assessment had a valuation of over $225 million. That's $25 million NPV with a 30% IRR and a quick one-year payback.

3:13 At today's gold price, that NPV is more like $500 million. So these are high quality projects. We use our direct shipping ore model to get things into production quickly.

3:25 We are traded by NYSE American, the ticker symbol CTGO there. We're part of the Russell 2000. And we'll look forward to telling you more about what we're going to be doing with our strong cash flows to develop our other projects. All right. Thank you very much, Rick. Now we'll just go to Caleb with Headwater Gold. All right. Thanks, Joe. And thanks everyone for tuning in here today. I'm Caleb Stroop, the President and CEO and also Director of Headwater Gold. We are an exploration company focused in the Western US with a specific focus on high-grade epithermal Gold deposits, Gold targets, all across the Western US, but our primary focus is on Nevada. As you can see, we have about a dozen projects in the portfolio at present, And quite a number of those are under partnerships that have been announced with multiple large companies. We've got 2 projects in the Walker Lane, partnered with Newmont, and just recently announced an LOI to partner 3 of our projects in northern Nevada with Oceana Gold.

4:37 I'm sure we'll talk about this a little bit later. I won't get into the specifics and the business model, but we're sort of a hybrid between a traditional junior explorer and a project generator where we look to partner a number of projects with producing companies

4:52 to advance exploration and fund the early work on those, while at the same time advancing some on our own to give our shareholders additional leverage to Discovery. All right, now we'll move on to Alistair Waddell, the President and CEO, Director of Inflection. Thanks, Joe. Alistair Waddell, President and CEO. Inflection Resources is focused on the discovery of very large copper-gold deposits, primarily in northern New South Wales, Australia. We're exploring a big belt of rocks called Macquarie Arc, which is host to some of Australia's biggest copper-gold mines. The big one in the belt is Newmont's Cadia operation, which is Australia's largest Gold mine.

5:41 This belt of rocks broadly extends to the north under a blanket of post-mineral cover. And to cut a long story short, we've extrapolated the known outcropping geology to the south that holds these big mines. And we built an interpretive geological map further to the north under this blanket of cover. And we've identified a whole series of targets we considered analogous with these major mines located further to the South, acquired the ground and we've been systematically exploring these targets through this blanket of cover, mostly in partnership with Anglo Gold Ashanti, which I'm sure we'll talk to in more detail going forward. But we're chasing big porphyry deposits, these are what we call alkalic porphyries.

6:29 These are targets that would be ultimately mined underground as block cave type operations. But we're obviously in a fabulous mining friendly jurisdiction. And if we believe we can tag and discover one of these big porphyries undercover, it'll be a tremendous value creating opportunity for our shareholders. All right, well, let's get going here first with the elephant in the room is the gold price surge in the first half of the year and then the ongoing like just this morning, I'm seeing a lot more new 52-week highs. And so the company of the 3 right now that are probably most impacted by the gold price is Cash Flowing Contango. So, Rick, how has the gold price impacted your estimates for free cash flow and leverage to the Gold price

7:22 so far? Well, it's been a fantastic year of production. We're about 1 year, a little over 1 year into production now. And when we gave guidance early in the year, we were using a lower long-term Gold price and now we're actually selling Gold, so we're making about 30% more money. We guided to about US$70M of free cash flow this year at the beginning of the year. And we're projected now to be well over $100M of free cash flow with the current prices. So that's sort of a bottom line number. Another couple of other metrics, we're generating about $8 of free cash flow per share. We have a very low share count. We have 12.7M shares outstanding.

8:11 And so if you want leverage to Gold on a per share basis, I don't really think there's another company that comes close to us. Obviously, what we do with that cash flow is important and that's where we're advancing our other 2 development stage projects, Lucky Shot and Johnson Track. Johnson Track is currently being permitted. Lucky Shot is already fully permitted.

8:35 We like the high gold price and we're gonna put that cash flow to good use. So just getting back to this is, you talked about the forecasts and then what you have now in free cash flow estimates. So like what were companies like Kinross who are operating this assuming for the gold price when they went into their budget year of 2025? Well, it's it's it's interesting. The major companies are still using very, very conservative Gold prices for their long-term reserve definition. As an example, we did the feasibility study 3 years ago and Ken Ross was still using $1,400 Gold. So the Feasibility Level Mine Plan was based on a $1,400 Gold price. We're more than double that now, but well more than double that now.

9:27 So the major companies will remain very conservative and that's how they're, they don't mine to that. Just keep in mind, they don't mind a $1,400 cutoff. They just keep their reserves there. So the reserve grade for Moncho is 8 grams per tonne based on the feasibility. And we're just blending that with low-grade oxide material

9:49 down to about 7. So obviously, that's going to extend the reserve life. We don't have any official numbers on that yet, but that's just the practical way of how you're mining this when the gold price is $3,400. And was there much change in the all-in sustaining costs? I know the margin is high, but obviously the gold price went up a lot more, but what I'd notice is that the costs had run up with some of these companies like 8 to 10% on the market, on the oil and sustaining costs. Did you see any impacts on the cost side? Not really, nothing significant. We had a reduction in the number of trucks last year, late last year that resulted in projected higher costs.

10:39 However, we're using a much lower price of diesel fuel than what was assumed in our feasibility study and in the bank financing arrangements, we were using a hundred dollar barrel oil based diesel price. So, and we're sitting here with sub $65 barrel oil. So we haven't seen, again, we didn't see big inflation because we didn't really build a lot because the mill and the tailings facility was already built at Fort Knox where we process our Moncho ore.

11:15 So our capital, we didn't see sort of the typical, when you have 5 years of permitting and 3 years of build out, there's a lot of inflation that you're just naturally gonna get there. We didn't see much of that because again, we didn't build a lot of things. And then now with the diesel price, being very tame, we're not seeing any significant inflation on the transportation cost, which is, of course, a big part of our costs. We projected originally $1,600 gold, all in sustaining, or sorry, $1,600 all in sustaining costs. We're looking at like $1,400 right now. Wow, that's a big stump. All right, now getting into the non-cash flowing companies like Headwater and inflection, like we had the move in the gold price and probably more positive sentiment on copper because Alistair is looking for porphyry, copper and gold projects.

12:10 How has that impacted potentially financing possibilities, more partners knocking on the door?

12:20 We'll start with Caleb. Well, on the partner side, a big part of our business model is to try to access the capital that's within the major miners and the producers to advance exploration. And when prices go up, like we've seen, and margins improve, there's simply just more cash in the system, which is an overall benefit for companies like us, I think. So, one big question that I think is yet to be determined is, will the percentages of free cash flow going into exploration increase as we move into this market? I think it probably will, but even without the percentage change, just the fact that there's more money being made, I think is a net benefit.

13:10 And yeah, as I said, you know, in the numbers that the big companies are putting out, there's no real clear indicator that, you know, they are pumping more money into exploration generally. But

13:24 that's in contrast to sort of what I'm feeling on the ground with my, gauged by the level of interest in our company and our projects and number of phone calls coming in has definitely been increasing dramatically over the last 9, even 6 months. So I'm expecting things to continue to improve in that direction. And the fact of the matter is, is producing companies are continually depleting their reserve base. And to grow, they need to invest in exploration. And that's where we come in. You all right, Alistair? Yeah, I would echo Caleb's comments there. I think it's just broadly very positive for our sector, particularly focusing on the earlier stage exploration opportunities. We perhaps haven't seen the love for early stage stocks filtered down quite as much as the producers as yet, but history tells us it does come.

14:22 As Caleb mentioned, I think there's definitely been an uptick of general interest from particularly the retail investors. So we are getting more inbound calls, but perhaps the thing that's impacted inflection specifically is more the major mining companies really now, or the gold companies should I say, focusing on copper. And this is a relatively recent development. We're seeing groups like Barrick, Newmont and Anglo Gold, who traditionally would take Copper as perhaps a by-product, but the principal commodity has to be Gold. But now they're openly exploring for copper gold, for free since specifically, changing their names, and changing the names as well. So, so that's probably have more of an impact and just attracting the attention of the majors. And we've got a bigger pool of, of companies which we can potentially attract capital from. So that's probably the big one.

15:21 All right, just going back to like, when we started off, Rick said, we're an Alaskan focused company. Caleb has been focusing in on Nevada and also Alistair's talking about New South Wales. So I want to get into jurisdiction a bit and the appeal of jurisdiction and how important it is for a smaller company to be focused and bring that, let's say, intellectual data that they have in a certain type of deposit potentially, but also in a jurisdiction to the table when they're talking to a company. So Rick, can you start that off? Sure, I mean, Alaska is a great place to work. Geologically, it's where North America, Asia and Europe have come together, banging back and forth for a billion years, bumping into each other, creating lots of big structures and lots of great ore deposits, world-class ore deposits like Red Dog, like Greens Creek.

16:25 And so we've got high quality deposits here, high grade deposits. We have now a federal government that is very much focused on developing the energy and critical metal resources of the state. We're the only state to have our own executive order. On day 1, President Trump, Trump 47, as they're referring to it, signed an executive order specific to Alaska calling on his administration to make it easier to permit things, get things through the permitting timelines on the federal side.

17:04 And on the state side, it's always been a fairly easy place to do business. We've definitely struggled with the federal administration, particularly the Biden administration to get permits. But in general, as long as you're not pebble, Alaska is a pretty good place to get permits and get a mine built. We've demonstrated that with our model, our direct shipping, our model that If you have a relatively simple project, i.e. You don't need a lot of infrastructure, then you can get your permits within a year. And we have our federal permits for our Montreux mine within 1 year. So that's a record time for any mining company.

17:52 But that is because of our approach and not building a mill in a tailings facility in a big power plant to run it all. So there's a specific set of criteria that deposits have to fit to fit the DSO model. But fortunately in Alaska, we've got a lot of shoreline and Johnson track is about 20 miles from the ocean. So, and barging is a very cost-effective way of moving high quality ore products. Just getting with the jurisdiction and Alaska, Lenny, you had mentioned the Biden administration versus the current administration, and both were pro-critical minerals. They both had a strategy, but it seemed like the Biden administration was a bit weaker with what happened with Trilogy and ADA with the road on and off and on and off, and with resolution as well on and off and on and off.

18:45 So right now, let's take that US administration and talk about jurisdiction, because Nevada, for Caleb, has, I mean, Nevada has always been a number 1 prime jurisdiction. It always has ranked very highly. How has that changed right now going forward? So not only do you have gold, which is very important to Nevada, but now also the push for, in terms of the US administration for mining in that state and being in the best state, How has that improved your ability in terms of people knocking on your door? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, we came to Nevada, you know, in the first place because it's one of the premier mining jurisdictions in the world. And it's always been a very well-established mining area, both from the permitting side and the local community side and skilled workforce and endowment-wise too, it's obviously a world-class place.

19:42 So the developments that have happened at the federal level I think are only increased tailwinds. Permitting is not necessarily in a place like Nevada, your typical, your main concern.

19:58 It's a place people tend to come to take exploration technical risk. But the more you can clarify the downstream permitting timelines, the better for sure. And especially as other parts of the world have been perceived as higher and higher risk geopolitically. I definitely have, you know, seen an increase in interest in in the Western US in general and probably Nevada in particular. I mean from the very beginning that was our our view here is as he said at the beginning of this conversation, it's good to have a focus. And our thought process was, okay, well, where do the big companies who want to bring the assets that we find into production, Where do they want to be and what do they want to have in their portfolio and high-grade gold in Nevada is at least one of the main answers to that question. And I think that's only increased since then.

21:00 Just further on Nevada, are you seeing more people come from outside into Nevada that don't have a history, don't have an operating asset there?

21:10 There hasn't been a sort of a real market increase in the last couple of years. You know, Nevada can be a difficult place to just jump parachute into and start up. There's a fairly competitive land situation here where you have to still stake claims physically, and there's a lot of ground that's already held by other people and you know, it takes, there's a bit of a learning curve to come into the state and I think that's where you know, established companies like ours have a bit of a competitive advantage. We've been working here for a long time, have an existing portfolio and an ability to really explore in a turnkey fashion with partners.

21:58 Alastair, we're out of the States now and in Australia. Australia is obviously some place that people don't mind mining there. And obviously, there's a lot of projects in New South Wales that are happening. So what jurisdictionally, you know, with the rise in the gold price, rising sentiment, you know, and copper being something people are always talking about. How does that change with what you're doing in New South Wales? Yeah, so I mean, I probably don't need to convince you about the Australia's being a mining jurisdiction. I mean, you just to look at the skyline in most of the major cities and you'll see buildings Rio Tinto and South 32 and BHP and things on the skyline. There's a strong culture of mining that most people in Australia understand and proud of I believe.

22:47 But specifically New South Wales, New South Wales has sort of gone out of the way to really to deliver a sort of a world-class environment for for groups like ours to come in and invest and explore. And for example, you know, we've received multiple grants from the government in New South Wales to drill conceptual targets. We've received hundreds of thousands of dollars for drilling. It's called a New Frontiers type program. So if you've got a good idea and a new concept, particularly areas that are covered or poorly understood where there's a lack of data, you'll receive grants from the government to drill. So things like that are amazing. You know, there's a world-class database and they do a lot of things sort of like big airborne geophysical surveys, big seismic surveys, they'll go and drill big stratigraphic holes and things like this and all this information is available for free so anybody that can log on to that platform.

23:45 So they're really going out of their way to encourage groups like ours to come and

23:50 invest. And as you mentioned, Joe, there's a number of world-class operations in New South Wales already. I mentioned Cadia earlier. This is the flagship operation of Newmont in Australia. And then we've got Evolution Mining. They've got their North Park porphyry Copper mines there as well. And their Cowl open pit now underground operation as well. So there's a big culture of mining in New South Wales and particularly where we are, we're in a relatively low populated part of New South Wales where it's more agricultural, big paddocks of grain and cotton and a lot of cattle sort of country as well. So it's an easy place to operate. Still good infrastructure, still a network of roads servicing these big farms.

24:41 We've got rail and power and things like this. So it's a real pleasurable place to operate, but it also translates to being a very cost-effective place to operate as well. So it's a combination of all these things that makes it an attractive destination for us and and same for the major mining companies we're trying to attract or have been able to attract as partners as well. You know, it's Australia obviously is considered a safe jurisdiction politically. And that's that's a big part of it as well. Having jurisdiction ultimately where the major mining companies want to own assets and the long term. So getting to, like we talked about the jurisdiction, the appeal in that, we talked about the commodities, the appeal, obviously the positive sentiment. But I guess like now I want to turn to people because when we talk about juniors and that it is a lot of people.

25:34 So my question is, Rick, I mean Alaska focus but it's not just that hey Alaska is a great jurisdiction but what is your team and potentially you in particular bringing to that story about Alaska because I know you've got several decades of experience in the state. Yeah, well, we just, you know, we know how to get stuff done here. And I think one of the particular things in Alaska that we've excelled at always is having partnerships with Alaska Native Corporation and tribes and who own private land. So as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which was passed in 1971,

26:15 indigenous Alaskans self-organized into 13 native corporations, regional corporations, and then over 200 village corps. And they own land. That's private land. And because the state and federal government had already sort of pre-selected all the oil and gas, most of, a good part of their selection rights, they directed toward mineral potential. And so they identified a lot of land that had mineral potential based on previous work and work that they actually conducted to make those land selections. Things like our Johnson Track project that's owned by Cook and Regional Corporation. The Tetlin tribal lands that they own, they're private lands. Tetlin's land block is about the size of the state of Rhode Island.

27:04 It's a small state, but it's a pretty big chunk of real estate owned by 1 tribe of 150,200 people. So that's a big advantage. We love working on private land because that's the easiest land to permit things on, especially because if you're working on public land, regardless of whether it's state or federal, the public gets to weigh in on what the best use of that land is. And often there's a group of people who don't believe the best use of any land is for mining. When it's private land, that question is not on the table. You still have to get permits for impacting wetlands, fish and wildlife, etc., etc. So there's still permitting to do. But but we like working with private lands. The state of Alaska is really good to work with.

27:51 I haven't worked on federal land in 30 years.

27:54 So in Alaska, we've worked on federal land elsewhere, but in Alaska, I just stay away from it. So, but with good news is we have plenty of other land, state land and private land to work on in Alaska. So there's no, that doesn't really restrict us too much. So, but you being in Alaska for a while, I know those first nation, I'm sorry, first nation, the native corps are very important, but that relationship with the individuals, that must, like somebody dropping into Alaska right now, thinking it's a great place to be, but doesn't have those relationships, maybe a little bit slower to do it. We see a lot of Canadian companies up here and a lot of, especially the last few years, a lot of Australian companies. I mean, the Australian markets are hot and they're able to raise a fair bit of money. The Canadian markets have not been so, they've been a little more lackluster.

28:50 But there are a number of new companies coming into the state. They tend to be picking up the projects that have been picked up and worked on before. So we're still, I think it's still early days in terms of the greenfield exploration. There's still lots of things to look at in the state. But I think now with the Trump administration we'll see probably a renewed interest to work on federal lands, particularly if they actually can get true permitting reform passed. I think that's important to get going. I'm actually participating in a round table that the House of Representatives is hosting up here with, it's a bipartisan committee, House of Representatives bipartisan committee on natural resources to basically ask us mining companies, what do we need to be doing to get more critical metals in Alaska? So there's a lot

29:45 of- Is that state or federal? Federal, The House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee. Right, and this is after Trump just had a meeting with the guys at Resolution, the Rio Tinto and BHP. That's correct. Yeah. These are real things that are very active and very meaningful. I mean, there's real action being done, not just a lot of talking. The Biden administration did a lot of talking. We're seeing this administration doing a lot of action. Yeah, I found the Biden administration, you know, a little bit weak in the sense that when an NGO popped up, they were all scared and didn't want to get sued. And they backpedaled a lot. And I don't think that's going to happen under this administration. So another one that's impacted potentially positively, because Nevada has always been a good state to work in, but when we're talking about people and Nevada, like you were saying before, Caleb, it's not, you do need a lot of experience in that state. You live there, but you've been working there previously with other companies like Kinross.

30:52 So how important it is, not only for knowledge of the geology in that, but in terms of just working there,

31:00 in Nevada, in terms of the advantage of somebody coming in from outside and trying to do exploration there from within. Yeah, I think whatever part of the globe you're in, the more experience you have within the team in those rocks and in that area and operated in that area, the better. And it's definitely a competitive advantage for us. Even the experience we've accrued in the last 5 or 6 years with Headwater operating multiple drill projects a year with really the same team in place here, you know, has given us a ton of experience and allowed us to develop a system to systematically march through and drill, you know, sort of 3 to 5 projects a year without really breaking a sweat and doing that safely and effectively and following all the permitting regulations, environmental compliance.

31:59 We have our own fairly strict safety criteria. And our ability to do that, I think is a big advantage, just getting things done, but also a big advantage in accessing partnerships with major mining companies who may not have that in place in a jurisdiction, but also want to have an exploration footprint there.

32:25 And it takes a while to stand up an office and a team and gain that experience. And so, yeah, that's, I think, definitely a distinct and durable competitive advantage. And Alistair, you know, I know with people and technical capacity, I mean, you've got a lot of advisors and people on your board, and, you know, people in your on your team that have a lot of experience in the Macquarie Arc and because you're looking undercover with geophysical interpretation as well. So just doing what you're doing, which was something a major really didn't want to do before, and you've shown that it can work. How does that people aspect help with doing something like you're doing?

33:12 Yeah, so we always, when we set up the company, we always imagine getting some sort of partnership with a major mining company. I mean, we're exploring for porphyries undercover. This is not the typical domain of Junius in many ways. It really is a major mining company sort of game in many ways. But we were able to assemble a team of experts who believed in our model. And this was drilling through a blanket of younger post-mineral cover, testing geophysical targets in the basement rocks. And We were able to attract experts in this specific belt and specific deposit type. For example, we had Stuart Smith on our board. Stuart was the former specialist for Copper for Tech for many years.

33:59 Fraser McCorkindale was the global head of exploration for Newcrest for many years, till the acquisition of Newmont. So we're able to attract these sort of real senior people that have got real world experience in specifically in the Macquarie arc. And I think in part, and I think this is where you were going with your question, that was part of the reason we had this partnership with Anglo Gold. We basically built the team around this specific challenge that we'd identified and really Anglo Gold, who came in as a partner, really were able just to step in and provide capital and allow us to execute on our program with the experts we've got within our greater team. And we're obviously able to draw on the expertise of Anglo Gold as well. But I think really to get the major mining companies attracted in the first place, having that sort of core team of experts assembled to solve a specific problem, I think that was a key part of it for us, Joe.

35:03 Okay. So we've talked about the commodity, we talked about the jurisdiction, we talked about the people. Now, in terms of strategy, like from Rick's perspective, what I can glean is that it's Alaska focus, it's this direct shipping or model, and it also seems to be like you want to avoid public land. Is there other things that fit into your strategy about now that you're free cash flowing how you're allocating your capital to what you're allocating? Yeah I mean right now I'd say you know we're going to pay down debt and deliver into the hedges. And our business model is going to continue to pursue the direct shipping arm model, which focuses on high grades, things that are close to infrastructure and projects that can be permitted, that the mine can be permitted quickly. Again, you're not gonna build a mill in a tailings facility in a big power plant. So there's a lot of permitting that you just avoid, a lot of capital that you avoid.

36:02 I won't say that we won't do another joint venture, but our focus right now is on actually acquiring our own mill so that we can have a bit more control on our own, on the production and sort of combining a direct shipping or model with a hub and spoke model. So acquiring a strategically located mill, i.e. On the water, would be a really positive thing for us. And that's something we're working on right now. We've got a number of opportunities we're we're looking at. And I think you know when you've got grade you can afford to pay to transport it to an existing facility. And as an example our Moncho mine the feasibility grade is 8 grams. It costs us about a gram to transport the ore from the mine site at just south of Tocque to the mill site at Ken Ross's Fort Knox operations just outside of Fairbanks. It's 240 miles. It's a long truck ride, but it costs about a gram to do that.

37:04 Our Lucky Shop project is located very close to the rail, so we could go north or south with the rail. We could go up to Fairbanks, but we could also head down to Seward and put it on a barge. And then you, and barging is a lot cheaper, right? And rail's a lot cheaper than trucking. So Johnson track, we're 20 miles from the coast. So, you know, we're gonna basically put it in boxes and load it on a barge. And once you're on the ocean, you know, sort of the world's your oyster. So that's sort of the change in our business model that I can see us going. And we see opportunities not only in Alaska to apply this model elsewhere, but we see opportunities in British Columbia and Canada, Yukon as well.

37:52 But so I think that's sort of what I would call our backyard right now is Alaska, Yukon, BC. Right. So adding to the DSO public land, but also like near tidewater would be another aspect of your model? Is that right? Yeah, you gotta have, wanna avoid the long timeframes it takes to permit a new mill and particularly tailings facilities. And that's the critical element from a permitting standpoint. Air quality permits are not easy either, but I think there's a lot of discussion globally about tailings facilities. And so if you have a permitted tailings facility, that's worth a lot.

38:39 Right. I guess you've already answered, there was a question in here about if, when you get lucky shot into production, will Kinross continue to be a partner? You're opening up other opportunities by potentially having your own plant that you wouldn't need another partner. Is that right? Yes, that's exactly right. And like I said, I'm not going to rule it out, But we think there's a better option, we think, to be, like you say, to own our own facility and as a central hub to be able to process high-grade ores. Okay. Now, Caleb, you know, what Headwater was pushing, pushing, like selling, that's the sell to potential partners and what you're doing on a hundred percent basis is a specific deposit style That you're putting forward. Can you talk a little bit about you know? Not only is it a Nevada focus, your technical team and that, but also the model you're looking at.

39:37 Yeah, so virtually everything in our portfolio of projects fits, you know, 1 deposit type model by design. We're focused on targets that have potential for high-grade epithermal Gold. There's a few reasons that play into this, but from a first principles point of view, one of the main things to consider is, you know, we're exploring a place, we're exploring Nevada and a place like Nevada has seen, you know, 150 years of continued exploration. And you can't really expect to just be traipsing across the desert and stumble upon an outcropping high-grade gold system in 2025. So, for us, we sort of built the model and direction of the company with that in mind and identified one particular opportunity in our view that there was, you know, a lot of targets out there that we could acquire that fit this model where with low sulfidation epithermal systems, they often have or almost always have a bear and alteration cap in the in the very upper part of the system.

40:53 In a place like Nevada, these things have been identified just based on the footprint of altered rock at surface and oftentimes had been drilled. But in previous generations of drilling, due to economic reasons and other reasons, they were mostly only drilled down to, you know, 100 or 150 meters. With a modern understanding of this deposit type, we now know that a lot of these systems, we don't really expect to see the precious metal component come in in any appreciable way until, you know, 150 to 250 meters, leaving, you know, many opportunities out there in our view, technically untested. So that was sort of the guiding principle behind the building of our portfolio, identify projects that we could confirm that we were in a fully preserved system within the upper alteration part.

41:47 I don't really care that much if there's, you know, ore grade gold at surface as long as we know we're in the very top of the system and can also confirm that the, you know, the prospective high-grade target at depth has not been tested by historic drilling. And that's our job is to put together those targets and put together, you know, compelling reason why we think they could host a high-grade system at depth and then systematically work through the portfolio, testing these targets, as you said, both in a combination of self-funded drilling, giving our shareholders, you know, pure upside to new discoveries, but also bringing in partners to help us scale our exploration. That's what we've been doing.

42:32 So the high-grade vein part of these systems is definitely the main guiding principle, but the other opportunity that you have when you're exploring these things is, There's also many examples, including the most recent, you know, tier 1 gold discovery in Nevada, more of a lower grade disseminated system, but massive, which is Silicon Merlin, that fits this model, you know, almost perfectly, really. That's gonna be exploited as a very large open pit, but we would be 100% fine with that as well. Yeah, and for the audience, just to understand, like this is probably now got up to a 16 million ounce deposit that's now called Arthur, that Engelgold Ashanti have, but that deposit was a blind discovery and also it was in a district that had been mined before, that had been trodden.

43:27 So that makes Nevada still an interesting place, not only with past production, but endowment and also the potential of finding more buried deposits. Talking about buried deposits, let's move on to inflection because Alistair, you guys put together your model of trying to look for the same style of deposit, these alkali porphyry Copper Gold deposits that Gold companies are interested in because there's a Copper component, but there's also a Gold component with these style of deposits. But you're taking them undercover, So maybe you could talk a little bit about what your model was when you brought this forward several years ago. Yes. So it's very much opportunistic. We were looking at the Macquarie Arc as a place of interest and obviously it's got massive endowment in terms of Copper and Gold, but the rub is the northern 50% to 60% of it disappears under this blanket of sedimentary cover, masking the perspective of older geology. The challenge really was how do you explore through this cover?

44:35 When we started this bench, the entire northern segment of the arc was completely free of exploration licenses where the southern part was completely gridlocked with major mining companies and a lot of ASX junior explorers as well. But the entire Northern piece was completely open. So we acquired this massive land position which extends over about 250km from north to south and set about exploring through this cover sequence. And we're exploring for these these alkalic copper gold systems, these porphyries. And they've got a very interesting geometry. They're referred to locally in Australia as pencil porphyries, just because they're very skinny in terms of their geometry, but very vertically extensive and it can extend over a couple of kilometres from north to south. So the challenge was really, how did we go about exploring through this cover? We do this through what we call mud rotary drilling, which is cheap and cheerful drilling, mostly used for drilling water wells by the farmers. We can drill through this cover for about AUD$70 per metre.

45:49 The model was we developed a huge portfolio of targets, mostly based on the geophysics, on the magnetics and gravity. We would poke 2 to 3 holes through the cover and then do short core holes at the bottom of these mud rotary holes. So, we were testing each of these targets for relatively small amounts of capital, sort of sub-$100,000. And that was the appeal here, drilling through this cover, looking for these alteration halos around these vertically extensive systems. We've been systematically testing for these targets over the last few years in partnership with Anglo Gold. But really, the attractive part is these Copper Gold porphyry systems are, as I say, very vertically extensive. They generally have long lives and their mining costs are relatively or very low once they're actually built. These would be block cave type operations that be mined essentially from below and let gravity draw the mineralized rock down to a sort of centralized draw point.

47:00 Expensive to build, but very, very cost effective to operate once they're built. The other interesting aspect is there's no huge open pits typically with these types of systems as well. So, you know, You could drive past one of the big North Parks operations, just located to the south of us. And if you weren't paying attention, you wouldn't necessarily even know it was there. They're very attractive from that perspective as well. But that's really what we're looking for. We're looking for these Copper Gold rich porphyry systems. And the other pieces, if you find one, they often occur as clusters. The Decadia operation, that's 5 or 6 different deposits within a 5x5km area.

47:49 And same with North parks, there's a whole series of these finger or porphyry, pencil porphyry type deposits within a sort of a 5 to 6 square kilometer area. So very attractive. You just, The challenge is actually just finding them under this blanket of sedimentary colour. All right. Well, we're just about to wrap up with the last questions I've got. All you guys are dealing with major or intermediate companies. How long does it take and what is the interaction like with these guys to get a deal done? I want to start with Rick because you closed a major deal on an operating asset where they became the builder. How long did that take and how were you approached? And was Kinross the only game in town for Mancho? Yes, so we made a discovery, Contango, but it was a million ounce, roughly a little over a million ounces, 1.3 million ounces of Gold.

48:46 When Contango was looking at it as a whole project, we were looking at building something on site. And so we were losing a lower cutoff grade. So the cutoff grade was like, or sorry, the average grade was about 4 grams, 1.3, 1.4 million ounces. And what that showed was that it's a viable project, but it's not big enough for a major to wanna do on their own. So this project kind of got high center and that's when I stepped in and put the deal together with Ken Ross. And the reason it gets high center is the market's just not going to support building a 4 or 500 million dollar project for a junior company. It's just not going to support a junior company raising that level of capital.

49:35 And we've seen this demonstrated time and time again in the market. So, and this actually has become sort of our business model. But to go back to Kinross, We saw the opportunity that their mill was, they were only using about half the capacity of the 50,000 ton a day mill at Kenross, at Fort Knox. And so we went, you know, we proactively went to them and worked this agreement out. Now, this was 2020, first year of COVID, total pain in the butt to try to get things done, just because you couldn't meet and all that. It took about 9 months to actually get the deal put together and signed. But once we did it, we hit the ground running. And as I said earlier, we redid the feasibility to look at shipping the ore, direct shipping the ore, trucking the ore to Fort Knox. That took about a year. While we were doing that, we did permitting for the federal permit, which was the 404 permit, the only federal permit we needed.

50:41 That went very quickly, less than a year. And then there was overlap with the state mine operating permit and the water discharge permits are sort of typical permits So you need to operate any mine? But again state permitting is usually goes very smoothly. You've got a good plan and you've done your baseline work. So we then start to finish We had our first full for in 2023. So it was start to finish was less than 3 years. So you know, it can go, look, Kinross has been a great partner. The Fort Knox operations are great operation. It's been, they've been operating for close to 30 years, I think now. And if you look at Fort Knox's financials, look at Kinross's Fort Knox financials, Moncho has been a huge improvement for them, as well as obviously for us. And this was a way for us to get it done quickly. If I had told the market, hey, we're going to go build this thing ourselves, it's going to cost $450 million to build.

51:48 And I'm going to go get it permitted in 3 years. All of those would have been untrue. It would have probably cost $600 million to build it by the time you got your permits 5 or 6 or 7 years later. So That's why we've adapted and moved to this direct ship or a model because we can get things done quickly if we sort of pre-select the project that meet the criteria. And that's what we've done with Moncho, with Lucky Shot now fully permitted and Johnson Track, which we expect to be permitted here by this time next year going underground and doing all the work. It sounds very similar in terms of the geology to what Alisher's working on. These are porphyry, Johnson Tracts are porphyry related breccia.

52:36 We're dealing with the high grade top of the system. We can't wait to get underground and explore the rest of it. We're in steep mountains, so we don't have the luxury of nearly flat Australia where we are, there's big mountains, so they get in the way of getting your drills in the right place to drill deeper. But once we're underground, we'll have a lot of opportunity to continue to explore these things. All right, thanks Rick. On to Caleb, you've done joint ventures and you've worked with a few different companies. You started with Newcrest, then that transitioned to Newmont and you just brought in a newer new player with Oceana Gold. How long do these agreements take place? And like what Rick was saying, that he was proactive and he went to Kinross because he saw an opportunity.

53:22 How do you approach this and how does it work for you in terms of your hybrid model? Yeah, so I mean, in terms of the timeline, It depends on where you start that, you know? So if you start from the initial outreach or searching for the right sort of groups who might be interested in it, it can take a long time. And we always have multiple ongoing conversations And you might never really know which ones of those are gonna culminate in a deal. Yeah, it can take months or even years to build the relationship, identify the right group, make sure there's a sort of cultural fit between the groups. If we're gonna be working together in the longterm, I think that's an important piece.

54:09 And then ultimately, get buy-in from everybody involved and put together an agreement. I mean, the final piece of that, isn't that big of a deal, the agreement piece, you know, that can be negotiated and hammered out in a few months. But to me, it's more about the longer term alignment of, you know, strategies and culture to get the right partner to make sure it's gonna be a successful partnership in the long run before you even get started. So I don't know if I really answered your question, but. No, I think you brought into the fact that we talked about the deposit style that they would have to be interested in the jurisdiction, also a comfort level with the people in terms of trust. And like you said, culture, and that's like a part of the equation that probably people don't think about. And to have people on the technical side or with the junior company that have worked with big companies, that's probably a better way of having that relationship because you know what they expect.

55:10 And just moving to Alistair, in terms of your relationship with Anglo and searching for porphyries undercover, which is a new concept, How did that approach and how many people did you talk to before you whittled it down to Anglo Gold and got what looks to anybody that looks at this agreement to be quite favourable for you? Like Caleb, we work very hard at really understanding who the key people are, the major miners, and that being the decision makers and likewise the key technical people. And we're constantly speaking to all of these groups at the various shows and things like this. So we work very hard at that. But specifically the deal we had with Anglo came about in a funny sort of way.

55:58 We actually were presenting a very technical conference in Australia. We actually had one of our directors give a very technical presentation and there was somebody from Anglo Gold in the audience, a geologist, and took that back to head office and made the recommendation. So they actually were aware of what we're doing, but sort of reached out and initiated the conversation. And I think what Caleb said about culture, I think that's a very important thing as well. I think there are better groups within the major mining community to deal with and some that really understand what's required to make discoveries. There's a champion there that's just laser focused on that.

56:47 I think for us, we really wanted a group that was prepared to drill and really understood our model, our exploration model and strategy. Anglo Gold completely got it straight away. We said we needed 30,000m of early-stage first-pass drilling. And it was, okay, let's do it. So we pitched to a few groups and there were a few grumbling about the amount of drilling required and things like this, but really Anglo Gold got it straight away. And I think from that first technical presentation that was given to getting the deal signed, it was about 6 months before the drills were turning. So Relatively quick, I guess, but we're thrilled with Anglo Gold. They've just been tremendous partners to work with, both getting the deal done, but also providing sort of ongoing technical support.

57:43 We've got access to their geophysicists and geochemists and you name it, there's a whole pool of people we can draw upon. So it is very much a true partnership with Anglo. All right, well, I think we're gonna wrap it up there. And so just for the audience, so they're aware, as it obviously exploration is very high risk, but the way you can mitigate some of this risk is pick good jurisdictions, pick people that are very fluent in that jurisdiction, not only geologically, but also in dealing with people, whether it's a native corpse or permitting people in that, and also have a strategy and a plan, whether it's DSO in Alaska, low sulfidation epithermal systems in Nevada, or alkali porphyry coppers in the Macquarie Belt of New South Wales and people who know what they're doing, but also how they actually put the deal together.

58:41 You can have everything in place and do a weak deal. And So nothing really accrues to you as a shareholder of the junior company. And so those kind of people that do great deals are also very important. So we'll wrap it up there. And I say thank you to Rick, Caleb and Alistair. And hopefully you guys got something out of that. And again, this was recorded. And so this will pop up again in a couple hours or so. Okay, thanks again. Cheers.