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0:36 Great. Thanks, Romeo. And thanks to 6 for providing this forum for us to be able to provide an update to everyone about how our drilling program is coming along and what we anticipate we'll see in the next few months. I've just arrived into Vancouver getting ready for a series of conferences, investor conferences that we'll have here in the next week or so as we kind of kick off the heart of the investor conference season between now and PDAC coming up. But As we mentioned, we started our drill program in November, late November of the last year, and it's well underway now. We have 3 rigs drilling. It will be still some time before the initial assays come out, but we thought it'd be a good moment just to give an update to everyone on where we're at with the program and what we anticipate will be coming up in the next few months. Pretty exciting time to be delivering results from a major copper discovery. Not only do we have the copper market behaving well in terms of metal prices and increased interest in the projects, but we're seeing continued interest from major companies to make investments into, if not outright acquire assets. And I think we're really on the leading edge of that and that'll be kicking off quite a bit more over the next year or 2.
1:46 Just as a reminder, we are publicly traded. So some of what I'll be speaking about today is forward-looking statements. So let's take just a quick summary of the project overall, in case we have people tuning in that are new to the story. Just the highlights of why it might be a good idea to take a look at Aldebaran and particularly at this moment in terms of making an investment into a really outstanding copper plate. We already have a robust copper gold resource in hand at Aldebaran. So we have a sizable deposit already drill indicated. Totaling between measured and indicated, we have over 11 billion pounds of copper and 3.4 million ounces of gold at the more advanced, better constrained, measured and indicated stage with some additional mineralization it inferred as well. So this is a large deposit already, but what we think we're onto is something that will become an even larger deposit with the drill results that we'll be putting out over the next few months. So that's part of the very significant exploration upside on this project.
2:46 We have multiple strategic investors. We're earning into the project from Sabani Stillwater. So they'll hold a direct, a 20% direct interest in the project by the time we complete our 80% earn into the project, as well as an equity position in the company. We have a major investor in Route 1 out of San Francisco that has been a long-term strategic investor for all of our business efforts moving forward. And then recently we've announced the South 32 agreement whereby South 32 has made a large investment into Aldebaran specifically to monitor progress and help us advance the Altar project. As management, we have a track record of success. We build our companies specifically to identify opportunities like this, identify projects that have potential to be large copper or copper gold deposits.
3:37 To drill those out, de-risk the projects and position them to be acquired by a major mining company at those moments in the market when prices spike and major companies are encouraged to grow and are looking to acquire assets, largely because their exploration teams haven't always been able to identify opportunities internally. And so sometimes it becomes much easier for them to look to acquire new assets. I strongly believe we're entering into a period of time when companies will be highly motivated to take a look at projects like this. As I mentioned, we've got an ongoing drilling program through E-Rig's turning, drill results to be coming in the next few months and probably almost continuous flow of results after that as we've extended our season through new low elevation roads that give us better access to the project.
4:30 And then one of the things that sometimes is overlooked on a company like this or overlooked in a copper market like this is your eye can get caught to the companies that have large deposits that have moved significantly in their share price, but sometimes the value has already been added to those companies. I think Aldebaran's in a position right now where we have a large resource in hand, but our valuation with respect to many of our peers and particularly the typical acquisition costs for these type assets when they're acquired is still quite low. So it's an outstanding time to get into a company like us as an investment with a lot of leverage to the upside as the ongoing drill program begins to generate more eyes on the project. Just a quick look at that share structure, we can see that Rowan owns over 44% of the company, Sabani is still water a little over 17 and a half and South 32 just under 9.9. So over 75% of the company is tied up in 3 large shareholders with long-term interest in the project as well as management, leaving a relatively thin float and the probability that with delivering good results this project will be able to see a substantially increase in valuation.
5:41 As I mentioned, and this information will be on previous presentations we've made, and it's a good point to note to everyone that on our website there are a series of these type webinars that have been put together for us by 6, as well as a number of other technical webinars that Kevin Heather, our chief geological officers put out. So there's quite a bit of information on the website if you want to dive more into who we are as a company or specifics about the project itself moving forward. So Aldebaran is actually the third company with our same management team. Our first company was Antares Minerals where We drilled out the Hakira deposit and sold that to 1st Quantum for $650 million. From that, we've spun out Regulus, which is focusing on an exciting copper gold project in northern Peru, and Aldebaran to focus on the Altar project that we'll talk about today.
6:31 The Altar project's located in San Juan province. As many of you are very aware, Argentina has a slightly different style of government than many of the other South American countries. It's a federation of states, so each individual province can set the tone on whether they want, for example, mining investment. And so what we see in Argentina is their provinces are particularly encouraging for mining investments in other areas where it's difficult to work. So you want to make sure you're located in a good province. We're in the province of San Juan, which is probably the best place to be working in Argentina. It's a province that has large existing mines, like Barracks Valadero operation. And the benefits from that are evident not only to the government, but also to the general population. And they're strongly encouraging the development of additional mines. This is one of the areas in the world right now where it's probably easier to work than most areas and very, very active. There are 5 major copper projects, including ours, that are being drilled out in advance at this point in time and highly likely that we'll see additional new copper and gold mines in the province in the coming years.
7:39 How did we acquire the Altar? As I mentioned, we're earning into this project with an agreement with Sabani Stillwater. The project was originally drilled out by a junior company called Peregrine Metals, sold to Stillwater Mining. It never really fit within Stillwater Mining, and when Sibania acquired Stillwater, they marked the project for sale. And we arrived at an agreement where we can earn into an 80% interest in the project by paying $15 million to Savania Stillwater, which has been completed, awarding them a 19.9% equity position in Aldebaran. And then we spend $55 million over the course of a number of years to earn into that point. The first stage of the earn-in is $30 million to earn into 60%. We're right at that mark right now, so I think in the near future you'll see an announcement that we've crossed that boundary and have earned into 60%. We'll formalize the joint venture, and then we'll have 3 additional years to expend $25 million more in the ground to get to that 80% mark. This is a project that at one point was sold by Peregrine Metals for $487 million of consideration in 2011 sold to Stillwater Mining. As I mentioned, it never really fit within that group and then consequently we were able to acquire the option to earn up to an 80% interest in the project.
9:04 Since that period in time, Sabania Stillwater has developed a strategic or battery metals initiative. And actually, this interest that they have fits well within their strategy to move forward. Let's take a quick look at the project itself. As many porphyry districts, the Altar project is actually a group of porphyries. We see a cluster of porphyries of at least 4 known centers. The mineralization that's defined to date and what we report for copper mineralization comes from Altar Central and Altar East on the right hand side of the diagram. And then we have the QDM radio porphyry cluster off to the west that's emerging as a new center where we've reported drilling over the last couple of years. And then there's mineralization to the north and an area called Altar North that has very little drilling to date, but offers promise to move forward.
9:56 Please note the scale of this district. This is 7 kilometers across on the scale bar on the bottom. So a very large district, a large resource which we'll touch on in a moment from Altar Central and East, but potential for this to become an even larger district as we drill it out. This is a cross section that's east to west looking to the north. So we're cutting through those 3 areas that are most drilled within the deposit. And we can see that Altar Central and Altar East deposits on the right-hand side of the diagram, and the conceptual pit that constrains the resource to date on the deposit. This resource, as I previously mentioned, is quite well drilled. We have a fairly large percentage of the mineralization in the measured and indicated categories. If we look at the measured and indicated categories, This totals approximately 1.2 billion tons of mineralization and at an average grade of just slightly less than 0.5 percent copper.
10:56 Additional resources in the inferred categories. So combined this is already quite a large deposit. We're not closed off at depth by any means at all and we'll see some exciting geophysical results here in a moment that have indicated that we probably the central septum that exists between the 2 pits may be quite well mineralized. There's no current copper gold resource reported in the west from the QDM radio area. We continue to work on that. The mineralization is quite encouraging. It has higher copper grades and notably higher gold grades to it, but the mineralization is quite deep and so we're evaluating how best to tackle that moving forward and we'll see that this year's program will focus more on filling out the full size of the Altar Central and Altar East deposits on the right hand side of the diagram.
11:46 So this is a closer view of that pit that constrains our currently reported resource. The pit outline is the black line. So that that constrains the 2 known areas of mineralization. If we look through the colors, we can see drill density at Altar Central and over at Altar East. When we acquired this project, there was quite a bit of drilling. There's over 100,000 meters of drilling when we acquired the option to turn into our 80% interest in the project. But we were a little bit surprised that despite high quality work in the drilling sense and indicating what mineralization was there, there were a lot of fundamental data sets that did not exist on the project. So we spent much of the last couple of years collecting basic geological or geophysical or geochemical data sets that we feel are important to fully understand the potential of the district and are very important to major miners that are our audience, the group that we're pitching to deliver this project to. So in this image, we see a background that shows gold surface, gold geochemistry in TALIS fine samples is a style of sampling that we use in this high area of the Andes instead of soil sampling.
12:54 In this particular image we're showing the gold content in the soils and we can see the gold numbers pick out the center of these 2 known areas of mineralization. In this particular case, they highlight an area to the south where we see hole 222 right now with very strong surface gold, geochemistry, and very little drilling but it falling within the pit. So this is an opportunity for us to drill in this area and any additional mineralization we find actually already falls into a pit that's constraining the known resource. So it's quite a bit to it. We've also completed some deep looking geophysical, a deep looking geophysical survey. And this is a style of geophysical survey that's now possible with higher tech instrumentation and better signal that we can read on this. And so it allows us to look much deeper than we've ever been able to do in major porphyry systems and with more confidence. And it works extremely well in many, but not all porphyry systems. So this is a data set that's really opened our eyes to what the potential of the deposit is.
13:54 And we'll next look at an image of that on the cross section from X to X prime. So from lower left to upper right, and we'll be looking to the north on this section. So this is a section we have, we can see the pit, pardon me, we can see the pit that constrains our known resource where most of the drilling has occurred in the past. And this is showing a conductivity anomaly, one of the slices we can take a look at the data from this geophysical survey. And we notice that there's a large conductivity anomaly that's very coincident with the known mineralization from the previous drilling. So when we've been drilling into this anomaly, we've been hitting mineralization quite well. And over on the right-hand side of the diagram, a number of these holes are improving on the bottom of the holes, but were cut short.
14:41 This is previous drilling done 20 years ago by our predecessors. These have every indication that these holes need to be continued deeper and likely encounter mineralization at depth. At the time we received this data last year, we had hole 221, which I'm highlighting with the cursor right now, underway. This hole was cited for primarily geologic reasons, feeling that there might be mineralization between the 2 known areas of mineralization. And as we received this geophysical data, we realized that we had a drill hole that was already piercing right through the heart of this untested anomaly. And This hole came back with some very spectacular results last year, over 1000 meters of continuous mineralization with a higher grade core to it, and right beneath the pit projection.
15:30 This really opens up this potential area to the east, and we'll see that's where we'll really be focusing on drilling. At the same time, we had hole 220 on the left-hand side of this diagram, which also intersected mineralization and confirmed that this anomaly likely coincides very well with known copper mineralization and there's a large part of the anomaly that remains to be drilled. We'll now look from the north to the south at an oblique image that's a cross-section showing the same geophysical data. So this is a conductivity image showing conductivity anomalies. We can see the surface, we can see the area of Altar Central and Altar East and the prominent color anomaly that represents Altar East. This diagram In the background we can see our camp at about 3,100 meters elevation, a large flat area quite close to the project site.
16:24 And we can see the radio QDM area off to the east, where we also see good coincidence of conductivity anomalies where we're hitting the higher grade mineralization. This is just a narrow, more vertical body that's chasing deep on us right now. So when we received this data, we realized that there was potential to add substantial mineralization within an open pit geometry between the 2 areas of known mineralization and Altar East. So we're highlighting right now that hole 221 that confirmed the anomaly by drilling right through it. And we're currently drilling holes to offset this and produce a grid pattern to see what this anomaly will result in. And we'll see this most easily when we take a look in a moment at the at the plan map to see where these holes are.
17:13 So we currently have 3 rigs drilling at the moment and they are drilling on the Altar East and Altar Central area and will continue to drill there throughout the season. This is a campaign that we estimate will be approximately 20,000 meters of drilling. We will evaluate as the results come in and as there's potential for access to additional capital, whether there's ability to increase the program. Our field season has been extended now, so we anticipate we'll be able to drill to June this year with a short break and commence again in October. So a much shorter break due to winter conditions than we've experienced in the past. This is another look where we can see hole 222, which drilled off to the west and cut through that anomaly as well and confirm that anomaly was there. So we're seeing that the 2 drill holes that we completed late last year confirmed the anomaly and the active drilling that we have underway now is positioned well to determine if we truly have the size of deposit that we believe we have.
18:22 So this is a plan map again. This is showing a surface projection of that geophysical conductivity anomaly. We can see in the white line the outline of the pit. And we can see in the dashed line, the outline of the strongest part of the anomaly projected to the surface. And so the first 2 holes this year, hole 223, which is off to the east here, over 400 meters away from from hole 221, so a significant step out from the mineralization, but testing an untested part of that anomaly as well. And hole 222 to the south drilling to test that surface gold anomaly in the southern edge of the anomaly in this area.
19:11 We've currently completed the first hole, 222 has been completed to a depth of 1,226 meters. 2, 23 is well underway, it's over 1,200 meters and is approaching a logical depth to conclude that hole. And 2, 24 and 2, 25 are underway with a total over 3,100 meters completed to date. It would make sense that for us, we believe to put out a drill, a press release on this when we have all the assay results in from the first 2 holes, 222 and 223, to give a good indication of whether we're onto the right idea and whether we continue to see mineralization within this large conductivity anomaly. And then after that, we'll start to see holes batched on a regular basis as we complete clusters of holes.
19:59 Drilling is a little bit slow, but improving. We're doing better than we were last year but we're still kind of working out some kinks within the drilling contractors and the supply chain issues on the project. So we hope the project picks up pace but at the rate we're going we'll complete hole 223 in the next week or 2 and then await assays for that and when we have all those assays in hand we'll be able to put out results. Best guidance we can give at this point in time is we're looking at well into March before we see that initial batch of drill results coming out on the project. And then fairly regular results after that. There's information in this presentation that talks about the QDM radio deposit as well, just for completeness to have it in the presentation. We won't discuss that today. We do not anticipate we'll be doing any additional drilling in this area this year as we really focus on that Altar Central and Altar East to get enough drilling into that to have a pretty good idea of what size deposit we might have on that site.
21:00 Also, we've just included the resource estimate information in here for details for those of you who might want to take a look at this. One thing to note on this is in the past we've been reporting copper equivalent grades. It's been pointed out to us by the exchange that they would prefer people don't report copper or gold equivalent grades without metallurgical information to indicate how we can do that. So you'll see us begin to report on both of our companies more directly to just copper grades and gold grades. And as we still do not know the best pathway forward metallurgically on this project, and there are strong implications on recovery, depending which is which are various ways that we can move on this project, you'll begin to see us report those as separate metals. And It's important to note that as you review the results of the drilling.
21:51 As I mentioned, the focus of the 20,000-meter campaign this year will really be to determine how much of this conductivity anomaly is mineralized and the implications for a very significant increase in the reportable size of the deposits at Altar Central and East. There are additional regional exploration targets in the area. We'll continue to work these up geologically over the course of this field season, but we do not anticipate we'll be doing any drilling on those projects in the coming field season. Just a bit of a wrap up on this. Argentina has, as I mentioned, San Juan in particular and Argentina overall, has really become a hotbed for mining investment. Argentina has always had the geologic potential. It shares much of the same geology of the Cordillera to the west in Chile. But it's been underexplored for various reasons for a number of years.
22:45 But this is changing right now. We're starting to see major mining companies come in and either take placements in projects like ours with South32 recently investing in us, BHP investing into a small position in the Filo de Sol project. It's a pretty exciting project to the north of us in San Juan. But also Rio Teno acquiring lithium assets, a number of Chinese companies acquiring assets in the country. So this is a notable change in the last year and I think we're really on the leading edge of this, particularly in areas like San Juan and up in Salta, Jujuy, we're seeing a very, very strong increase in mining and the public's becoming very much aware of the potential for good paying jobs and strong improvements to the economy due to mining as an industry. So it's an easier place for us to work compared to many places worldwide.
23:37 And this is part of a trend where we're seeing majors actively acquiring copper assets throughout the world, either acquiring the portions of deposits that they don't already own to consolidate total ownership on them or outright purchasing projects. It's not just the major copper companies. We've also seen the gold companies be pretty aggressive and notably interested in large copper gold systems now. They're realizing that a large porphyry offers the potential for a long mine life and still considerable gold content as a byproduct from that. And they're realizing that that's probably a smart investment for them to move as they continue to grow the size of the particularly large companies. So that's a quick summary of where we're at.
24:24 Aggressive drill program underway. We're really testing a concept that could substantially increase this project and make it much more visible to the investing public and those that are the companies that are watching us as we move forward on the project. Great jurisdiction to be working in and very importantly an outstanding time to take a look at us as we have a market cap of about $100 million right now, but we're sitting on an asset that demonstrably has potential value significantly greater than that. So it's a great time to be paying attention to us and we'll be seeing good data flow over the course of the next year. So I think that's a good point to stop off and see if we might have any questions. Yeah, sounds great. Thanks, John. We'll start with some of the questions that came in over email and then we'll get to the live questions in the chat.
25:12 The first one is, what is the current assay turnaround time and how much can this vary? Okay, that's a great question and 1 we're very much concerned about. Right now, our assay turnaround time is between 32 and 35 days from the time that the samples arrive into the lab. So when we complete a drill hole we have to complete cutting the final portion of the holes and get them prepared and off the hill and down to the lab. We try to keep up as much as we can on the drilling to do that but that takes typically a week on the tail end of a hole to get the final hole down. And as I mentioned, it's approximately 35 days to receive the assays from that, at which time we then need to do our QAQC control on those.
26:01 The lab does work quite well so we rarely see busts on those or irregularities, but occasionally they do happen. So we don't know how well this is going to hold up because we, this is based on samples that started late last year and everybody's starting to really hit stride on drilling right now. So I think the labs will see an increased flow of samples over the next few months. They are doing their best to be prepared for it, but we're hoping we can hold in at that 35 day mark and it doesn't increase. Great, thank you. We got a question about drilling specific. What depth will the holes typically be drilled to at Altair Central and East? Okay, that's a highly debated topic amongst our geological team.
26:48 The system is we've have holes up to 2,000 meters that have been drilled on the project in mineralization and so there's a temptation to chase these really deep but this year we'll really be focusing on trying to define mineralization that fits into potential open pit geometry at Altar Central and Altar East. Our drill rigs have capacity to drill to 1500 meters or greater. It's fairly easy drilling on this project at depth. So it's not an issue that we see on some other projects in the area. But I think we'll typically be drilling between 1,000 and 1,200 meters depth on most holes. Occasionally, if we're in particularly good mineralization, we may chase a little bit deeper than that in some cases. But I think right around that 1,000 to 1,200 meters depth will be a typical average depth for our holes this year.
27:40 Okay, thanks. One question, why did you choose to start with the locations of holes 222 and 223 in this campaign? I'll start with 222. That one was focused on that Southern edge of the large conductivity anomaly and where we have a strong surface expression geochemically. So we see strong gold, copper, a number of other elements associated there. And it's an area that had no previous drill testing. So if we encounter mineralization in that hole, it opens up potential for expansion to the South into a new area. The first half of the 1,200 metre hole that we've just completed there will be within the currently projected pit geometry. So any mineralization we encounter in that adds significantly to the economics of the project because It's just taking areas that we consider waste right now, but it's undefined waste because it's waste by virtue of not having any drilling in it. If we drill that and we encounter mineralization, it lowers our strip ratio on the project.
28:43 So it's pretty important in that sense. So testing a new geochemical anomaly that's coincident with a geophysical anomaly on the south side that's not been tested, so pretty obvious target on that. And then hole 223 is just a very significant offset from hole 221, the one we reported last year. And it's a big step out. It's a pretty bold drill hole to be moving that far. We evaluated whether we just walk our way out in slow increments from the known mineralization. But it's such a large untested portion of this anomaly, we really need to be making these big step outs to understand what we have. So it's over a 400 meter step out to the east. If this hole hits, it will clearly confirm and add potential to the project.
29:30 As we move forward, we're moving towards having drilling on approximately 200 meter space setting to see what we have. And then we'll have to tighten that up over time to move to a higher confidence resource category as we continue to drill. So watch this when we do start to report results. These are big step outs with major implications for volume if they continue to hit as they have been. Okay, now jump into some questions from the live chat. Jorge is asking, did you change drilling contractor from last year? He remembers there were some problems with them. No, we did not in the end. And there's a there's an interesting dance going on right now in San Juan amongst all of us that are trying to position and get drill rigs. What we chose to do was to continue with the same contractor but work with them in the off-season to improve their ability to continue drilling. It's not just necessarily availability of drill rigs. A lot of it has to do with training of the drillers and experience of the drillers and supply chain issues, how quickly you get replacement parts in when they're necessary. So we chose to go with 3 rigs rather than 4 at this point in time, feeling that we wanted to establish that they could work more efficiently, with the option for us to add additional rigs during the field season, if the results are suggesting we should, and if we're confident that the drilling company has the ability to
31:01 provide adequate crews to keep moving on that. And we're still working the kinks out on that a little bit. It's going better than last year, but with plenty of room to improve going forward. Okay. So Adrian in the chat wants to know if 3 rigs are optimum. I asked why not 4 or even 5? 3 is a good number right now on our evaluation with the drilling company of their ability to make sure those are all working well and going forward. As I mentioned, we initially thought we'd go with 4 and they're a little uncertain they can adequately supply crews and equipment to make sure, but we're evaluating that now whether we add additional rig. The size of this anomaly is such that if these initial holes confirm what we're looking at and doing it, we will certainly evaluate the possibility of increasing the rig count.
32:00 The rigs have been particularly tight in San Juan, but there are new companies coming in and the existing companies are sourcing additional rigs. So it is possible that we'd be able to add additional rigs. We'd like to see results in these first few holes that confirm we're on the right track to do that. Makes sense. Brittany in the chat wants to know, what is the dollar cost per meter? We budget approximately $400 US per meter in Argentina, and that's all in drilling costs. So that'd be our drilling cost plus our assay cost plus the cost associated with cutting the samples and getting them off the hill to move forward. So that's what we use and it comes in a little bit less than that, but that's a good guidance level.
32:47 Okay. Adrian's got a kind of tricky question here. The project has lots of attractive features, but what are the less attractive features for a prospective purchaser? He suggests elevation, infrastructure, grade, or potentially something else. Great question. We appreciate those. And probably just to start on that, what I'd like to point out is that a part of our strategy is not simply just to drill out a lot of tons and grade. That's exciting as the geologists to do, we all get focused on size of deposits. But it's really important to be thinking about how do you de-risk the project. And if someone were to acquire this project, which is our business strategy and what we'd like to do, we have to be thinking about exactly that question. What are the concerns they would have? What are the issues that need to be solved on this project. So on this project we have plenty of size on it. Our grade is a moderate grade on this. So we're not as high grade as some deposits that are around, but we're a grade that's fairly average for major porphyry copper deposits right now.
33:49 In the past there have been concerns about arsenic levels in the project. This was primarily because the initial operators on the project noted that there was arsenic in the deposit but they did not constrain it very well geologically on where it occurred and how it existed. So when we put out our initial resource a little over a year ago on this project, we used a much stronger geologic database and we were able to map out where the arsenic occurs as a late overprint high in the system. And we were able to constrain that much better and more accurately report what the arsenic levels would be in in various portions of the deposit moving forward. And we're highly confident that it's a manageable number. Now there There may be a situation if we did conventional concentrates on this project, we might have to pay a small penalty on portions of it.
34:39 But there's a good – with proper campaigning on the project, there's a good chance that blending on the project could minimize those going forward. And there are also some emerging technologies that offer the potential for alternative ways to process this, and we're closely monitoring those. I think many people will know that Rio Teno Newton has recently entered into an agreement with McEwen at Los Isulis a little bit to the north of us. And our sister company has also entered into an agreement with Newton to evaluate these primary sulfide leach techniques for projects in our project in northern Peru and we think it could be applicable here as well. So we don't we no longer believe arsenic is a serious challenge on the project. It's more of a situation to manage out and understand but the best way to convey that to potential buyers is accurately depicting the situation and presenting it to them so they can see that information and see the alternatives to move forward.
35:34 The other things on this project are strip ratio. On it, we do have a leach cap over the top of the deposit that where the copper has been removed and redeposited at depth. And so that produces waste on the surface that we need to remove before you get to the copper deposit. So as reported right now, there's a higher strip ratio on the project, but much of that strip ratio is untested portions within the pit. And so a large part of this campaign this year will be testing some of those areas that are currently reported as waste in the pit just by virtue of not having any drilling. If we hit on that, we'll be attacking that strip ratio as we move forward. So those are really the ones that we focus on right now in terms of technical aspects of the deposit is making sure that our snake situation is well characterized and well understood.
36:22 That's going well for us and attacking that strip ratio to move that down. That just improves the economics and makes the project more valuable as we do that. Okay, thank you. We've got one question from Mark Turner at ICANN. He notes that this time last year, we're talking about the QDM radio discovery, but notes that now it appears to be on the back burner with no drilling planned for 2023. He's curious what the strategic reasons for that change are. It's a good point. It's, we embarked on this project realizing we had large tonnage already, but wanting to focus on getting to higher grade zones and the QDM radio part of the project offered that opportunity for us and continues to do so. But as we've drilled there, we are encountering grades that we like, but they're going deep and it's becoming expensive to drill there and it's not clear that it adds as much value as what we now realize that we can do on the east side with a possibility of substantially increasing the deposit, decreasing the strip ratio and making it more valuable. So it's a good example of how your ideas change.
37:33 We embarked on the project with 1 idea. It wasn't an incorrect idea by any means at all, but we're realizing we now with new data, we have an opportunity that adds potential, offers the opportunity to add much more value, more directly in the project. This is also with some interaction with some number of the companies that are either partners for us right now or monitoring us as we move forward and listening to what they wanna see and what they wanna do. So it's an evolution of our ideas as we move forward. The target at QDM Radio still exists, it will possibly have to be more of a bulk underground mining opportunity. And we felt that that would take longer to develop right now. And there is a more immediate opportunity to do the drilling at Altar Central and Altar East right now. It's still there. It's still an opportunity for additional value in the project in the future. We just have seen our priorities evolve as we get more information on the project.
38:32 Okay, thanks. One question, are there any active mines in South America ideally or elsewhere that you could compare Altar to in terms of size and grade?
