Updated PEA Highlights Robust Economics at the Enchi Gold Project

0:07 Thank you for joining us today. Most of you likely already know who I am, but for those of you who don't, my name is Mal Kadwoska and I'm the Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations for Nucor Gold. I'm joined today by Nucor Gold's President and CEO, Luke Alexander, as well as Nucor's VP of Exploration, Greg Smith, and VP of projects, Brandon Fraser. So before we get started, I do want to highlight that we will be making some forward-looking statements today. So I encourage you all to visit our website where you can find the full cautionary language. We are recording this webinar and it will be available for replay. With that, I'm really looking forward to taking this opportunity with the team to provide you with a detailed overview of the PEA results that we announced yesterday for our Enshi Gold project in Ghana.

0:56 The PEA highlights the potential for an open-pit heap-leach gold mine at Enshi, and the study delivered very robust economics that showcase Enshi's significant leverage to the Gold price. So we're going to do a deep dive into the details of that PA and also why we think Enshi is one of the best undeveloped Gold projects out there. It's underpinned by a robust economic study, but it also has significant upside potential from its location and district scale exploration opportunity. So we're going to kick things off with a presentation, after which we do look forward to answering questions. So please do submit those questions in the chat button. You'll find that at the bottom right of your screen. So please do submit those throughout the presentation. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Luke and the team to kick things off. Thanks. Yeah, thanks a lot, Mal, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

1:44 As Mal mentioned, we put out a PEA yesterday, which we're extremely excited about. We had a nice market reaction with the stock up about 15-16% yesterday on very strong volume. Our view from an underpinning of value perspective is that this is ultimately just the start. When we look at our share price today, our

2:06 market cap in Canadian dollar terms is about 45 million dollars. If we looked at that from a US dollar perspective, we're trading around 30 million dollars US today. So keep that 30 million dollars in mind as we walk you through the project and outline what the project economics ultimately deliver for Nucor and for our shareholders. Our view is that there's a significant gap between where the stock is trading today and ultimately the project value. And we'll highlight a number of those things as we walk through the presentation. So Maybe just to kick things off, we've got a management team and board who are truly aligned with shareholders.

2:51 So we own

3:04 22% of new core. And this is shareholders over the tail, EA that we just released ultimately provides for shareholders. And then We're in Ghana, which is a tier 1 jurisdiction to be operating in and we've got huge district scale exploration potential on our project as well. So fundamental underpinning of value through the project economics and a mind that we can build and deliver, but then tremendous amount of exploration upside, which Greg will get to in some detail. I'd encourage everyone to go through our press release. We put a lot of detail in that, as well as this presentation is now up on our website. So the PEA that we put out in terms of the economics, the base case was all done at an 1850 Gold price, which over the last 24 hours, a number of people have raised that, you know, in this environment, is that the right Gold price? For us, you know, our view is that with the economics of this project, we don't need to be aggressive on a Gold price perspective. And we'll get into, obviously, some sensitivities to gold price as well. But at an 1850 base case, we've got an after tax NPV of $371 million, after tax IRR of 58%.

4:28 And one of the things that really helped drive the economics of this project is the fact that it's a heap leach project. So much lower capital required to build a heap leach project. So we've got a $106 million upfront capital, which includes a 20% contingency. Less than a 2 year payback, 1.6 years, again, at an 1850 gold price and a very nice production profile. We've increased the production profile by about 36% from roughly 90,000 ounces to 122 or 120,000 ounces per year and a very good all in sustaining costs, which again is one of the real advantages we have as a heap leach project. So all of these economics, we're obviously extremely excited about. And I think we've started to just see those getting reflected in the market over the last couple of days. But as we get out and highlight these economics more broadly, our expectation is that we're just at the tip of the iceberg here and that there's an opportunity to really continue to re-rate from here. And then again, Greg is going to get into the fact that we've identified over 25 targets on our project and we really just scratched the surface so far.

5:56 When we go through these numbers in more detail, I think it's also important that you keep in mind that the consultant who we worked with on this project is Leica Podium. I'm sure for most of you that's a household name but for those of you who aren't familiar with Leica Podium I think it's really important to highlight their track record. If you look at the last dozen odd projects that they've been involved in over the last number of years that have been put into production by companies like B2, Newmont, endeavor, you'll see that they've got an incredible track record of bringing projects in on time, on budget, under schedule, under budget. This is something that's very rare to see in most parts of the world, but Leica Podium in West Africa and across the continent has consistently been able to bring these projects in on time and at least on budget.

6:55 So when you're looking at these numbers, keep in mind that it's Leica Podium who is our lead engineer, who's ultimately put all of this work together for us. They are also important to highlight working with Newmont on their AHAFO project. So Newmont's investing another billion dollars into Ghana to expand Ahafo and Leica Podium is one of the lead engineers who's helping with that. So obviously all of the quotes that we're able to leverage in country is what ultimately feeds this updated PEA that we put out. I talked to you about some of the headline numbers and a few other things that really helped drive the economics of this project. And I've highlighted this in the past is, the fact that we've got a low strip ratio.

7:47 Anyone who's on this call, I would encourage you, if a company is not highlighting in their presentation what their strip ratio is, you better ask, because you're probably going to find out it's 5 or 10 to 1. So one of the things that really helps drive the economics here on top of being a heap bleach project is the fact that we've got low strip ratio. We're looking at

8:14 a processing capacity of about 8.1 million tons per year, 69 million tons over the life of the project. Brandon will get into a number of the details here. And then operating costs, I touched on it, but from an operating cost perspective, we're looking at $801 per ounce. From a cash cost perspective, we're looking at about $930. And then from an all-in sustaining cost perspective, a little over $1,000 per ounce. Again, these are very attractive operating costs because it is a heap leach project for the most part that has a very low strip ratio That's in a very mining friendly jurisdiction.

9:04 I touched on the average production of roughly 122,000 ounces per year. And then we got a nice peak production of over 150,000 ounces in year 6. Here's the production profile over the life of the mine. All of our deposits remain open a long strike. So we see the opportunity to expand the near surface oxide transition allowances over time, as well as continue to grow the resource at depth, which Greg will get into in some detail. So our view is that, you know, 9 years is really just the start and that as we grow the resource will obviously be able to add more years of mine life.

9:53 A couple other things here, because we've got such, or we've got free dig material in the first year, first 4 years of mining within the oxide and some transitional material. One of the optimization things that we were able to do is push the expense of the crusher that will process more of the transitional and sulfide material in the later years into years 4 and 5. So that really helped in terms of the economics of the project. And then on this slide here, we can see the breakdown of the strip ratio as well as the grades which then as you can see here in year 6 helps drive that hundred and 50,000 ounce plus per year production profile.

10:45 From a cash flow perspective here what we're looking at is both an 1850 gold price, which is highlighted by the black bars in this chart. And then we've got the 2350 gold price, which is highlighted by the gold bars. So as you can see a very nice cashflow profile for this project, which then leads to that quick payback period, as well as obviously the NPV of the project. We did, as we highlighted, run our base case at an 18.50 gold price. If we then wanted to, let's say, look at this at a 23.50 gold price or pick any price you want in between, we've provided all of that information for you but at a 23.50 gold price which is where we're trading today as you can see you know we've got very good leverage for the gold price you're now looking at an after-tax 602 sorry 630 million dollar NPV

11:50 after-tax IRR of 92% and just over a one-year payback. I would encourage anyone on this call to go out and find another project or challenge you to go out and find another project or challenge you to go out and find another project that has such robust economics. And one of the things you like to highlight is, you know, this isn't a 50 or 60,000 ounce a year producer. As we've highlighted, this is over 120,000 ounces of production. So this is a meaningful operation and again, I would challenge you to go out and find similar economics for another project. One of the things we like to talk about often is the NPV to CapEx ratio. So if we look at this project at an 1850 gold price, you're looking at an after tax NPV of $370 million.

12:48 You compare that to our upfront capital and you're looking at an NPV to CapEx ratio of roughly 3 and a half times. When you now take that to a 2350 gold price, that NPV to CapEx ratio goes to about 6 times. So for every dollar of capital you're investing, you're getting 3 and a half to 6 times the NPV. Again, I would challenge anyone who's on this call and if you do find another project that has this type of economics that's at the development stage, please reach out and let us know because we'd be keen to be able to find some other projects. With all of that in mind, again, a huge amount of detail in our press release, so I'd encourage you to go and have a look at that.

13:40 And I will hand it over to Greg to touch on some of the net work that we've done since 2021, which has significantly de-risked the metallurgical and recoveries on this project.

13:54 Thanks Luke. Yes, this updated PEA has a number of advancements, A recent updated mineral resource, a number of other updates that we've done to get current costings but one of the most significant is as well a significant amount of metallurgical work We're now up to over 390 tests that are used to do all of the estimation of the recovery factors that we used in the study. Of these 390,350 of them have been done over the last couple of years. So as I pointed out, we've got excellent recoveries within these bottle rolls, column tests, and ultimately the the pilot heap tests that we did. And we'll look at that on the next slide. We've used a conservative 81.8% recovery overall, in the economics of the of the study.

14:51 We've got good recovery curves, so we're getting the majority of that recovery in the first 40 days. As you would expect, it slows down, but continued recovery beyond 90 days. The work that we've done has been on representative samples. So we've got samples from all of the 5 deposits, and then from the 3 material types, the oxides, the transition, and the hard rock. And We do have continued testing underway. We've got additional columns. As well, we're doing quite a bit more testing on the hard rock material. All of those tests we used to plan a couple of bulk scale pilot heap tests. Here's the pictures of them here. We did this through the University of Mines and Technology in Tarquah, which is just located about 2 and a half hours from our project. So we've got 2 15 ton samples, 1 from Boyne, 1 from Sium. These 2 deposits represent 76% of our overall resource. So that's where the bulk of the material life of mine is currently coming from. Again, excellent curves here where you've got rapid recovery of the gold for the first 30, 40 days and then continued recovery out beyond, in this case, 60, but as well it continues out beyond 90 days. So real good average recoveries. Again, average recoveries here much higher than what we're using in the study, but certainly supports the numbers that we have. 93.5% for Siem, 90.3%

16:23 for Boeing, giving us an average of 92%. So as well, good consumption levels. So as important it is to recover the gold, you also wanna keep costs down. So again, we've got good low consumptions of cement, cyanide and lime, which are the primary consumables that you need to run a heap leach operation.

16:46 All of that information has been used to go into our flow sheet. It is a relatively simple straightforward operation, open pit mining, heap leach processing being the 2 main components. As I mentioned, we've got the oxides and upper transitions that are soft. So we just have a mineral sizer for our first 4 or 5 years. Then we do have some additional capital that we invest kind of in the middle of the project to then be able to process the hard rock material. And then on the back end, a very standard ADR recovery plant to ultimately produce the Dore on site. Yeah, thanks for that, Greg. So obviously as Greg highlighted, huge amount of de-risking work has happened from a metallurgical test work perspective. And, you know, our view is that we're now pushing a PFSFS type level from a network perspective.

17:47 So I think we can take a huge amount of confidence in that. Infrastructure is one of the other big benefits we've got. So we're able to leverage all of the infrastructure that sits at our NG project to, again, really help with the capital costs. So what we're looking at here is a map of our 248 square kilometer land package. We've got a paved road that goes through the middle of it with a power line running beside that to the town of Enchi. Enchi's got about 15, 1,500 people. So it's got high schools, it's got hospital, it's got a university campus. It's basically got all the support services we could want for our project. We can house all of our employees here in the town of Enchi, but importantly, it sits about 15 kilometers away from where our mine will ultimately be. So it's far enough away that, you know, no issues in terms of building, noise, those types of things,

18:52 but obviously close enough that we don't have to be spending tens of millions of dollars on building camps and additional facilities for, for our employees. This is a good example of the infrastructure. You can drive a hundred kilometers an hour along this road here. You've got a power line that runs along beside it. There's a half dozen gas stations throughout the project, cell phone towers. You then drive about 15 minutes down this road and you'll be standing on top of our Boeing deposit. When we look at the site layout of our project where we were just looking at that 3 360 image is roughly here in this direction so there's the road I was mentioning that you drive 15 minutes down so we've got dirt and gravel logging roads throughout our project that we can obviously access, which again, really helps from a capital cost perspective.

19:52 And within 15 minutes, you're standing beside our Boeing deposit, where the heap leach pad is situated is tucked into a valley right in between Boeing and Sium, which again, as Greg highlighted, is about 76% of the material on our project. So, you know, very easy to truck the material from both Boeing and Sium to a central processing facility. And then from Niam and Kwachi Krum, which are later in the mine life, you're looking at about 7 to 10 kilometers. To give you a sense of the topography, we're now right on top of our Boeing deposit, so the mineralization sits underneath this hillside here, but again, it's rolling topography, so very easy to access. And then again, throughout our project, you've got, as you can see here, these dirt and gravel logging roads so very amenable from a from a mine building perspective.

20:59 With that I'll hand it over to Brandon Fraser, our VP of projects, to run through some of the specifics on the facilities and the mine plan. Thanks, Thayer-Luke. Again, I appreciate the introduction. My name is Brandon Fraser. I'm the new VP of projects with NuCore Gold. I originally joined the team back in September, 2023. I come from a mining and process engineering background with about 15 years of experience in mine construction operations and study management. I specifically have extensive experience in designing, building and operating heat bleachers globally. I recently built Victoria Gold's heat bleach in the Yukon in 2018, and I have extensive heat bleach experience in South and Central America. I also helped with the initial 2021 PEA study design. When I joined, very impressed with the entry project in the NuCore team.

21:45 So I entered a 2 million share position and continue the tradition with Nucor of aligning with shareholders. So in front of us here right now, we have the PEA processing facility layout where we've zoomed in specifically on the heap leach central to the drawing. We have our process ponds to the south with our process plant ADR plant right there. And you can see our crushing located at the top of the drawing. Now, as Luke mentioned, we're located centrally between the Boeing deposit. So haul traffic comes from the north as well as the CM deposit, which comes to the south. That accounts for 75% of our haul traffic within 2 kilometers of the heat bleach facility. That helps with a heavy reduction in haulage costs

22:21 in this location right here. With the heat bleach design, there's 70 million tons of capacity will require throughout the life of mine. The design's designed currently for 75 million tons, there's excess capacity involved. There's also expansion potential both to the West and the East when it comes to heat bleach expansion. The location of the heat bleach also benefits from being in this isolated valley structure. So when it comes to water management and visual impact studies, We benefit from being insulated when it comes to water inflows as well as from ESG approach. We have the ability to have our structures hidden from a lot of public view. We're within the valley so our heap leach structure won't be visible, it won't be at the top of a hill, etc. Diving into the mining schedule, we are looking at delivering 8.1 million tons of material to the heap leach annually. All mineralization and all 5 deposits come to surface, So leading this leads to no required pre-production waste stripping. Mining of all the pits is quite straightforward. We're looking at using a selective contract mining fleet for efficient development of these shallow surface pits. Again, like Luke mentioned, very low strip ratio. You can see right here for each of the pits, specifically in our 2 largest pits, Boeing and Sioum.

23:34 You can see right here as well, the mining schedule,

23:37 it targets Boeing and Sioum in the first 4 years, specifically targeting the high-grade oxides of Boeing and Sioum. You do see In year 5, the two-stage crushing come online. At that point, we re-entered Boeing and Sioum to target the fresh material that was left. That'll be went into in the next slide here.

23:58 So for the PEA capital cost details here, We do have a staged approach for both the heap leach facility and for the crusher capital costs. The initial capex of $106 million that allows us all the infrastructure to process oxide material into Dory with an expected timeline for construction of 15 months. That includes a 20% contingency and all of these quotes are built up from vendor quotes that Leica Podium provided. When looking at our sustaining capital of $92 million, The majority of that is in our heap leach phases incurred in years 3 and 6, as well as our crusher installation to handle fresh rock in years 4 and 5. When jumping into operating costs here, our mining and processing costs are separated by material type. Our mining costs do assume a contract mining fleet with our processing costs calculated using a mass balance approach with recent quotes on all reagents and consumption rates taken from that metallurgical test program Greg mentioned previously. All of our programs have been verified with consultant data in the region. The oxide material requires no additional crushing but again like mentioned that fresh material will undergo a full two-stage crushing process.

25:15 We will be agglomerating all material on the project. The agglomeration blends from the material we're taking from our recent test work programs. We do include GNA costs on the project specifically for land disturbance compensation and for achieving our ESG initiatives. And with that, I'll hand it back over to Luke. Thank you. Luke, you're just muted. So if you don't mind unmuting yourself. Thank you. There we go. You don't want to hear me talking anyways. Yeah, so listen, we've obviously done a huge amount of de-risking work since 2021, and that's really reflected

26:00 in this PEA, as well as obviously a lot of optimization and value accretive work has gone into this. So as we've kind of touched on and just to recap, we've increased the production profile significantly, about 36% increase in the overall production profile. We've also increased the overall, and that was ultimately driven by us increasing the overall size of the resource when we put out our resource update in 2023, which added an additional 34,000 meters.

26:38 Importantly, we also converted about 47% of the contained ounces into the indicated category. So that obviously de-risks it from a resource perspective and something that we're gonna look at is obviously converting additional ounces into the indicated category, which is what's required to take it from a PEA to a PFS. A lot of the other work from a MET perspective, we're doing, we've completed a social environmental baseline study, which is highlighted down here. We're doing condenation drilling across where the heap leach pad will go. We're doing hydrological and geotech work. This is all work that we've been working on for the last number of years that ultimately isn't required for a PEA. But as we move towards a PFS, it is work that will start to feed that. And you will see a lot of that in this 2024 PEA as well.

27:43 From a Met perspective, Greg went through it in some detail, but we have significantly de-risked the metallurgy on the project. 82% recoveries, that's backed by over 20 column tests, 2 bulk samples, and hundreds of bottle roll tests. So again, we feel we're now pushing a PFS, FS type level from a metallurgical perspective.

28:12 We completed a detailed engineering plan on the heap leach facility, which Brandon took you through. So we've got a lot more confidence in what we'll ultimately look to be building on the project, which is another big check mark for this 2024 PEA. And then obviously, you know, we've seen a lot of cost inflation

28:37 in all sectors globally since 2021. So we've taken a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach, gotten vendor, as Brandon mentioned, vendor quotes. We've worked very closely with Leica Podium, obviously leveraged all of the work that they've done in West Africa to come up with very credible capital and operating cost numbers that are extremely defendable

29:06 and are using 2024 quotes. So, that's the de-risking work that we've done over the last few years. And obviously it's produced a PEA that has a great NPV, $370 million at 1850 gold. That jumps to 630 at today's gold price, a very good payback period of 1.6 years and a 58% IRR. So again, I challenge anyone on this call to go find us a project with economics like this.

29:39 With that, I think I'll hand it over to Greg to talk about the district scale exploration that we've got on our project. Yeah, thanks Luke. So yeah, some very impressive numbers there and I guess for the next few slides I'm going to share how we think that can even get bigger and better in the longer term as we unlock what we believe is a significant amount of upside exploration potential that remains on our Enchi project. So I think by now everybody's familiar that we're in Ghana, we're in Southwest Ghana. It's an area that's got a long, long history of gold mining and production. It includes deposits like Obawasi, which is one of the largest gold deposits on the planet.

30:30 The Ashanti Gold Belt, which is again, very historic. We're on the parallel Sefwi-Bibiani Belt, includes ourselves here in the South, our neighbors at Bibiani in Toronto. And then as been mentioned, the very large Ahafo deposit where Newmont is currently investing a billion dollars. So certainly proven to be a very prospective place to be. So zooming in a little bit again on the Southern Inderville, ourselves here has been mentioned. We've got 40

31:02 kilometers of these splays coming off the main Bibiani shear, and it's the second and third order splays that actually host the gold mineralization. We've got multiple structures, so you're multiplying that 40 kilometers across each of those different structures. We'll get into some more details of the resource in the upcoming slide. Again, almost 250 square kilometers that we've now got on the project, having recently expanded it with the Omanpe license. And we'll look to show again, some real upside potential.

31:40 We've got the existing indicated and inferred resources, but they are very shallow. And especially compared to some of our neighbors who are mining down to depths of 4 or 5 times that amount, we've really just scratched the surface. So as part of the PEA, we did include an updated mineral resource estimate, which was completed last year in 2023. So very recent. This was done in terms of the open pits at a price of 1650, as Luke mentioned. For the first time, we've got the indicated resources, de-risking the project. We've also got a small but first pass higher grade deeper resource below the pits. We added a fifth deposit.

32:27 Each of the last number of resource estimates we've been adding new deposits, so it's good to see those coming on stream. And again, we've got a significant amount of drilling that's been done outside of these deposits that

32:41 has had good results, but need some additional work before it's actually going to be additional deposits added to the resource. So, in terms of the work that we've done, and we could get into an exploration presentation that takes up all of the time we have today, but we don't have that. But yeah, We've done work across the project, geochemical, geophysical work. We've advanced that to, again, a few of these projects that we've actually

33:08 drill tested in a first pass, where we've got some really good results, that Cogina Hill and Arati here in the north. Again, it runs the gamut of the 40 kilometers that we have on the project. We also have areas where we've just done first pass trenching on existing soil anomalies. This is work we've done over the last 12 to 18 months. And then we've got a number of high-priority anomalies where we're still in the process of evaluating them. So all of that adds up to the blue sky potential that exists for both additional oxide and near-surface transitional material, and then as we'll talk, some of the deeper material. So we've talked about our 2 main deposits, Boyne and Siyoum here again, 76%.

33:56 The facility that we're proposing sits in between them. So you get all of the synergies of that material there in close space. When you look at Sioum, Sioum is our largest deposit and it's, well, it's our most complex, but obviously in terms of geology, complexity can be a good thing.

34:15 There's 3 main areas. There's the ridge zone here, checkerboard hill, the extension. But beyond that, and these are open for expansion in both directions, we've got our newest deposit of Tokasea here in the north. Looks like it's an extension to maybe a parallel structure. We've tested this parallel structure here for the first time and actually included a small amount of material in that most

34:40 recent resource update. And then we've got our Sioum South area here. So again, the Sioum area is our biggest deposit now. And we think, again, it has probably the most potential to continue to find additional resources and test additional targets. So zooming in a little bit there, I mentioned the extension. So again, it's one of the things that we benefit from having several sort of sub parallel structures in all of these zones. Here's the results that we had most recently here on the parallel structure at the seam extension. So real good, these are our grades right next to surface. So I think again, essentially starting at 2 meters below surface, almost 6 grams over 6 meters, and then some real nice wide zones here where you've got over a gram over 10 meters and 0.7 over 20. So these are the sort of numbers that will help build the resource in the future. Again, zooming in on a cross section for that area, We've got our main structure here where we've got the open pit which is the bulk of our current resource.

35:51 You see here the oxide zone and we've talked a lot about the benefits of that and ultimately again we'll be able to follow these things to depth and build on what is an initial underground resource that was included in the last resource update. Yeah, thanks, Greg. So, I mean, I think obviously we've outlined a nine-year mine life here. Our view is we'll easily be able to expand beyond that. But given the economics of the project today and how robust they are, Let's focus in on building this project and alongside building it we can then continue to add mine life. The other thing that we've talked about over the last few years is the huge upside potential that we have at depth.

36:49 And what we're looking at here is a long section of our Enshi project and we're comparing it to the Trannel mine. This would look very similar at Bibiani and at Newmont's Ahafo mine, these greenstone hosted deposits where you often start to see them increase

37:05 and grow in size is as you start to get deeper and drilling into those sulfides. So the average vertical depth of the pits that constrain our resource today is only down to about 75 to 80 meters in depth. We have started to put a few deeper holes into this project and we've had some very good success. To put that 80 meter depth in perspective,

37:37 Asante today, formerly owned by Kinross, is mining down at 800m below surface, 1.5g-2g per tonne material. So we've really just scratched the surface from a deeper perspective and Greg and the team have started to identify some of the high-grade shoots that we see at these other deposits along trend. I'll just take you into the 3D model now. We have outlined about 135,000oz

38:11 of underground material. That's not a mine today, but it's a proof of concept for us. About half of that comes from our NIAM deposits. So again, what we're looking at is here are the pits that constrain that heap leachable open pit material that has been feeding that PEA that we presented. But as we started to drill deeper you know we've hit 5.8 over 7, 5.6 over 8. This hole doesn't exist on our resource because it came out after we put the resource out but 6.6 over 4 meters so when you look here you can see that high grade shoot that we think will ultimately end up continuing to plunge at depth. Sitting 500 metres to the south, we hit 3.2 over 9, 7.4 over 8, 3.5 over 9.

39:00 So Greg and his team, again, think that we've hit one of these high-grade feeder zones that extend at depth. When we now pull back a little bit and look at this from a bit further, you know, we're looking at a 2km or 2.5km strike here, and we can see these high grade feeder zones that plunge at depth. But what you also probably notice is that there's no drilling to the south, there's limited drilling in between, and limited drilling to the north, and no deeper drilling to the North. So that's the opportunity for us is to continue to expand some of these high-grade feeder zones that we've identified, as well as obviously we can keep chasing these things to depth as well. So that's some of the district scale exploration that we're obviously excited about.

39:52 And I'll just jump in quickly there Luke and just make the point that when you're talking about deeper there, we're still only about 200 meters below the surface. So these are not 2 kilometer long drill holes as we've talked about. The ultimate depth of the pits is averaging only 75 meters. The deepest part is 120 meters. So all that material you're talking about is still relatively close to surface. Yeah, no, that's a great point, Greg. And thanks a lot for jumping in and highlighting that. So those pits there that constrain all that material, as I highlighted, 75 meters. And as Greg just pointed out, we're down to 200 to 250 meters. Toronto, again, down to 800 meters at depth.

40:37 So these things typically just keep going and that's an opportunity for us to continue to expand. Maybe I'll just quickly jump into corporate overview and then we'll get to the questions because it's great to see that we've got a long list of questions to get to. So I think my background quickly, 20 years on the investment banking side of the business, advising ASX, TSX, London listed companies. Greg Smith, he's worked around the world on these Greenstone hosted deposits, discovered millions of ounces. Mal Carvazka started off on the investment banking side of the team. She then worked in private equity and has worked on the corporate side, including other projects in Africa for a number of years. She's a crucial part of our team.

41:25 Brandon Fraser, the most recent addition to the team, he gave you his background, but obviously bringing in some of that that construction experience directly on the heap leaches light side of things has been has been great. And then Dan Wilson, he's a critical member of our team. Dan Wilson's our country manager, he's been working on this project with us for the last 10 plus years. So we obviously have very good relationships in country. And then we've got a Tier 1 board. So, you know, these are a number of the companies that our board has been involved in. So we've got a track record of ultimately creating value for shareholders in the mining space. From a capital structure perspective, very good tight capital structure, about 173M shares outstanding.

42:18 We do have about 17 million warrants which are now well in the money. So about $3.3 million will come in with those warrants, assuming they're exercised by the end of June. And we've got a great institutional shareholder base. So currently 45% institutionally owned. You know, these are deep pocketed, long-term focused, primarily mining and precious metal investors who obviously recognize the huge exploration upside of our project, but recognize that we've got a very buildable project today with incredibly good economics, which hopefully everyone has recognized as we work through this presentation.

43:04 And then at the end of the year, we've got about 3.7 million of cash. And if you look at our previous cash balance, it was 4.9. So about a million dollars a quarter. So obviously we've got lots of runway to move, you know, to continue to run the business. With that, maybe I'll hand it back over unless I missed anything to Mal, and we can start to dive into the long list of questions we have. Perfect. Great job, guys. And thank you, everyone, for submitting questions. I'm going to do my best to group some of the topics, and then please do feel free to submit some additional questions if anything comes up. So I think just to kick things off, someone had asked about the mine life. So just to reiterate, the estimated life of mine that we have within this PEA is 9 years, but with the exploration potential that Greg and Luke spoke about, we do believe that there is significant potential to expand that longer term.

44:04 And then sticking with the theme of mine plan, so someone did ask about what's the cause of the low production in year 7? Can this be improved? Greg, did you want to touch on that? And I'll touch on that. Sure, and in terms of, I'll answer the second part first, it really flows, you know, do we have the potential to sort of fill that gap if you will? Absolutely and you know this is the mine plan based on the resource that we have at the moment, because obviously that's what we have to base it on. But when you're talking year 7, there's no doubt, we'll be doing additional exploration over the next 7 years, and we will find some material that we'll be able to fill that in. And what it's related to is some slightly lower grades. So, in terms of the mine plan, obviously you've got to, the tons are relatively consistent as we've shown.

45:02 We're mining and putting on the heap about 8.1Mt a year. So a lot of the fluctuations that you see in the amount of ounces that are produced are directly related to the grade. And you see there that in that year, the average grade is 0.42. You can contrast that to the year before, which is 0.78. And that's the difference in terms of that profile, 155,000oz versus 99. Now, again, as we expand some of these zones, bring on new zones, if we find any material that's better than 0.42, then we'll be able to bring that forward into the mine plant. And if you say, well, why aren't you mining the material that's in year 8 and 9 and 7? Certainly the answer there is, well, the stuff in year 7 sits on top of the material in year 8 and 9. So you have to mine that first. But yes, ultimately, as we continue to explore, We certainly hope to be able to fill that particular gap.

46:06 And staying with the theme of mine plan, can you provide more detail about the pit depths and how deep they go? How does strip ratio potentially get impacted longer term if you go deeper? Yeah, so the stripping ratio is pretty consistent in terms of the life of the mine and that's shown here in the diamond shapes. So it is a little bit higher in year 1 and that's because we're chasing after some higher grade material that sits in the Boeing pit, again, in the oxides, because the first couple of years we're processing all oxide material. But then it is relatively flat around that 2.5 to 1 ratio for the life of mine.

46:55 And yeah, as well, it goes with the Gold grade. Obviously, if you've got some better grades, it can support some larger stripping ratios, but yeah, it's all a function of the inputs, the grade of the blocks that you have, the cost that you're putting in. And we again believe that the 2.5, 2.6 for the life of mine is something that's supportable and it is life of mine. So it stays pretty consistent as you continue to mine down these pits. They're relatively consistent angles, obviously a little shallower in the softer material, a little steeper in the fresh rock. But yeah, in order to drive these pits deeper, you're basically looking at, well, one of the inputs would be a higher Gold price. So again, we're doing this at a base case of 1850. If we use today's gold price, then yes, the stripping ratio should stay relatively the same, but these pits would then get driven a little bit deeper into some of that material that we're now discussing as potentially underground mineable material.

48:00 Thanks, Greg. And I think the Toronto comparison is also a good example of what these types of ore bodies and systems longer term tend to look like. So, you know, as we go deeper and we do discover that higher grade potential, you do tend to see these mines shift into underground milling operations, but that would be a longer term potential at our project. So now shifting gears to the processing side of things, we did have a question around the process flow diagram and an exclusion of milling in that diagram. Just to be clear, there is no milling with the project. It is a heap leach operation that we're looking at. And just thinking maybe the team could give everyone a really high level description of what a heap leach mine is given. I know a lot of people do focus in on milling specifically.

48:48 So Greg or Brandon, if one of you wants to jump in to give a very high level overview of what heap leach mining is. Sure, if you'd like to go back to the process layout there, you might be able to just drive through or the process flow sheet is fine here. You can see we do have 2 different material flows and that is dependent on the hardness of our ore. For the first 4 years, we are targeting those oxides. Now we will have a rock breaker for any oversized material, but the majority of our oxide feed, we're talking above 95%, is going directly into a sizer and then directly to agglomeration. The saprolyte material we have on the project is very amenable to cyanidation and really we're looking at minimizing fine material. Our biggest issue is ensuring that we have high percolation rates over getting that cyanidation value up. And what we do see to start to see that that issue occurring and where we correct for it is in the fresh material. And that's why in years 5 plus, we do install a full secondary crushing circuit. We do get to our optimal material size for that ore and that's where we start to see again that crushing come online. But for the oxides, we're really, again, you can look at the current bottle roll and the current heap leach test, we're really getting great recoveries. We just want to make sure we maintain percolation and really reduction of fine material is where we're putting our focus with the oxides because we're getting great recovery. We just want to maintain that percolation.

50:11 And Greg, do you mind just explaining because people know what milling operations are, what a heap leach operation is just at a very high level? Yeah sure, so on this diagram obviously after you mine it and then we agglomerate it which again is the process of adding cement and some other consumables to the material such that as Brandon mentioned the main thing we're doing there is ensuring that we've got percolation on these heap leach pads. And then, although the heap leach is probably the largest by size component of all of this, it's that rather small little area there on the upper right that says heap leach pad. And, Mal, I don't know if you want to jump to the metallurgical slide that shows the picture of the pilot heap.

50:57 And maybe the easiest way to explain what a heap leach looks like is by looking at the pilot heap. So the advantages of it is you don't have a milling operation, you're not spending a lot of money with giant ball mills processing this material before you then put it in tanks and spend more money to get it out. You're basically, after the agglomeration, putting it into great big piles. And they're obviously much bigger than our 15 ton samples here. But they kind of look like this. They are piles that are there. And in our case, we've got 10 meter stacks that are going to go life of mine. You put cyanide solution on this material. In this case, we've just got some, obviously, again, this is a test that we're doing. We've got some garden hoses. There's much more sort of detailed engineering that goes into what the actual operation looks like, but it is putting cyanide solution on these heaps, recovering the solution on the bottom, and again a lot of engineering goes into ensuring that that's done correctly and safely.

51:59 And again, The advantage is that it's a relatively passive system that allows you to recover the gold out of this material without spending a lot of money, certainly on energy and other operating costs and ultimately, again, in our case, giving us 81.8% recoveries, which are really good recoveries for this type of process. Sticking with the theme on metallurgy, can you please explain the differences in recoveries between test work and what is used in the economics? Yeah, the test work are, you know, they're ideal conditions. So you see in these images the column tests. So you know, first and foremost, you're starting with representative material. So you always want to be using samples that are, you know, representative of the larger resources that you have. But in the case of the column tests, you're testing anywhere from 30 to 60 kilograms of material. And in terms of the pilot heaps, we're testing 2 15-ton samples. But obviously, we're talking about moving 70 million tons of material. So you do your best to make this as representative as possible.

53:11 But certainly these tests are done under ideal conditions with, you know, the available cyanide solution and the chemical components at ideal levels. And so therefore, if you're getting, as we see, 90 to 95% in the lab, real world conditions suggest that you put a factor on that. And we've actually put a factor on that is even higher than some of the recommendations by some of our independent engineers. We've been very conservative here, ending up with a life of mine, average gold recovery of 81.8%. And what's the... May I just add to that, we've run some numbers internally that have kind of pointed to 3 to 4% between lab work and actual real world operations. So as Greg said, we're being conservative here, but that's an area for potential improvement in the future. But again, at $371 million after tax NPV, we don't need to be aggressive with these things. So it's one of the real advantages we have from that perspective.

54:24 And what's the split between Oxide's transition, Fresh Rock, and what are the relative recoveries? Yes, so the split is roughly plus or minus, but one-third, one-third, one-third. And in terms of the transition, you've got essentially the upper half of that that acts very much like the oxide material. You've got the lower half of that, that acts a bit more like the fresh rock. And in terms of the recoveries, we're 85% for the oxide in transition and 75% for the fresh rock. Yeah, maybe I'll add to that. In terms of the work that's been done. So we've got roughly a million ounces of oxide transitional material and kind of 350 of sulfide just for round numbers sake. It's a little more oxide transitional, but for round numbers, let's use a million.

55:20 The test work that we've done is a combination of oxide transition, 50-50, in some cases 60-40, 40-60. So it's a blend of oxide and transitional material. So the transitional material for us leaches very well. And it's one of the, you know, the advantages we've got here is that, you know, it's very amenable to processing on a heap leach pad. Obviously the bulk samples, because you're digging that from surface, are purely oxide, but if you look at all this test work, keep in mind that it's a combination of oxide and transitional. So we often just refer to oxide transitional as heap leachable material given the test work doesn't really differentiate much between the 2.

56:09 We have a question around the infrastructure at site. How is the tailings going to be managed on site? Brandon, I think that would be a good question for you to answer. Definitely, so talking about the difference between a heap leach and a traditional CIL or CIP plant, the benefit of a heap leach is again, your ore when it's placed onto the pad, that is where it stops. So you aren't running this through again a mill, you're not doing flotation, you're not doing any of this. So you don't have a pulp which you then have to stack as a tailings. You're basically stacking it in place with the stacking plan, you recover the gold and then it remains there. Now at the end of mine life we have attributed around 4 years of environmental remediation. What will happen then is the heat bleach material there you see in the center of that processing facility layout, it will be treated with neutralizing solution.

56:59 And then we'll basically regrade all of that heat bleach infrastructure. And at that point, we reseed it and it becomes again back to natural topography at that point. So when it comes to handling tailings that is 1 benefit of the heap leach facility, very minimal tailings. We will look at again treating water etc but when it comes to actual material that is 1 benefit of the heap bleach process. So now over to the capital and operating costs a question here what accuracy level are they calculated at? Definitely and one comment on there is again it was put together by Leica Podium. They attributed a 20%, again, contingency on that. Now for the specific AACE guidelines there, I'd refer to Leica Podium kind of in the comments in our upcoming NI43-101 report. But we were able to, again, from vendor quotations directly, we did a full mass balance, we did full design criteria, and we did get sign-off again at that 20% contingency number. So, Again, we'll look forward at, again, confirming those AACE direct guideline requirements, but we were able to get to that 20% contingency number. Another benefit of working in Ghana, we've got, obviously, there's a couple of dozen mining operations there.

58:15 Again, some of them run by the biggest companies in the world and there are suppliers, multiple suppliers for all of the consumables and we use multiple quotes for the consumables and then there are multiple mining contractors active in the country as well and you're able to get real-time costs from that. Yeah, so maybe just to simplify that as well, so you know for all of our costs we would reach out to different service providers in country or in West Africa and get multiple quotes like a podium would then take those quotes and they've obviously got a huge database of different service providers and then come up with what is the best number to use. So a lot of work goes into every one of these numbers that's provided and they're direct quotes from the different service companies. So just to simplify it a little bit in case people aren't as familiar with how the process works.

59:23 So in terms of costs, and I'll be able to answer this one, there's a question around costs are excluded in the AISC calculation fees. Which costs are? So you can see the breakdown on your screen here in terms of what is included. So you've got your operating costs which consists of mining, processing and mine site G&A, as well as your treatment and refining charges and royalties and then sustaining capital. What AISC excludes would be your closure capital which is about 18 million US at the end of the mine life. And that does include that rehabilitation that Brandon commented on, as well as taxes and any corporate level GNA would not be included in that number. In terms of another question, who is Triple Flag? So this slide addresses that you know, in terms of royalties, there are 2 sets of royalties on the project. 2% NSR royalty payable to Triple Flag Precious Metals. It's a publicly listed royalty company. They acquired the royalty on Enchi from their acquisition of Mavericks metals. And then there is a 5% gross royalty payable to the Ghanaian government that is standard for all mining projects in-country.

1:00:31 So I think we could pivot a little bit more to exploration now in terms of what's next. And Greg, this is a question for you. What average drill spacing will you need to convert inferred into MNI? Yeah, so that I'll preface it by saying it's somewhat dependent on the consistency of the results. If every single hole had the exact same interval, then you could do a little bit wider spacings. But in general, what we've been able to use are 50 meter spaced sections and then along each section 25 meter spaced holes. So roughly 50 meters by 25. Keeping in mind that these are relatively wide zones, our average intercept would be 20 to 30 meters wide and again, pretty consistent between the cutoff of sort of 0.2 grams per ton and up to 1.5 grams per ton. So not a lot of super high grade material, such that it causes issues with nugget effects or anything like that. Really a lot of average and good grade intercepts such that for our existing indicated resources, we're basically looking at that. So In some cases, tighter spacings than that, but generally speaking, 25x50.

1:01:53 I may be able to add to that, Greg. I pulled up the resource table here. Today, we sit at 740,000oz of indicated material. That's what's required to feed or to feed into a PFS in terms, and that's the tighter drill splicing of, you know, 25 metres that Greg's referring to. We'll then look at converting a portion of this 972,000 ounces that sits within the inferred category. You know, we're still doing some of the work on it now, but roughly we would look to convert 5 to 600,000 ounces from the inferred category into that indicated category, which is what then feeds a PFS.

1:02:45 And the benefit we have is that we've got these 75 meter, the average deep pits. So we're able to get back in there and drill a lot, but relatively short holes. So we can go in there and with an RC which works really well in the oxide and transition material, you get nice big samples, representative samples, get that work done efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. So conscious of time, we're going to pivot to a couple higher level corporate questions before we wrap things up. So are you going to study this project for the next 3 to 4 years or can you follow the path of some other juniors that have fast tracked a simple heap leach based on a PEA?

1:03:30 If not, why not? And perhaps with that answer, you could also talk about going straight into DFS versus doing a PFS. Yeah, so one of the big advantages of obviously having a, you know, a DFS is you can then go out and get debt financing which then helps with the overall economics of the project. So let's say this project, call it 106 million for round numbers, let's say 100 million dollars. We can then go and raise 50 million of debt and 50 million of equity. That obviously helps in terms of the construction financing and the overall economics of the project. To get the banks and lenders comfortable, you have to take this to a DFS or a bankable feasibility study. So that's really the advantage of taking it to all the way to a to a DFS.

1:04:26 One of the things that we're looking at is taking it to let's call it an advanced stage PFS where we've done all of the work required for a DFS, subject to final detailed engineering. So, down to the last nut and bolt and where those will go. The advantage there of going to an advanced stage PFS, let's call it, is you can then start initiating discussions with the various lenders, banks, debt providers, And if there's any modifications at the 11th hour that they may require, then you can still do those as you transition to completing a full DFS. So you haven't fully locked yourself in, you've given yourself a little bit of flexibility.

1:05:16 So that's what we're going to be moving towards is an advanced stage DFS and then at that point being able to go to a DFS very quickly. And what would that timeline look like? What is the timeline for advancing NG? So one of the advantages of being in Ghana is we've got a very supportive government. So you know a very small example of that would be you know within 15 minutes of us releasing this PEA yesterday I had an email from the CEO of the Minerals Commission in Ghana and he said, you know, congratulations, great results. How can we help with, you know, the next stage? You know, it's that kind of commitment to seeing projects getting built in Ghana. Obviously, Ghana, you've got 5 million ounces of production a year. So there's a very skilled workforce in country keen to see projects get built. Our view is that once we submit a mining lease application, we would have that completed within 12 months. That's unheard of in North America to be able to have those types of timelines. So That's one of the big advantages we've got. So, we'll be out disseminating and highlighting the great economics of this project over the next few weeks. We'll be meeting with our major shareholders, meeting with the board and discussing, okay, you

1:06:47 know, next step PFS, and then we'll come out with a plan as to, you know, how quickly we can get that done. But roughly speaking, you know, we'd expect within 12 to 18 months, we'd be able to deliver that type of a study and then the next stage would obviously be aggressively pushing it towards a construction decision. And so on that theme in terms of budgets for the next 12 to 18 months that is one of the questions along with how much cash do you currently have? How long will that cash last? Yeah, so as we highlighted in our recent financials, 3.7 million of cash that went down by about a million dollars over the quarter. So, you know, one of the things with a team that is 22% owners of the business, we wanna see as much money going into the ground as possible because that's really where you create the value.

1:07:45 So we run an extremely low G&A, so $3.7 at roughly $1M a quarter. Everyone can do the math on that. We do have about $3.3M of in-the-money warrants, which can be exercised by the end of June. So there's another, call it 3 quarters of cash there. So we're in a good position in terms of, we're not in any rush that we need to raise money, but obviously as an exploration company and development stage company, capital is one of the requirements. We do have a very strong institutional ownership who obviously don't want to be diluted and recognize the big upside potential of this project and want to, you know, see us push it to that construction decision.

1:08:41 So if you do have any questions, or if we didn't get to your questions, I will make sure to follow up via email after the fact. And I did throw my email in the chat, but there is 1 great question. I think that would be good to end on, Luke. So what is the long-term view for this company? Single asset producer, use the free cash flow to purchase another, or sell this at the right price? So our view on the back of obviously working on this PEA over the last number of months and obviously the results that we put out yesterday, the initial feedback that we've had from the market, including a number of our major investors, is that this project is too good for us to not put in production. Again, at an 1850 gold price, you're looking at an after-tax NPV of $370 million.

1:09:35 NPV to CapEx of 3 and a half times, IRR of 58%, less than a 1 point, or sorry, less than a 2 year payback at 1.6 years. So anyone who wants to follow up, my challenge is go find another project that sits within a company of our size that has economics like this that can actually be built by a junior company. So that's what we're gonna start to focus on and be laser focused on. But obviously, we can't lose fact of the reality that we've got huge district scale exploration upside. So Greg's highlighted that, we've talked about it. But for us, and for a number of our major shareholders, where they see the most value being created is pushing this to a production decision. And I think the numbers in the PEA have really highlighted why that should be the focus of the company.

1:10:34 And I think the market over the last day or 2, we've seen the stock up on big volume. And I think the market is just starting to wake up to the fact that, you know, we've got a very attractive project. And as we kind of de-risk it and move it forward, does someone come along and say, hey, we wanna pay you a huge premium. That's something as a management team that it's not our decision, that's shareholder decisions. Where we sit today, I think we'd be crazy to sell it because there's so much value for us to create by moving it to a construction decision. So Mal, happy for you to add to that or any of the other, But that's kind of, I think, the view for the team and the company.

1:11:21 I think if you look at the team involved here and specifically the board, you can see a number of the successes the group has had, and that spans exploration, development, and production. So we definitely have the people in terms of that path forward, which is a reason I joined. So I'm sure by a reason why Greg, Luke and Brandon are all excited to be part of the team. So I think with that, we are definitely over time. So again, I encourage people to reach out directly to me if there are any follow up questions or you wanna meet with the team. And I just wanna say a big thank you to everyone for joining us to get the detail on the PEA today. In terms of following us, please do follow us on social media. We're going to have some great content on X, LinkedIn, Facebook coming up, giving all the interviews on the back of the PA results. So please do follow us and stay tuned for some great discussions that Luke will be having on various platforms.

1:12:18 And with that, I hope everyone has a great weekend given it's Friday. So thank you all for joining. ♪♪ Thanks for watching!