Aldebaran Presents Exploration Update

0:07 Hello everyone and welcome to the Auto Brown Resources live event hosted by 6. I'm pleased to introduce our speakers for today, John Black, CEO, and Dr. Kevin B. Heather, CGO. They'll provide further context on the exploration update following the news that was released this morning. And afterwards we'll be answering questions. So feel free to submit the questions at any point in the bottom right corner of your screen, that little text box there.

0:33 As always, the summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards. So without further ado, I hand things over to John to kick things off. Okay, great. Thanks Kyle. And thanks to Kyle and Romeo and the full 6 team once again for providing this format. We find this to be quite effective to be able to provide just a little more context when we put out news and give people the opportunity to ask for questions and learn more about what we're doing. Also thanks to everybody tuning in or picking this up on the replay. If you have any further questions that we don't address today, please feel free to contact us. There's plenty of information on our website. Just as a disclaimer, we are publicly traded, listed in both the TSX-V and the OTC in the US, and the appropriate disclaimers apply to us. So I thought we'd just start with a real quick summary for those of you that might be new to the story, just a reminder for those that have been with us for some time, is with Aldebaran, we are working on the Altar Porphyry Copper System. It's one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world in the hands of a junior.

1:43 It's about to get substantially larger. And what we'll be going over today are the results from the next batch of 5 drill holes. Just as in the first batch that we put out earlier this year, these holes are largely on the margins of the system and they're designed to find the edge of the system. What we're finding is we're continuing to find low-grade materials as we move out to the edge, which will have very important implications for the overall strip ratio and the project economics moving forward. And Kevin will walk us through these details and the importance of these results. We're about halfway through reporting drill results for the project and we're nearing the end of the completion of the project. We're drilling with 4 rigs right now. We're approaching the 20,000 meters we had planned for this year. There's always a lag in the reporting of those results.

2:32 So with this batch, we'll finish the holes that are really kind of on the periphery of the system. And the remainder of the holes will be filling in gaps in the middle portions of the system back into the heart of the system as we move forward. We're working in Argentina, which is one of the hotbeds for exploration in anywhere in the world right now and continues to be even more so with the recent change in government. And just once again, a reminder that we have the right team and the right partners to execute this program. Our team has successfully drilled out projects like this before and sold them to major companies, which is our strategy. We're earning into this project from Savanye Stillwater, and we have Sal32 as a major equity partner to help us move the project forward. And we've recently announced an agreement with Rio Tinto Newton to explore some exciting technology they have that could be very important to the project moving forward.

3:23 Just a quick review of the major milestones that are coming up on the project. As I mentioned, We're completing the 20,000 meter drill program that we had planned for this season. We're opposite field seasons in South America, so by June we'll be hitting the cold weather and shutting down for a few months. But the drilling that we've completed will take us over 160,000 meters of drilling on the project and put us in a position to do a major resource update in the second half of this year. And that will form the foundation for the first PEA on the project, the first look at what a mine might look like in the project economics in the first half of 2025. So 2 very important milestones coming up in the remainder of this year.

4:11 While we complete those, we'll also complete a third milestone, which is the expenditures necessary for us to earn into an 80% interest in the project. We currently have a 60% interest in the project. By expending $25 million more in the ground on the project, we complete the full earn into an 80%, at which point it's a joint venture with ourselves and Sibania Stillwater moving forward. So 3 very important milestones coming up in the next 12 months or so on the project, as well as continued news flow with withdrawal results coming up. Just a word or 2 on that Rio Tinto-Newton collaboration agreement. This is one of the newer pieces of news. Please take a look at our website for additional information. But this is an important agreement that will allow us to test Rio Tinto's primary sulfide leaching technology on the project.

5:03 We have various options on how we move forward to process mineralization on this project, but we're very curious to see if this technology works. If it works successfully, it could have very, very significant implications on project economics. So this work is underway. The samples have been sent off for the column test work, and we anticipate we'll have results by this time next year to feed into that PEA as we move forward. So with that, I think really the last thing I'll mention is that Altar is already one of the largest copper projects, undeveloped copper projects in the hands of a junior. This is a chart that comes to us with the help of the folks at Desjardins, And it's pointing out that Altar is already in the top 10 projects in terms of size of contained copper. But I think you'll see Kevin lay out the information today that will indicate that when we do that

6:02 resource update later this year, we'll move substantially up on this chart. So we're very, very anxious to get to that point. So I think with that, I'll turn it over to Kevin and Kevin will walk us through the results that we put out this morning and just some other general information on the project. And then we'll look forward to any questions that people might have. Thank you. Okay, thanks, John. And hello, everybody. I know that we may have some new viewers today. So just a quick location. We're located in San Juan province, Northwestern Argentina, and within San Juan province, which is probably the most mining friendly province in Argentina, ranked number 1 exploration jurisdiction in South America in the Fraser Institute last year.

6:55 You can see the location of the Altar Project down here, right near the border with Chile. We're about 25 kilometers north of Antofagasta's Las Palambres mine and El Pichon, the project currently in feasibility studies for Glencore. And we're about 45 kilometers south of McEwen Copper's Los Azules deposit. So what I'd like to walk you through today is just the results that we put out this morning and try to put those into some context so you understand, A, where the holes were drilled and a little bit on why they were drilled, where they were drilled. And this is data that's as of yesterday.

7:41 So it's pretty up to date and you can see the location map here. These are the 4 holes that we previously reported. The ones with the yellow stars here indicate that they've been publicly released. And you can see that they were clustered along the southern side of this large geophysical anomaly, which I've superimposed in the black dotted line. Those of you that follow us know that we have this very large conductive geophysical feature that has a pretty good correlation with known mineralization. And so we've been trying to test some of those areas to see like John mentioned, how far out the footprint of mineralization goes.

8:29 And then you can also see on this plan map in the white line is the 2021 resource conceptual pit. The holes that we're reporting today are 5, as John mentioned, There's 2 holes down on the Southern side here, 237 and 239. And then there's 3 holes at 200 meters spacings along the Northern edge of the known Altar Central mineralization and sort of on the same kind of strike trend as the Altar United. Those are the holes that were released this morning. We've completed 5 holes. You can see those in the blue dots here, but those are still pending final assays. These are quite deep holes.

9:22 And so we tend to get the assays back in batches. So we're still waiting on final assays for the bottom parts of many of these holes. And then the holes that are currently in progress are the ones shown here in magenta. And as of yesterday afternoon, these were the depths. These depths may vary slightly from what was reported in the press release, just because I think I updated this after the press release had already gone to the exchange yesterday. So you can see that we're, as John mentioned, we've been focusing on trying to see where the edges of the system are, but we're now starting to focus in and fill in really key gaps in the known mineralization and where the higher-grade core to the system is. We're currently sitting at just over 16,700 meters of drilling completed of the 20,000 meter plan.

10:27 And you can see that we don't have very much more to go until we will complete the 20,000m plan that we set out. So as always, I think the quotes say a lot, and so I've just kind of summarized some of the important takeaways. We've Extended the known mineralization substantially to the north and the south. Remember in many cases, these are 200m step outs. So that's even big by porphyry standards. The holes are on the edge of the deposit and most of these holes are in areas where historically there was no previous drilling. These might not be the most eye catching grades, but from our perspective, they are providing valuable information.

11:16 And I'm hopefully we'll demonstrate to you today that they are necessary in order to complete the resource update later this year. But with that the remaining holes as I just showed you in the plan map are focused on the core of deposit, where we've identified significant gaps in our understanding and quite frankly, assays in the heart of the system. And we're filling those gaps in to make a much more robust resource update later this year. The other thing is that these holes that we're presenting today really allow us to better capture the better grade mineralization in the central part of the system because we're pushing mineralization out further laterally.

12:06 This allows us to capture blocks that currently are not falling within the pit design. And you'll see that, I think very clearly when we start to look at the cross sections. We're also continuing to convert near surface rock that currently is being treated as waste. And we're converting that into mineralization that's above the break even cutoff. And so that's also really important, as John mentioned, in terms of strip ratio. And then finally, hole 239 is kind of interesting because we started seeing increasing grades towards the bottom of that hole. Unfortunately, we reached the final depth, which was the capacity of the drill rig, which was just a little bit over 1,000m depth. But it's interesting that we're getting very nice looking grades in rocks that are not particularly good host rocks. And so there's a suggestion that we might be near maybe an undiscovered additional porphyry centre that will require some follow-up in the future.

13:18 So just to jump in and start to look at the results, then again, I'm not gonna belabor these, but basically you can see the 2 holes on this cross section are hole 235 and then down to the South hole 239. You can see them there. We're showing a copper equivalent grades on this particular cross section. Hole 235 had a several long intervals of sort of low to medium grade throughout the whole. And you can see that towards the bottom of the hole, we started seeing increasing grades in the bottom of 235. In the case of 239, we hit an upper zone that was probably in an area that was designated as waste or lower grade than what we intercepted, and we hit mineralization inside the pit shell, you can see in the dashed black line.

14:21 And then towards the bottom, and this is the part where I said it looks quite interesting, is we started to see an increase in the grade. And again, we had to shut the hole down at 1,049 meters because that was the depth capacity. But the hole was left in such a state that in the future, if we decide that we want to deepen that hole, we can, but that'll be in an evaluation that we'll do here during the months coming forward and decide whether that's an option that makes sense or not. This is just the same section just to show you the geology. And as I mentioned, you can see the bottom of 239 down here had pretty good grade both in rhyolite and in andesite host rocks. The rhyolites tend to be very poor host rocks and so the fact that we're seeing those kind of grades in that host rock suggests that we've got to be close to something.

15:17 This again, just so that we can see where we are relative to that very large conductivity feature, you can see that every place that we drill into that large conductive feature, in this case, it's the magnetotelluric conductive feature, we can see that we're hitting mineralization. This is the 2021 block model, and you can see that both hole 235 and hole 239 are gonna add significantly here in pit resource blocks and then down deeper extend this higher grade mineralization and likewise the same thing. This is the bottom of hole 235 is drilled into a completely virgin area and it's still showing good mineralization at depth.

16:07 Just some quick photos to show you what the mineralization looks like up near the surface in 235. We're seeing energite pyrite. We're also seeing chalcopyrite with pyrite down slightly deeper. We also intercepted a mineralized porphyry on the top part of hole 235. Unfortunately, it wasn't that well mineralized. We're still evaluating whether this is a host rock or whether it's a causative intrusion and whether it's a new intrusion that we haven't seen previously. We can see that As we go down deeper, the andesites are very strongly veined and altered and carrying chalcopyrite. You can see here that we're seeing chalcopyrite very well disseminated on fracture surfaces and we can see strong chalcopyrite-pyrite as we go deeper in that hole.

17:04 In the case of 239, again, up near the surface, we're seeing energite pyrite, a high sulfidation style mineralization. We also intercepted a very interesting heterolithic milled breccia. And the importance of this is these are intrusive or eruptive type breccias. And we're noticing that there's fragments of mineralized porphyry in these breccias. And so this is also part of the evidence suggesting that we may be close to another as yet discovered porphyry center. And then we also see stronger chalcopyrite and molybdenite as we go deeper in hole 239.

17:51 The types of mineralization that we would expect to see in host rocks peripheral to a porphyry center. Moving on to hole 236, slightly to the west. You can see it was drilled here on the north side. That hit a very long run, almost directly from surface, well over a thousand meters of low grade mineralization. But as we'll see, it was within that porphyry that we're not really quite sure what that porphyry phase is. We're still evaluating that. In many cases, it's quite strongly altered, but we think it might be a different porphyry phase than what we've historically been encountering in this part of the deposit.

18:41 Again, we can see there's a very good correlation with that large conductivity feature. And again, when we look at the block model, and this is where I think you can start to see the importance of these holes is that they're completely mineralized, both of these holes in areas where there was previously no drilling and no resource blocks to find. And you can see that immediately below the pit bottom here, we've got high grade blocks that are trapped. And so these holes will help us to potentially pull this pit deeper and start to capture some of this higher grade material in a larger resource pit. Hopefully, we'll put out those results later this year.

19:31 Again, 236, repetitive story. We see high sulfidation, energite pyrite mineralization near surface. As we go deeper, we're starting to see very nice looking chalcopyrite associated with green sarasite. Typically, we see that style of mineralization, the grades go up. Again, we're also seeing the development of chalcopyrite with molybdenite. And we also see a lot of quartz flooding in the deeper parts of drill hole 236. And we start to get into very nice looking Potassic alteration again with Chalcopyrite and Pyrate at depth.

20:17 So moving on to the final 2 holes here is hole 237, which was drilled on the South side and 238 drilled to the North. And again, the same cross section, you can see the pit shell again in the black dotted line. We're looking towards the east and in hole 237, again, interestingly in pit, we hit 130m of 0.2 Copper equivalent of which most of it's Copper. And so that's above the break-even cut-off. So this will would be mineralized material and wouldn't be classified as waste. And so that's an important contribution. You can clearly see that drill hole 238 again hit a, just like we saw in the previous cross section, hit a very long intercept, almost over 1100 meters of 0.25, of which most of it is copper, throughout this whole intercept. And you can see near the bottom, we start to see an increase in the amount of copper coming into the system.

21:31 And so you can see that again, most of the mineralization and the central part here is in porphyry intrusion. And you can see, again, this is a porphyry that we're not sure yet whether it's part of this main porphyry intrusion here or whether it's a separate porphyry phase. Again, you can see relative to the conductivity feature, again, a really good correlation that when we drill into that conductivity feature, it's really doing a good job of representing mineralization. The contrary is in the bottom of 237, you can see we're into very choppy, low-grade looking material here, but it's still conductive, and it's probably because it's dominantly pyrite here.

22:18 And again, if we look at the block model here, we can see that hole 238 is going to help us to extend mineralization out towards the north and hopefully allow us to capture some of these high grade blocks down here that are currently not falling within the resource pit shell. Again, somewhat of a repetitive story, but Energite pyrite mineralization near the surface. We can see that the andesites are very strongly veined and altered with chalcopyrite. We also encountered in hole 237 to the south, which is interesting because we found a very similar looking breccia that we encountered in 239.

23:06 It's got fragments of altered rock in it, suggesting again that there's something going on down in the South that we still don't have a complete handle on, but moving forward may warrant some additional drilling next year. Again, towards the bottom of the hole, we see an increase in Chalcopyrite, Molybdenite and the intensity of veining. And 238, similar story, energite pyrite. We hit that mineralized porphyry again, but it was relatively low grade. Again, over on the north side, we're starting to see this same breccia body as narrow dikes, again with altered class within that breccia.

23:55 And we're starting to also see with depth, chalcopyrite magnetite, that's usually a pretty good indication that we're heading towards the more potassically or hotter part of the system where the grades potentially will increase. And we also see K-Feldspar with chalcopyrite as well. And then we're also seeing an increase in the prevalence of anhydrite, which indicates that we have a very oxidized type system. And again, it's a thing that we like to see when we're drilling these kinds of systems. So just a couple of slides to finish up here. This is the slide I showed you in the beginning, but we can look at these holes in a slightly different way. And that's to look at them based on what the objective of those holes were.

24:46 So the 3 holes that we reported early, the last press release were these 3 holes down here. Those were testing to fill in this area here of the known geophysical anomaly and to test whether mineralization extended to the South. The green holes down to the South here of which 3 have now been reported, a fourth one, we're still waiting for the results. That's an area that we were drilling, try to convert waste material to above cutoff. All of those holes reported to date have been successful in doing that. They have converted waste to above cutoff mineralization within the current 2021 pit shell.

25:37 The 3 holes that we just reported along the northern side here, we're testing for the extension to the north of Altar Central mineralization and also testing this area of geophysical anomaly. Again, all 3 of those holes hit long intervals of low to moderate grade material. And then the holes that are still pending are these holes right in here. These are the holes that I would call sort of the Altar United and Altar East definition holes. These are holes that we established that there were significant gaps in our understanding and also in the drill hole density.

26:23 And so these holes were all targeted to try to fill those gaps in, and these will be really important holes as we start to shore up that central higher grade core area. And then in concert with these peripheral holes that we've been reporting will help us to put out, I think, a very robust and interesting resource update moving forward. And then finally, we've got 2 holes on the ends here, which I call extension holes. The mineralization is clearly still open to the West here, so hole 62 extension is drilling to test if that Altar Central mineralization extends further to the west than what we currently understand.

27:13 And the same thing here is that the high-grade mineralization that comes down through Altar Central to Altar East is still open towards the east. You can see there's a lot of hydrothermal alteration here in these white colors on the satellite image. And so we've targeted a hole in here to test if that mineralization indeed does extend further to the east than our current understanding. So just a final reminder, we already have based on our 2021 mineral resource, a very large resource in hand. And I think the thing that's really important here is that it doesn't include the radioporphyry system, which we'll be bringing into resource at the end of this year.

28:01 But the other thing that's quite important here is that a lot of the known mineralization and the stuff that's very close to surface is already in the measured and indicated categories. You can see the measured and indicated here are in the reds and the orange colours. And that's really important because in a PEA, we can use inferred and above, but for a PFS, you need measured and indicated. You can see that an early part of any potential mine life here, majority of the mineralization is already in the measured and indicated category. So we think that allows us to transition fairly quickly without a lot of additional drilling to go from the PEA to the PFS stage.

28:51 So this is the final summary. We still have 4 drill rigs turning. As we've indicated, we're budgeted for 20,000 meters. We're just over 16,000 meters completed. I suspect that we will be, with the holes that we're drilling now, plus a few additional ones, we'll be completing that 20,000m objective. This will all feed into an updated mineral resource that we're hoping to get out by the second half of this year, probably in the October-November range. This will include hopefully all of the drilling that we've been discussing today and the stuff that's still in progress.

29:41 And also we'll include the QDM and radio areas, which the radio porphyry system is currently not in resource. Based on this, we hope to complete the Maiden PEA for the project in the first half of 2025. As well, we're doing a lot of supportive studies towards the PEA and eventual PFS. We're doing core scanning, geotechnical studies, metallurgical work, water and glacial studies, environmental baseline work, all of these other peripheral, but also very important studies that will help us to move the project through the PEA to PFS stages.

30:30 As John mentioned, we have collected 10 samples for the Rio Tinto Newton Sulphide Leach test work. Those samples have been shipped to the SGS lab in Chile, where they are currently being processed, and eventually will be sent to the US for column tests and further analysis by the Rio Tinto Newton team. And then just a quick update, we've now completed over 20,000 meters of core scanning. That data is extremely valuable for any future metallurgical modeling and future engineering studies such as pit slope stabilities, waste rock characterization, et cetera. So that program's well on its way as well.

31:22 And in the end, I'd like to really thank our Aldebaran Argentina exploration team. It's really their dedication and their hard work that makes all of this really go forward. I'm just the voice, but they're the actual hard work that goes into all the results that we've seen today. And I'll pass it back to John for some final commentary.

31:49 You're muted, John. You're muted, John. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for a great summary on that. And just as Kevin's already summarized on this, We've got a large resource in hand. It's about to get significantly larger by the end of the year. And I'm very excited that we're moving towards that PEA stage where we can begin to see what an actual mine would look like here. So we're a little bit earlier staged than some of the major projects around us in San Juan, but I think we're on a pathway to catch up pretty quickly. So I think with that we can really open things up for questions if there might be any from the audience. Excellent, Thank you guys. And for anyone that came in late, just as a reminder, you can submit your questions in the bottom right corner of your chat here.

32:40 We do have a few in emails here, but I wanted to ask because I want to, I believe, understand the concept here. So big step out holes for Alto Central. And you mentioned that there was interesting mineralization in hole 239. As well in the summary, you had 20,000 meters of drilling and then a resource estimate. Going forward on exploration after this drill program, can you talk about strategy for the company?

33:13 Would you be looking at doing drilling after this 20,000 meters? Summarize that please.

33:22 Yeah, well, next year we're just beginning to lay out what the program will look like next year. And as we mentioned, we'll be making that transition into more of the type of activities that are necessary for what we refer to as feasibility work overall, leading into the PEA and the pre-feasibility studies. That does not mean we won't continue to do exploration. We just think that with this amount of drilling we have right now, we're at a very logical point to move towards that PEA.

33:54 Of course, we'll continue to do that drilling. There will be a discussion by the end of the season whether we come back in, and it depends a little bit where we sit on meterage, whether we try to put a tail on the bottom of that hole by the end of the season or not. It's one of several opportunities we have. So Kevin and his team will prioritize which are the best ways to go. We might point out of the 4 rigs we have, 3 of the rigs have capability of going quite deep. It's the one rig, the LF90 that we have that bottoms out at a little over a thousand meters. And that happened to be the hole that we couldn't continue.

34:28 Kevin, any other thoughts on that to add? Oh, I think you've covered the main part there, John.

34:36 Excellent, thank you. I just threw a caveat in there. We didn't really discuss it, but we are, as the drill program starts to wind down here, As long as the weather is still

34:52 decent above, we do have crews that are actually out doing mapping and looking at some of the more satellite areas that we know potentially might host mineralization. We won't be drilling those this field campaign, but we're starting to do the field work around those to potentially define that if we decide that they warrant drilling in the future, that we will have the field work to decide where the best locations to test some of those anomalous areas are. I know before starting this meeting, we were talking about the price of gold moving and copper's actually been moving as well. It's been having a nice uptick lately.

35:38 Have you noticed any change in sentiment during investor meetings? Yeah, it's quite notable actually. I was just in Zurich at the Swiss Mining Institute conference last week, and it was one of the more refreshing investor conferences I've been at in the last 2 years. It's a noticeable buzz associated with both base metals like copper with the price moving. It's been long anticipated. I think most investors we talked to and most analysts we talked to agree that it's very likely we'll see a substantial move in the copper price towards the upside. But I think everybody was kind of waiting for it to happen. So as it clicked through $4, I think that confirmed to a lot of people that it was moving. And we've seen a lot of interest, not just in our company, but in many of our peers as well, moving forward. And then of course, gold is at an all-time high, and that's finally beginning to catch a little bit of sale, wind in the sails as well. So it's a notably more positive mood in recent investor conferences.

36:43 Excellent. We do have a question in the chat here. The individual is wondering if you could elaborate more fully on the potential for a successful application of the new technology to be very impactful on logistics and economics.

37:10 Certainly. For those of you that might not be familiar with what Rio Tinto is exploring here is, fundamentally there are 2 styles of mineralization in a large porphyry copper system. The upper portion of the deposit can be weathered and oxidized producing oxide copper or what we call secondary sulfides, they're redeposited sulfide minerals. And that type of material, it's possible to process it with heap leach technology, SXCW heap leach technology, where you take the rock, you crush it up to about the consistency of gravel, you put it on heap leach pads and trickle a sulfuric acid solution through that, and you produce pure copper metal on site. It has some very good advantages because you have much lower capital costs, you're not producing a concentrate, you don't have tailings.

38:02 If you can process a deposit with that methodology, you absolutely would. But the vast majority of big copper deposits are what we call primary or unweathered sulfide mineralization. And historically, the way that that material has had to be processed is we have to mill it, which means you crush it up to about the consistency of flour. You put it through a concentrator. You run it through a process called floatation to produce a copper-rich concentrate that has a grade of about 25, 28% copper, and then you have to ship that concentrate to a smelter, which is often located on the other side of the world in Asia or somewhere. And you produce a tailings, which is a material that you need to store. And it's sometimes is sensitive how you store that type of material in a seismically active area like the Andes. So it's much more capital intensive, requires a higher grade to process that mineralization, and it also uses a lot more water and power. So for decades, the major mining companies have been exploring the possibility, could they modify SXEW type technology to apply it to the primary mineralization and heap leach all styles of mineralization on a project.

39:19 Rio Tinto Newton believes that they've cracked the nut on that to the point where they've packaged a series of proprietary technologies under the name of Rio Tinto Newton, and they've entered into agreements with a large number of companies like ourselves to test that work. So if that work, if that technology is successful at showing that we could heap leach the bulk part of the mineralization instead of running it through conventional milling and concentration. It has tremendous implications for the projects. In terms of cost, it lowers your capital costs for the project, very notably, which makes a project more economically viable. It lowers your operating costs. And I think in the process of developing this, there were some pleasant surprises for Rio Tinto and other major copper companies that are exploring similar technology under their own versions of this, is that it has tremendous ESG potential benefits as well. It uses a lot less water.

40:20 It uses a lot less energy. It's really nice now that copper is recognized as a green metal, an essential metal to help us with the transition to a lower carbon energy future. But the mining of copper is still carbon intensive. And so if we could apply this type of technology to the project, we'd be producing greener copper. We'd be using less water. We'd be using less energy. We'd produce a copper metal in-country, which means a value add to the country. It keeps jobs and value inside the country, which is very important to many countries and particularly Argentina. We had also eliminate the possibility of tailings, which makes a much safer mine for all involved. So we're quite excited to explore this. It's not necessary that this technology work for the project to be viable. It's just, if it does work, it could make the project not only much more profitable, but it could make it also much more environmentally friendly moving forward. So there's a lot of potential in this technology.

41:24 It won't work on every single project out there by any means at all. That's why we're entering into the column leach test program that we're going forward. But we wouldn't be embarking on this and Rio Tindal certainly wouldn't be doing this at their cost if we didn't have a great degree of certainty that it'll work on these types of rocks. Thank you for that thorough response. And We have a good question from the audience. There was commentary by your company some time ago about focusing on a smaller pit shell to focus on the high-grade core, but given these recent step-out drill results, what are your team's thoughts on the potential pit shell now? Kevin, you wanna jump on that one or?

42:10 You're on mute, Kevin. Now you can hear me. I'm not quite sure I agree with that. We were kind of focusing on a smaller pitch. I think there's some confusion here. Typically, the way the evolution of any project like this works is that we want to drill out the full extent of mineralization and see what the size of the footprint of that mineralization is. When we report a resource, that is based on reasonable expectations of economic extraction parameters. And those are pretty loose and they're quite variable depending on deposits and etc. Etc. So that tends to make a very large pit to capture or potentially a large pit with underground tails on it that would simulate where potentially there might be a reasonable chance of economic extraction of mineral.

43:12 Those tend to be large, but then when we start to move to the PEA stage, that's when we have to start putting more thorough economics onto the assumptions and typically those economic pits will become smaller. But we're not doing that by design to start with. So I think that's where there's a little bit of confusion here. We've always been, what's the full extent of the mineralisation? And the reason why that's important is you can imagine deposits like big Copper systems like we're discussing here today, those deposits take a long time to put into production and they typically, especially deposits of the size that we're potentially talking about here, are multi-generational mines.

44:04 And so we tend to want to put today's costs and economics on it, but a lot of this mineralization might be mined 50 years from now. And so you want to know what the full size of that mineralization is because that gives you an idea of there's future upside because we know the prices are going to change, that the economics and things are going to change. And that's why active mines, they're constantly, every few months, updating their reserve models and everything because they're reacting to changes in the price, etc. Etc. So, I don't think that we've changed course. I think we're on the same course.

44:52 Now, were we drilling for higher grade earlier on? Yes, and we did find that. And now we're going back into that same area because we've now seen through our work when we've had time to analyze it, is that there are gaps in our understanding and gaps in our drilling in that area. And that's why you'll see over the next few months as more results come out, they're gonna be more focused into that core higher grade area. Thank you, Kevin. Some of the commentary in that response can be mirrored in this question perhaps, but an individual is expressing concerns about the grade and the cutoff grade having to be very low.

45:39 Do you wanna comment on the grades versus the cutoff and maybe what's average in this? Average difference. Yeah, most big Copper porphyry systems worldwide, the cut-off grade is about 0.1 to 0.15. Okay? So that means that anything that's above 0.1 goes to the mill, or it goes to a heap leach pad. It's not waste. That's the thing that people have to get their heads wrapped around here is that these systems are huge economies of scale. These things move a lot of rock. And so by doing so, they can move lower grade material because it makes it still economic to do so. And so, yes, some of the grades that we're showing today are on the low to moderate grade side of things, but those will still eventually will get mined at some point. So The cutoff grade for these big systems is about 0.1 to 0.15.

46:52 Thank you for that. We might give another minute here if there's any questions, but I think we addressed all the questions in the audience. So If you came in late, don't worry, this is being recorded. You can watch the recording on YouTube afterwards here. But do you have any final messages for the Aldebaran shareholders and what can be expected for the rest of 2024 as we wrap up this call? Kevin, do you want to first make a comment, John, and then I'll pass it off to you to close things off. Just, this is a story that these big systems take time to reveal what the full potential is. And really, I think that people need to keep their eye focused on those key catalysts that John mentioned.

47:40 There'll be some more results coming over the next few months. I think the results are gonna be more interesting. I don't have the results, but I'm just anticipating they're going to be more interesting because we're moving into the core area. And the resource update is a milestone that's going to be very significant for us as an exploration team, but also for us as shareholders, because we're shareholders, just like all of you who are listening in. And then obviously moving to PEA, because that'll be the first time in this project's history that there's been some economics wrapped around this project. So those are the 2 key things that I leave people with is that, you know, this is not a, we drill a hot hole and then the stock triples. That's not the game here. If that's what people want, then the game is somewhere else.

48:42 Okay, great. Yeah, I think Kevin captured a lot of that, those 2 real key milestones coming up in the resource update and the PEA. I'm looking forward very much for that. We have funding in hand to complete that. We have outstanding backers in our strategic partners and a lot of our long-term shareholders in the project. So we're well positioned to raise additional capital to move it into the feasibility level activities that will start later this year and into the next field season. And our strategy on this, this is the third company Kevin and I've had in our series of companies. And on all 3 companies, our strategy has been to identify a project just like this, 1 that has a potential to be a very large copper deposit, that's economically robust, and sufficiently strong that a major mining company would like to acquire from us.

49:36 So fundamentally, you have to have the deposit in the rocks. That's where you start from. But you also have to have that at the right time in the market. And I think we're right on the cusp of entering into the sweet spot for us to deliver this type of a project. We're seeing a clear increase in demand for copper as we need to use more copper to increasingly electrify most aspects of society right now and reduce carbon use moving forward. As an industry, we're not very good at finding these deposits and it takes a long time to get them into production. So there'll be a difficulty for our industry to keep up with this increased demand, which will result most likely in a significantly higher copper price.

50:24 Groups like Goldman Sachs are predicting $6.80 by the end of next year. So That's based on fundamental projections of supply and demand moving forward. So we don't need those higher prices for a project like this to be viable. But what happens is when we see those higher prices is we see the major mining companies start to pile up cash and start to get interested in developing new projects. And they turn their eyes towards groups like ourselves to look to acquire projects. So I couldn't be more pleased that we have our hands on a project of this quality and that we'll be delivering it at the right time in the market in the next year or 2. So I'm looking very much forward to what happens over the next 12 to 24 months. Excellent.

51:11 Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for providing further commentary to today's news release and always being available to shareholders. But enjoy your long weekend. Yeah, happy Easter weekend, everybody, and stay tuned. Okay. More good news coming. You