The Significant Copper Opportunity at Paint Lake Road & Buck Lake

0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to Advanced Gold's live event. Today I'm joined with their CEO, Jim Atkinson, who discussed the significant copper opportunity at their Buck Lake and Paint Lake Road properties. But before we get into that, Jim, why don't you just give us the macro? I know Advanced Gold is in the name of your company, but you do have some copper assets. Why don't you talk macro copper and why you like the metal copper so much?

0:35 Sure, well thank you. I mean yes we are a gold company but you know as the headline in my last press release we do have copper and we have 2 major copper projects but yeah I'll talk a little bit about the macro and I'm not an expert in macro economics But I can pair it what a lot a lot of people are saying about it You know, I'd say the best if the best thing I saw recently was a headline in the Globe and Mail on April 27th, they said copper is the new gold. I'm sorry, copper is the new gold. Just think about that. Copper is absolutely necessity for any electrification anywhere in the world. You can't do electrification without copper. And so the world needs more copper.

1:22 That's what everybody's writing and that's what everybody's saying. And I think that really, you know, again, I'm not an expert in macroeconomics or even supply, but you know, one of the things I heard recently from one of the letter writers was that to supply the demand for copper over the next, let's say 20 years, we need 1 brand new mine every year. That's the kind of demand that there will be and that's the kind of supply that's going to be required. So the world needs copper and we're trying to find it at a fast enough pace. No matter where you look in the world where there's copper being produced, you're getting issues. The government of Panama took away a mine from a company, it was a huge mine, probably supplied 4% to 5% of the world's supply of copper.

2:13 Chile and Peru are having issues. Chile in 2023 had the lowest copper production ever in their history. So the world is demanding copper but not necessarily supplying it or finding it fast enough. And I think that's where, you know, our projects and projects in Canada and places like that are going to be important. And one of the things I think is important to realize in some ways is that what we need are low capex copper projects. In other words, we don't need a project like Rico Dik, which is in Pakistan. It's gonna cost Barrick probably $9 billion to put that into production.

3:02 What we need, I think, are some higher grade, smaller type copper projects with lower CAPEX and also with, let's call them slower, I'm sorry, faster permitting type regimes. You know, Now it's taking 10, 15 years to put a permit together, put a project together, all the permitting and stuff for a copper project. We need to be able to do it faster and get the copper onto the market faster. And that's kind of where I'm starting to talk about the kind of projects that we have in Ontario.

3:41 The projects that we have in Ontario, higher grade, people say they're smaller, but they forget about Kid Creek, which is one of the largest deposits in the world.

3:52 It was mainly zinc and copper, but had a lot of silver. You know, that's the kind of thing that we need to think about. The other thing that we need to think about is how do we cluster these smaller, let's call them smaller, smaller deposits. And, you know, we take a look at the model like Montogamy Lake, for instance, where there were a lot of, you know, these smaller high-grade deposits, but they kind of put them into a kind of a, let's call it a hub and spoke kind of situation. So they can supply a lot of copper from a bunch of smaller,

4:28 I hate to use the word smaller, but We're not talking porphyry copper type situations here. You know 8 10 million tons would be a significant Copper deposit of this this type. So that's where I see the copper the worldwide copper Demand sort of starting to come back home to North America to look for those kinds of projects. You know, higher grade, lower capex, lower operating costs, and you know, rapidity to get to the copper to the market.

5:02 I'd say that's a different perspective than the industry norm. A lot of people are saying we need to find copper and a lot of copper. So with these high grade, you brought up Kid Creek. Why'd you bring up Kid Creek? And because I haven't heard of this project before, maybe educate us on Kid Creek and why are you using that as an example? When I talk to people about copper projects and they say, yeah, well, the kind of copper projects you're looking for are small. Well, I point to Kidd Creek, which was one of the largest base metal deposits in the world. They mined that mine for over 50 years and you know it was not small. So that's why I point to Kid Creek. Now Kid Creek had copper, it also had a lot of zinc and silver. You know with these base metal deposits the other thing you get is you get often you'll get a subsidiary or an additional metal that's got value. At one time, Kid Creek was the largest silver producer in Canada, you know, that kind of thing. So that's the other reason why these kinds of deposits are attractive because you can get other other metals to help I'm still confused here Jim. It's this sounds contradictory You're saying small deposits, but Kid Creek is not small. So did it start small or what do you what do you mean? Yeah, of course it started small The reason I use Kid Creek is just to counter the argument that these types of deposits are generally small.

6:25 And that argument is somewhat true. They generally are smaller.

6:30 You're not talking about 100 billion pounds of copper like you would in a massive porphyry copper, but you may be talking about 500 million pounds or something. That's the reason why I talk about Kid Creek. And that's the reason why I talk about Metagami Lake as well. These are

6:49 clusters of deposits that turn out to be significant. Metagami Lake they mined for a long time as well. And I think that's the model that we're looking at for these kinds of deposits. Take a look at Flint Flawn, which is the kind of deposits that we're talking about. They've been mining in Flint Flawn for, I don't know, 60 years or more. And some of the deposits, the main Flint Flawn deposit was quite large. Northern Manitoba, northern Saskatchewan, that area, northern Quebec. These are the kinds of deposits I think we should be looking for and not saying anything negative about people looking for porphyries, that's fine, but as a junior explorer that's a challenge because the drill holes are, you know, a thousand meter drill hole is going to cost you half a million dollars. And, you know, that as a junior exploration company, that's not where I think we should be spending our money. I'm talking about our company. I'm not saying anything negative about other people that are doing that. The other thing about exploring for those kinds of deposits, at least what we're hearing, notwithstanding some of the higher grade ones they have in say in South America, but you know drilling a thousand meters of 0.3 equivalent copper is not it's not gonna make it. I'm sorry. It's just not gonna make it So I would rather drill, you know, what what the company called Abitibi Metals is doing, 50 meters of 2 and a half percent

8:20 copper. Okay, that's something that has a lot of potential, I think. And so that's why I mentioned things like metagamy and like Kid Creek, because Although most of these deposits are relatively small, as I said, maybe 8 to 10 million, 7 to 10 million tons, there are potential for big ones and there are potential for clusters of these kinds of deposits. And so, potentially to put together something on a district type scale. Great, thank you for that. That helps a lot. Why don't you tie those types of deposits into Buck Lake and the Paint Lake Road projects? What similarities are you seeing here?

8:59 What gets you excited about these projects?

9:02 Let's start with Buck Lake. Buck Lake is what would be known as a volcanogenic massive sulfide, VMS, and that's the kinds of deposits we're talking about, Kidd Creek, Mittagami, Flint flan, those kinds of things. Those are the kind of deposits. The thing that's interesting again, as I said before, a project like Buck Lake, which by the way is fairly large at 4,000 hectares, is Buck Lake. Buck Lake project has at least 8 known mineralized occurrence on it, on the property itself, plus another maybe 20 or so in the area. The interesting thing about that is, again, we have already drilled 15 drill holes at Buck Lake. We've encountered high-grade copper in the drilling and also in the trenching.

9:53 We've discovered zinc. And let me just talk a little bit about the significance of zinc in this situation. The zinc and the copper

10:04 tend to occur together in these deposits, but they occur together a little bit separated. In other words, copper tends to be concentrated in 1 area, zinc may be concentrated in another area. So the fact that Buck Lake has both copper and zinc, again, makes me really confident that what we're dealing with at Buck Lake is a typical volcanogenic mass of sulfide deposit, VMS deposit.

10:30 And the reason that's exciting about that is notwithstanding the fact that we got high grade zinc and high grade copper in our drilling and in our trenching. But the thing that gets me excited a little bit is the fact that that also shows that we have this kind of deposit, which has the potential to be in a cluster. That's just the way these things occur. And just to point out some of the potential of just the Buck Lake part of the property, We have a soil geochemical anomaly over the main zone, which shows up very high zinc and very high copper. And we have another very high copper geochemical soil anomaly just to the south that hasn't been drilled or trenched or even prospected.

11:18 So, you know, here you have 2 potential, let's call them deposits or occurrences, 2 potential occurrences within a few hundred meters of each other. And this again would be pretty typical of the way these kinds of deposits occur. Farther to the north on the Buck Lake property, we have a high grade zinc occurrence, which is called the Wolverine. Trenching there has encountered up to 17% zinc. And again, that sort of shows us, okay, there's the zinc part of it, where's the copper part of that system? And that's something that we would need to explore for. So Buck Lake, the project itself, the claims, the 4,000 hectares, I think has tremendous potential. Like I said, there are at least 7 or 8 other areas where we know that drill holes have encountered massive sulfides with copper, sometimes with a little bit of zinc. And these have not been followed up. This work was done mainly

12:17 in the late 70s and the mid 80s, and really has been no work done since then. And even something as simple as an airborne geophysical survey would be important, because we now have better detection of methodologies with geophysics and much better interpretation methodology. So we can do a better job of identifying prospective anomalies and, you know, and that whole area has very, very limited overburden. It's not like you're in the Abatibi where you got 100 meters of swamp.

12:54 So doing prospecting and doing soil sampling, that kind of stuff, is fairly easy. So that kind of lets me get into what I consider the district potential of the Buck Lake area. And there's an area there which is probably as much as

13:11 about 20 square miles, sorry, 20 square kilometers of ground which one would consider prospective ground for these types of deposits. And work has been done there in the past. Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting, back in the day in the 70s, flew the area, found quite a lot of anomalies and drilled some, got massive sulfides with copper and some got graphite, you know, very typical what you would expect if you had 20 square kilometers to work in the Abitibi. Again, the thing about this greenstone belt where we are, it has not been explored

13:49 at all, really, for base metals. And that's the one thing that I find really exciting about this area. It's not as- Why is that? Well, I'll give you 2 reasons for it. First of all, it's a little bit away from, let's say, some of the other areas. Now, farther to the southwest from where we are, it has been well explored because that's the location of what was a past producer called the Tribag Mine. That was a past producer of tech. That area has been well explored from there down to the southwest, but where we are in the northeast, it hasn't been explored. And one of the reasons I think is because in general, rocks in the Abitibi Greenstone Belt in the Canadian Shield trend east to west, generally.

14:39 Now in this area, the rocks trend north-south. So any geophysical work, sort of regional government work that was done, may or may not get good coupling with any of the anomalies. So that's the one reason. The other reason is, I just don't know. I don't know why it hasn't been explored. Certainly it's well known that there's mineralization there. You know, Naranda in 1986 drilled a hole, got, you know, 2 intersections of massive sulfide over 4 meters each, put the information into the assessment files, and it's been known in the assessment files since that time. The one thing is, of course, they didn't put any assays in. But from my mind, I don't care. If they drill a hole and they say they got chalcopyrite and sphalerite, that's good enough for me. I don't really necessarily need the assays to get interested in the area. So I think that's one of the reasons. It really, it's kind of, it's kind of being, I think, out of favor.

15:37 And maybe the other reason is because the mineralization that's known in the southwest, in the Tribeg area, is totally different from this. It's a totally different kind of mineralization.

15:51 So maybe that's the reason people just didn't think that there was another kind of mineralization in the same greenstone belt. So anyway, that's my spiel on the district potential there. I really think it has tremendous potential for, you know, if you want to be involved in a district play, as well as, of course, being involved in Buck Lake itself. You mentioned an area

16:20 south, right? No drill and no prospect. And what do you know about that zone at Buck Lake? Well, I don't know anything about it except that it has a soil geochemical anomaly that very similar to the one that overlies the area where we did drill and get mineralization. So again, that's potential.

16:41 The other thing that that tells me is that soil geochemical sampling works very well in that area. And that's because we have shallow overburden, nice topography. And so it's not like the, say, other greenstone belts where you have flat and swamp. So for me, that's a real good indication of how 1 could explore. If you flew an airborne survey, let's say in the district, and you ended up with a lot of anomalies, which you probably will, doing soil geochemical grids over some of those anomalies will help you understand whether there's mineralization there or not. And at the same time prospecting, just as an aside, prospecting there has been incredibly useful. We did a small prospecting program to the south of the mineralized zone, I'm sorry, to the north of the mineralized zone that we have at Buck Lake, which we call the Niranda zone by the way, because Niranda drilled it. Anyway, just north of the Niranda zone and we found a very wide zone of mineral, you know, mineralization that's never been discovered before, never even known.

17:50 And again, it was discovered based on a very weak EM anomaly, and the EM anomaly was weak because the zone trends more north-south and the line was flowing north-south, so the coupling wasn't good. So we think that a survey flowing in the correct direction, which would be from northeast to southwest lines, northeast to southwest, would give us a really a lot of targets

18:19 in the area. That one zone that I talked about that the prospectors found, it's wide, it's a wide zone of mineralization. It's never been, well we sampled it, but it's never been explored at all, never even been looked at by anybody. And I'm sure there's lots more of those around the district. What happens generally when you get into a volcanic district like this? There are lots of occurrences because

18:46 the system that forms the mineralization, it's an ongoing system. You know, think about, you know, I like to point out to people, I don't know if you know about the volcanic eruption going on in Southern Iceland right now, that the fissure that's opened up, that's spewing magma out, is over 3 and a half kilometers long. And so if you had a mineralizing system in a similar volcanic setting, you know, the potential for it to be kilometers long is pretty reasonable. And we now know from work in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and places like that, some of these systems can be very large. So that's, again, one of the reasons why I think this is a very interesting district play.

19:34 So I'm really hopeful that we can find a partner, you know, who's interested in taking a look at this district play, as well as of course, expanding work on our Buck Lake. The Buck

19:47 Lake deposit itself, what we call the Niranda Zone, is not drilled off. It's open to the north and south and it's also open down dip. So there's potential to expand what we have there, you know, in 3 directions. Before we transition to Paint Lake Road, the Neurandazone, did you say they drilled it but they never bothered getting the assays for that? Well, they never reported the assays. I'm sure they had them, but they were never reported. And, you know, back in those days, it was now it's required if you have assays, you have to report them, but back then it was not required. So, but we did have the logs, and the logs described chalcopyrite, copper mineralization, zinc mineralization.

20:34 So that's really what got us interested in the area. Plus the width, 2 four-meter wide zones. 4 meters is a very nice mining width if you've got good grade. Definitely. Let's transition to Paint Lake now. What gets you excited about that project? Paint Lake Road is an interesting project because it's kind of a an orphan project, shall we say. So most people may or may not recall, but back when we were Talisker Gold, we actually sold a large property in the Wawa area. We sold that to a company called Angus Gold, and Angus then went and staked a very large area there, up to 600 units. So they have a very large area.

21:23 And what happened was there was a few claims or a few units left over, sort of between the ground that Angus had and the ground that another company called Bold Ventures had to the northwest. There was a strip of ground there. At that time it was actually owned by a prospector. We made a deal with the prospector and got the ground. So we have this strip of ground which sits kind of between the ground that Angus has. Now, Angus has ground that surrounds the West Dome open pit. And so where the ground that Angus has and the ground that Bold has, there was a strip of ground. And it wasn't just, let's call it moose pasture. In fact, there were some interesting features on that ground that really hadn't been followed up. And one of the features is a very, very large shear zone, which goes through that area.

22:18 And shear zones of course have always been known to host gold and in the greenstone belt. So that was part of the motivation for getting that property. Paint Lake Road is a joint venture with a company called Frontline Gold. We've been cooperating very well together on that property. But the interesting thing that came out of that, notwithstanding the sort of gold potential and if you sort of follow that shear zone to the north, you run into a Property that has gold called Abbey Lake if you follow that shear zone to the south you run into another property Which has gold called David Lakes and we sort of have the ground in between So there's that potential what I would call close ology potential But the more interesting thing for me and why we're talking about copper here instead of gold is that Bold Ventures did some work on their property, which is to the northwest of us. And they put out a press release back in 2022, I believe, 2023 maybe, and what they came across was a structure which runs at, let's call it almost right angles to that major shear zone, and that structure appears to cross onto our property.

23:35 And the interesting thing about that structure is that farther to the Northwest along that feature, there has been some intersections of copper. And even more interesting, when I was looking at the information in the area. The Ontario government back in the day did some work which they call lake sediment sampling. So they went to small lakes, they collected material from the bottom of the lake, and they analyzed it. And the theory is that anything in the surrounding area in the streams, any kind of mineral or anything metal, will drain into the lake and end up in the bottom of the lake. Well, in that survey, in that whole area, there's 1 lake that has anomalous copper. That lake sits right on that shear zone.

24:23 That also has incredibly anomalous zinc. And like, you know, most of the lakes in the area have zinc numbers, let's call them 15 or 20 or 80, that the zinc number in that lake is over 900. The same with copper. Most of the lakes in the area have copper results of 4, 5, 2 ppm. That one has 100. So it's a highly anomalous lake for some reason happens to sit right on that structure and happens to be right on the boundary. It sits mostly on our property but right on the boundary between our property and Bold's property. So that gives us an idea that maybe there's some copper potential on that property as well, as well as, of course, the gold property.

25:08 So we will be focusing on that area. It's never been prospected, never, because, Again, because it was always kind of an orphan piece of ground and supposedly underlain by granite, people didn't even look at it for any kind of potential. Now the interesting thing about the fact that it's underlain by granite is that the gold mine, that deposit that Westdome has, which they call the Eagle Deposit, which is to the south of where we are, actually sits in a granite, granitic type of rock. It's a diorite, but it's the same kind of pernitic-type rock. So being in granite is not a bad thing if you have the right structures and the right mineralizing solutions going on. So that's sort of the short story of Pain Lake Road Joint Venture. We don't really know what's there. It's never been prospected, it's never really been looked at. I mean, we can look at the regional geophysics, see the structures, I mean the structures even show up on the topography, so we can see the structures fairly well, but we don't know exactly what that means for potential for mineralization, because it's never been never been prospected, never been examined forever, right.

26:26 And the other interesting thing about it, and again I'm doing a little arm waving here, but we can actually show by looking at the topography that perhaps that northwest trending sort of structure that has been discovered on Bold's property and probably extends on our property, you might even actually convince yourself that it extends all the way to the Michie Open Pit of Westo. Now that's a little bit arm-wavy, but I'm allowed to do that because I'm a geologist. Now Jim, where that gold shear zone is and where the copper structure intersects, is there a lake right there? Yeah, it's a small lake right there. Not just a small lake right in that area, yeah. So is there a lot of fish in there?

27:16 I get hesitant when I hear lake, and would you be drilling or explore? Like what is the exact exploration strategy there? Well, the exploration strategy there would be to go, then we have a proposal in place and a budget in place to actually go there, do some prospecting. It's not very accessible, in fact it has to be accessed by helicopter, so you know, it would be set up a camp, send some prospectors there for a couple weeks, and just get them to prospect around and see what they can find in the area, right, and try to determine what exactly these 2 structures are. Like, it's one thing to have them on topography or on geophysics, but you know, you sort of need to get the boots on the ground and get people to look at exactly what's going on there and collect samples and do analysis.

28:08 The sampling can include, of course, proper gold analysis, but it can also include other elements that indicate that you have a major zone of mineralization there. And that's something that we've learned lately about how to deal with these things. And one thing, I'll just digress for a second Back to my model about why I think VMS are what we should be looking for You know for the last 30 years or so in in Canada in Ontario Quebec We've really focused our attention on gold. However, the academics have actually been working, you know somewhat on identifying and understanding these VMS type deposits. And what we've found is that there are actual, let's call them district or regional alteration patterns in the rocks, you know, patterns of different kinds of elements in the rocks that can point us in the right direction.

29:07 So getting back to Paint Lake Road joint venture, the one thing that the prospectors would do would be collect a lot of rocks, even if they were not mineralized. Of course, we like the ones that are mineralized with copper, but even if they're not mineralized, to actually take to the laboratory and analyze them for other elements that will point us potentially in the direction of where the mineralization is. And that's again, something we can apply as sort of our modern technology that we've learned over the years that hasn't been well applied to the field, right? And again, I'll do another small aside, and I'll do a shout out to the Ontario Geological Survey because their district geologist in Sault Ste. Marie took the data that exists in the government database.

30:00 So the government geologists over the years of collected rocks, they have had them analyzed, they have a database, it's a massive database. He took a look at that and he said, okay, let's apply some of these alteration, let's call them alteration indexes, you know, mineral changes, chemical changes. Let's apply it to this database. And he did it for the whole of the Batchewana Greenstone Belt. And he came up with some areas that look like they have potential based on the alteration of the rocks. And the one thing, I mean, it's great work, and I really shout out to the work that was done. It's a great idea. And the one thing that that tells us is that these alteration indexes actually can work in our area because we know some of the high alteration indexes he got in his study sat on our Buck Lake property. So we know that they kind of work. So, again, that's the kind of thing that the governments are doing a little bit. And That's the kind of thing that the governments are doing a little bit. And that's the kind of thing that we can do in more detail when we get to a place like Paint Lake Road.

31:12 And it's never been sampled. We have no database there, but we can start to develop 1 and get some samples. Excellent. Thank you for the thorough overview. Is there anything from the latest press release that you wanted to cover? I don't see any questions in the audience. No, I don't think so. I think, you know, I don't want to sort of repeat what people who are a lot smarter than I am are talking about the copper market, the copper demand, all that stuff. You know, just suffice it to say that we know that there's no electrification without copper and the copper supply over the next, let's call it 20 years, is going to be demanding additional deposits. And we need to find them and we need to get them in production quickly. And that's why I think the VMS type of target is what we should be looking for because it does have potential to get to the market a lot quicker than something like a huge porphyry.

32:15 The huge porphyries have lots of resource, no problem there, but to get them to market is going to take a very long time. Fair enough. Jim, it's always a pleasure chatting with you. For the attendees, Thank you for joining us today. If you came in a little late, this is being recorded and it will be available on YouTube probably within the day. So keep an eye out for that. But thank you