Chesapeake Gold Announces Metallurgical Results

0:08 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for this live event. We're joined by John Paul Sotso, Interim CEO of Chesapeake Gold. Today he'll be providing further context on the recent press release regarding the metallurgical results for the Metates project. Following his update, we will be having a live Q&A session. So please do submit your questions in the bottom right corner in the chat box there. Also, this event is being recorded. So you will be able to watch it shortly after on YouTube. With all the housekeeping out of the order, John Paul, the floor is yours.

0:39 Thank you so much, Kyle, and welcome everyone. I'm very happy to provide an update on the metallurgical work at Metates and the advancement of our proprietary oxidative leach technology. The next 2 slides here are just cautionary notes. I would ask that you take a moment after the presentation or during the presentation to have a chance to read them. They're also on our corporate presentation on our website if you want to go back and take a look. Overall, we'll be making some forward-looking statements, so take it as a grain of salt and I'll jump right into the new results. So this is just an overview of Chesapeake Gold. Metates and the technology will be the focus. But just a reminder, we do have 3 assets within Chesapeake.

1:27 There's Metates, the 19Moz Gold deposit with another almost 500Moz of Silver. There's our proprietary Oxidative Leach technology. And then there's our new Oxide Gold discovery at Lucy, only 60km west of Matates in Sinaloa. As you know, we're well-founded. We have 15 million in the treasury and we have very supportive shareholders with Eric Sprott, Peter Palmetto at Sun Valley and several members of our board, including Alan Pangborn and Randy Reifel. In total, that's about 40% of our equity. And so we're well positioned to continue to advance the Chesapeake story with the funds that we have internally. So now on to the technology.

2:14 So you guys have heard myself talk about the technology over the past year. To be more clear about what the technology is and how the technology works, you look at nature and nature has actually been doing this through the history of our Earth. You find any oxide deposit anywhere in the world, and at one point that oxide deposit was a sulfide deposit. And over 100 millions of years, that sulfide deposit interacted with fluids that the Earth put near the minerals. And those fluids, over those 100 million years, transformed those sulfide minerals into oxide minerals. In modern day, we've been searching for oxide deposits, discovering them.

3:02 We've been able to mine and extract the metals in these oxide deposits. And the biggest challenge that we've had is once the oxide minerals have been mined out and we reached the sulfide layer that still exists deep in the deposits, there's really very few options for us to actually extract the precious metals out of those sulfide deposits. There's a report that was put out by McKinsey & Company back in March of 2021 that looked at all the gold globally. And of that, they estimated about 1 in 4 gold ounces or 25% of the total gold are trapped in this refractory 4. So the beautiful chart on the on the left hand side here shows they estimated 2.6 billion ounces of gold globally in reserves and resources.

3:54 And of that, about 25% or 580 million ounces are considered refractory. Now To put that into perspective, if you would take the price of Gold last month, $2,500, that basically, you multiply the 2 of them together, that represents a $1.5 trillion market. And to be clear, When companies go and they explore and they drill into the sulfides, they stop. Most people realize the challenges of trying to extract metal from refractory types and so they stop drilling. I would say that this is a very concerted estimate on what the size of the global refractory market is. And I think looking at it, it's a great opportunity for anyone that is able to extract that value. And I believe that Chesapeake has the technology to address this big challenge.

4:50 When we look at the grades in the McKinsey report, they estimate that refractory type deposits are nearly double the grades of non-refractory type. The average grade is about 2.25g per tonne, which gives us a lot of margin to work with, but also gives us access to really high quality deposits that are being overlooked by the industry. So the key thing about our technology is we've looked at what nature does over 100 millions of years, and over the last decade we have harnessed that power, harnessed that knowledge, and we've been able to show that we can get nature's process down to a timeline of months, which is a great advancement on the technology side.

5:43 The ways that Chesapeake has been moving forward in the background and more in the light, I guess more recently, is we've been working diligently in the background to continue to advance this technology. You'll recognize just a few months ago, We acquired the license that we had from Highcroft and we acquired that for $5M, $2M in cash and $3M in shares at a very high price, Chesapeake price. We got a very good deal. Highcroft is no longer involved in the process at all. They do have shares, so they do have upside potential if we were to rate or continue to grow through the technology. But all of the hooks that were in the previous agreement, they've all been pushed away. So basically number 2 here tells us that, you know, it's completely royalty-free technology.

6:39 We have a portfolio of patents that we also acquired in that process, as well as patent applications. We've actually submitted a brand new patent, which we highlighted in the press release, and that is to cover a bunch of the newer innovative things that we've come up with to help advance the technology forward. Number 3 really highlights that we really have the in-house experience and expertise with the technology. As everyone knows Alan Pangborn has been talking about the technology to everyone for the past 3 years. Prior to that when the technology was in Highcroft, Randy Buffington was talking about the possibility and the opportunity that the technology would provide for the industry.

7:26 And underlying all of that, the lead technologists that worked at Highcroft actually is our QP at Chesapeake. And so our in-house expertise on this is nearly a decade. And so that's a lot of R&D expertise that we've been using to advance this technology. And then the last thing, now that it's well known that this has been tested on 2 sites. We're showing very positive results on 2 sites now, and I can share that actively. We are looking for other opportunities for this technology because we believe that this $1.5 trillion market out there, that we have a technology that can tap into this market. So last year, we highlighted the fact that we had the technology and we were working towards advancing the rate at which we can oxidize the rock.

8:22 And the key discovery that we had last year was we tested a whole bunch of different variables, and through that test work we found a certain set of variables that allowed us to increase the speed at which we oxidize the material. So the best previous result that we had was in within the first 60 days, we achieved about 10% oxidation. But with this one set of results, we were able to achieve 15%, which is 50% faster than what we had previously done. And also through this process, we found numerous ways where the set of variables, they didn't work very well and we actually achieved lower oxidation rates.

9:07 But the way that we look at this is, you know, Thomas Edison, when he created the light bulb, you know, he tried 999 different ways to do it, And only one way worked. And that way, he patented it, he commercialized it, and we have light today. That green bar there is our light bulb. And all the other light bulbs that failed is that smaller blue bar, and we just throw those away. This is also great because if anyone tries to chase us there's lots of ways not to run the technology and that gives us additional protection and time to continue to advance it on our side. So what we did last year is we actually took the columns that were working faster and we ran a series of those columns and that's what the results were that we highlighted the other day.

9:58 So Here's the chart from the news release. You can see that on the far left, where we did not use the oxidative technology at all, and we just did straight cyanide leaching, we were only able to achieve about 33% of the Gold recovered and about 35% of the Silver. That is basically why it's called refractory and why these deposits are overlooked. They were tested with Cyanide to see if recoveries could be achieved that were economic and they were not. But through the use of our technology, and you can see here that we've applied the technology to 126 days, then 146 days, and then 200 days.

10:45 And In each case, the higher the oxidation level we were able to hit, the higher recoveries. It was positively correlated. Going from the 204 days versus the 0 days, you can see that's a doubling of Gold Recovery. This is Metathase rock from site, unoxidized. This is from a previous test that was done a while back, where you can see the material is actually oxidized. You can see that it's definitely a little bit more rusty and brown versus the previous unoxidized form. You can physically see, both in the test work and the samples that you take, the actual changing of the rock and the changing of the color because the sulfides are actually oxidizing and going from what was pyrite to hematite, which is commonly known as rust.

11:46 So you can physically see the changes happening, chemically we can see the changes happening, and really this next result is very important because now that we have a time series, then we can start to address other questions about the technology.

12:06 So this is an old slide that was in our presentation a while back. I'll go through it very simply. A, which is the chart on the farthest left, is really the oxidation process. What we were trying to do in that is we were trying to, under the fewest number of days, to achieve the highest amount of oxidation. So You can see from the previous graph, now we have in the blue numbers on the top, the oxidation levels and the time on the bottom. The next one is B. Now that is looking at the actual leaching with cyanide. Okay. And what we found generally with all the samples that we've done is the rate of leaching is very similar. We get maybe about 80 to 85% of what we're gonna get within the first 10 days.

13:02 And then afterwards, we can recover above that as well. But we really get the lion's share of the recoveries of the metals within the first part. And then the last chart here really is the combination of A plus B, which has the sulfide oxidation on the bottom. Again, those are the blue numbers on the previous phase and the recoveries. The key thing that we're looking at here, there's obviously a cost of running the technology, but there's also a cost with regards to the capital required during the time we wait for the material to actually oxidize and then we actually get the bar gold on the end. It's called working capital.

13:50 So the more we reduce the time from blasting and mining to the point where we get a bar of gold, the lower amount of working capital is required until we get the first bar of gold. And so that's something we've always been optimizing. So it's both going to be the working capital and the cost of the process. And then there are going to be a trade-off versus the recoveries. And so with the data that we have now, we can actually do an optimization and determine what is actually the ideal recovery. At the end of the day, if you go back to our 2021 PEA, we were targeting 70% Gold recovery in that PEA.

14:39 70% might end up being the optimum with the results that we have. Maybe it's 72%, Maybe it's the 74%. Maybe we can actually push it out even further, or maybe it's 68%. But the whole purpose of all the work that we were doing and why we were trying to achieve recoveries above 70% was not only to validate our PEA, but also to make our technology analogous to regular heap leach. So regular heap leaches globally achieve somewhere between the 70 and 80% recovery range. And now with our technology, we're heading into that same area, which is which is a wonderful step forward for the work that we're doing.

15:33 So I've talked about the chemistry and now I'm just going to highlight how it actually works. And so in the top 2 images, you have marcosite on the right hand side and there's the chemical formula there in the brackets of iron and sulfur. And so I have actually marcosite with me here. You can see that same radial pattern and growth on it. And then the image on the left-hand side, image 1.8, you can actually see that same radial pattern in that image. You can see that's crustal form, the additional gross. So at some point, that was actually marcosite as well. But you can see on the end of the SCM, so these are pictures done at 50 microns, so very small, they're pictures done in the rock that I showed earlier that's been oxidized and we found that you know what we thought was marcosite. But on the end of the electron microscope, there's actually an XRF and it tells you when you take a point-spot measurement exactly the chemical formula. You can see here that all 3 points no longer have sulfur associated with it. There's no S, it's now O. So that's iron with oxygen, which is known as hematite and again is commonly known as rust. So this is an example where we went from figure 1B to 1A using the technology.

17:01 All the sulfur has been stripped away, leaving an oxide form

17:07 of hematite. That oxide form, when you place cyanide on it, you recover the gold. That is the goal of our technology, is to take the sulfur away, replace it with oxygen, and then in that state we're able to recover the gold. So the next image on the bottom left corner, so that was the first way, complete dissolution and replacement of sulfur with oxygen. In the bottom left corner is massive pie. Right here is an example from a museum quality here, and there's a whole bunch of holes in it. And you can see on the image here, we've drawn on and yellow these mineral cleavage planes. So the chemistry actually eats into it like worms, falling along those holes in the rock and the mineral, eating away and everywhere where it's grey or black, the point samples on the X-ray app came back as iron and oxygen, and where you have the lighter portions, they're still pyrite. So this is an in-process conversion of the pyrite into hematite, And so it's not fully converted.

18:19 The last example is similar to one of the pure forms of pyrite, which is this cubic form that I'm holding up. And if anyone walks down to the nearby lake or the nearby ocean to where they live, you'll always see chains keeping people from falling into the water. And if you go up really close, if you look at those chains, on the outside, they're rusted and cracked. But if you were to cut that down the middle and have a look inside, you would see that it's still solid iron in the middle. And so the bottom right image basically shows the chemistry's been eating from the outside in. You can actually see the cracks, the forming, so it's just like that chain with the cracks on the outside and the rust. So it's eating from the outside in. There's still the solid core, in this case it's pyrite, and every point sample taken on the outside has come back as hematite.

19:12 There's a shadow on the left-hand side right there where we're calling it the transition zone, where we can see some iron and oxygen and some iron and sulfur, where it's transitioning from 1 to the other. And then again, the center still has pyrite. But what's interesting is there's a crack that goes through the middle core of pyrite, and you can see the actual chemistry preferentially eating down it. So we can physically show how the chemistry is actually doing the work as well. So I'm going to switch over to, you know, looking at the technology on a scale of, you know, what is it going to do and how is it also going to change the way we do our business. And one of the things that these are not our numbers, these are the latest numbers from Barrick Gold.

20:01 And what we've taken is Pueblo Vale, which is an autoclave over in Dominican Republic and Veradero, which is a heap leach operation in Argentina. They're very similar operations. They both have similar trucks. They both are on diesel. The only difference between the 2 operations is really the processing technology. And the great thing about Barrick is they do a wonderful job of actually going out to site and quantifying everything and making it comparable so that they can say where all their operations scale when it comes to energy use, water consumption and GHG emissions. What I've done on the slide is I basically put the autoclave system against the heat bleach. And as you know, the autoclave system is one of the other options that people have to extract precious metals from refractory ore.

21:02 But you can see in every case here, it's a lot more intense on the environment. So a lot more water consumption, a lot more energy use and a lot more GHG emissions per ounce of gold produced. And so our technology would be working more on the veradero side over on the heap leach side where the chemistry is actually doing the work. And so the energy going in is from the chemistry, it's a chemical reaction, no energy needs to be put into the system. Autoclaves also require that you float a concentrate of sulfides, so the pyrites. But in our case, we just put all the material onto a heat bleach, so there's no flotation, so that's why there's less water consumption. And then because there's not, you know, large autoclave tanks basically running a lot of heat and pressure, the GHG emissions are much lower in a heat bleach environment.

21:57 So those are the significant benefits of what the technology can do. The conventional way of dealing with refractory is now moving to a way that's a lot more environmentally friendly. And again, if there's no flotation, there's no need for a tailings facility. And so once you go into a heat bleach environment, I'm not building power plants or desalination plants to bring more water. So the potential for permitting becomes a lot more simplified. And so that's another benefit to where the technology is going.

22:35 This last slide here, it's just to help get people's mind wrapped around how the technology is gonna be implemented at Metates. Now this is our 2021 PEA site layout. In the corner, we have those concentric circles. That's actually where the pits are going to be located. That's where the mining happens. The material is brought up and there's a green area here which starts the crushing phase. It's a three-stage crush. We're getting it down from the larger blocks from mining down to something, let's say, around a half inch. Then that material is then brought over to the oxidative leach pads. That's that blue football field here. And the way that we would envision this is, so we have 200 days of oxidation to get to that 74%.

23:26 So let's do cells of 20 days to make this simple. So the first 20 days of mining and crushing, the material is placed on cell number 1, all by conveyors and just basically laid out. It moves to cell number 2 in the next 20 days of material. And that now continues until we get to day 10. And at day 10, we put another 10 days, 20 days of material down. Well, back at cell 1, we've actually already been there 200 days. So the material has actually been subjected to our chemistry for 200 days. So it's achieved the oxidation level that we're targeting. So that it goes back over to that first cell, and then with a rotary shovel, we pick up the material back onto the conveyor, and that material is then brought over to the heap leach. And that's these 2, this large pink area here.

24:17 And Then we're back to being a standard heap leach operation. The material is placed on the heap leach, it's cyanide leached, and then the fluids that come off the leach

24:34 then go through into our ponds and into our Merrill Crow plant, which then treat it. Then we get into a refinery and we produce Barso Gold. That gives you an idea of how exactly this would look when we implement to that site. I guess to summarize before we jump into questions, last year we found a faster way to oxidize. This year, with these latest results, we've shown that we can recover up to 74% Gold with our technology over about 200 days, which is a great step forward. This also unlocks the global refractory gold deposit market, which is one of the things that we're targeting. And our technology, if you remember, our original autoclave plan for 2016 had it at $3.6Bn.

25:29 And we put our 2021 PEA out, the capital cost of that was $360 million. So using our technology, not requiring all the infrastructure for an autoclave system, really brings down the capital intensity when using our technology. We already discussed the environmental footprint benefits and generating green gold. And this gives us a competitive advantage over our peers because we're working towards a viable alternative to unlocking refractory minerals. So the work that we're doing next, the work that we did now is going to get put into a PFS. And so we're putting all the data in there, doing the trade-off work.

26:15 And then we're also going to send new material from site up to the lab, and we're moving to larger diameter tests. So that's really the next step to continue to scale up the test work. So large diameter, smaller heaps, a pilot plant. And so that's the normal commercialization pathway that would be taking the technology through. And so a lot of the work that's being done on the next phase would then feed into the feasibility study thereafter. Elsewhere, we're continued to prioritize drilling at Lucy. We're still doing the work in the background. Like I mentioned already, the data from this latest set of results will be fed into a pre-feasibility study.

27:01 And then on the back end of the pre-feasibility study, we'll be working towards permitting metates and moving that side forward as well. And we are continuing to do environmental baseline work at site. And then the last thing that we're still waiting for is a resolution on San Vicente 3. So those are really the upcoming catalysts. And again, as a reminder, we have a well-financed treasury, supportive shareholders, and we have a management team that is working very diligently to continue to show value of both Metates, the technology and our new Lucy discovery. So Kyle, you can pass it on to Q&A now. Excellent. Excellent presentation, John-Paul. Thank you very much. The chat box is already getting full of questions, so that's great to see.

27:51 Now there have been a lot of investors waiting for this news and I think I'm just going to ask directly, just how big of a deal is this news release and these MET results? Yeah, so, you know, looking at the smaller scale for Matates, you know, if people go back to the 2021 PEA, you know, we estimated at the time that the technology could achieve something around 70% recovery. You know, we internally believe that we could probably do better than that. But it was great to finally have results that, you know, we're able to achieve greater than 70%. And we're continuing to do more test work on the back of that to continue to confirm those results and hopefully push the barrier a bit more and continue to see how high we can get the recoveries to.

28:41 This is a big step forward for Matates and for the technology. When you look at the bigger market idea, you know, there's like I mentioned, $1.5 trillion market of refractory metals that are locked in the ground everywhere. And if our technology is able to tap into that, that is, you know, I would say that would be comparable to, you look at the oil and gas industry and, you know, Hubbard, the Hubbard curve has basically been talked about for decades, about how US oil and gas is going to hit a peak somewhere in the 60s, 70s, and then oil continues to go down.

29:27 And the US made huge decisions to lock all their crude within the country and store it to protect themselves and protect their sovereignty. That was on the basis of a peak oil production. What did we see early 2000 to 2010? 2 technologies at the time, which was fracking and directional drilling, were combined together and large resources were unlocked. The Balkan was unlocked, the Permian Basin was unlocked, And now the US is producing so much oil and gas that they actually changed the laws to allow them to export crude because they were unable to deal with the amount of crude that they were producing. So we're working hard on our side in order to solve the challenges in the gold space. I'm not saying that this is going to change the world by unlocking every single refractory out there, but you get an idea of how big that this could potentially be if we're able to commercialize the technology and then distribute it globally.

30:40 Yeah, it certainly can be transformational. Could you outline your strategy for monetizing this tech beyond Metatase and what criteria you're using to evaluate potential opportunities? We're keeping a keen eye on market updates from assets from various sized companies. We're keeping a keen eye on whether there's updates where they have a refractory challenge

31:09 or drilling has happened and drilling has stopped because they've hit sulfide and they're basically just drilling out the oxide. We're keeping an eye on the market to see what potential is out there. We have a list of names already of opportunities. I say that the technology is worth taking a look at. Internally, we're going to take the normal commercialization approach, increasing the scale of the test work as we're moving. But opportunities present themselves where we could do test work on other projects as well. There's other opportunities to confirm the technology beyond its use at Metates.

31:54 And so we're looking to see other opportunities to open it up and really get an idea of how big this could be. Now, in this press release, it's stated silver represents about 30% of Metatase's economic value, yet the current recovery improvement is around 20% after 146 days. So What specific approaches are you exploring to enhance the Silver recovery rates and how might this impact the overall project economics? That's a great question. As you mentioned, it's 30% of the value of the ounces in the ground. It's a lower proportion of the total revenue generation of Metates.

32:40 The focus of the work that we've been doing has been on the Gold and improving the gold recoveries through the technology. Now that we've got it to an area where we feel very comfortable, the focus will shift in the new phases to start looking at the silver and optimizing the silver recoveries as well. But to put this into perspective,

33:04 you look at the resource of Metates in the PEA, and we were estimating 70% recovery. I've now increased that if I just drop in 74% and that value increase, so the additional recovery of metals, basically offsets that loss that we've had on the Silver side. I think we just looked at it on a whole. If I look at the recovered metal at Metates, I just take the metal price, $1,600 gold and $22 silver at the time, and I multiply it by the amount of ounces recovered with the change in recovery, I think it just slightly declined by like 2%. I think in total it's out of $6 billion worth of value.

33:54 It's just about $100 million is what we're losing in this lower recovery than expected. But I think the key thing to note here is, so that's the PEA. Obviously we've added another $1,000 worth of Gold since we put down the PEA and another $10 of Silver since we did the PEA. So there's a big crease on that side. But there was also exploration that we did to improve the resource. And we put our resource back in early 2023 that showed that we have about 17% higher grade in gold. And that's also not accounted for in the PEA. So stepwise, I think we're actually doing a lot better. But you're right. You know, the next set of test work will focus on improving also the silver recoveries alongside the gold.

34:47 Arjun in the chat is wondering if you update the NPV values in your corporate deck with the current recoveries. So what's in the deck is basically what came in the PA. Unfortunately, without us doing a full economic study, I could not provide you with the new numbers. But if you wanna go back and take the PEA numbers right over PEA and put them in a model and drop in the new recoveries, you're more than welcome to do that to get an idea of how the increase happened. But we're bound by 43-101 just to highlight exactly what was done at the time. And he has a follow-up question here. So Just to confirm, the next study is the PFS and can you provide any length, any timelines on that?

35:39 There's a bunch of work that we've been doing. Obviously, the metallurgical work has been the key amount of work. We basically have drilled it off to the level we want for the PFS, that's good. We've been doing environmental baseline work constantly at site, so that's still ongoing. And then we're doing a bit more work on the infrastructure side, like looking at the roads and water requirements. And so all of that would feed into this PFS. And the idea would be to probably put it off, probably the second half of next year. Now, the press release also mentioned upcoming larger diameter column tests. What specific operational parameters are you looking to validate in this next phase and how would that influence the PFS timeline?

36:29 Yeah, So the larger diameter columns are not going to be incorporated into the PFS. The work of that stage would actually be towards the feasibility study. But basically what we've taken is, we have 8 foot columns, 6 inch diameter in the lab with the work that we've been doing now. We'll be moving to something larger, probably 12 foot by 12 inch diameter. And that gives you an idea of more what you would see in a pad environment because you're larger diameter, larger material, and now we're starting to get more volume of the solutions off. And so it gives us a, you know, it's the really the next step on fully understanding what it would look like in reality.

37:16 Thank you for that. So Matthew has a question here about the scale today, what the scale is currently and how much does it have to grow to get to a pilot plant stage? Like I said, we've already done the regular diameter. We're going to go to larger. Then we probably want to do some test pads, small, we're talking probably a thousand kilograms of material. And then afterwards from there, then we would move up to a pilot test. And that's just basically the standard way of doing things. I think, you know, there may be opportunities to streamline this and get to that point faster. If there's other opportunities, like I mentioned earlier, where other companies are interested in testing the rock and they already have material on a pad, there might be other ways of looking at this.

38:12 But right now we're moving towards the normal commercialization pathway. Thank you. Anthony has a question about the technology. He's just wondering, how is it different, if at all, from the alkaline oxidation developed by High Crop Mine in Nevada? Yeah, so there's a couple of things that are different. It's a little bit challenging for me to describe them right now because we filed brand new patents and right now they're under confidentiality. But there are significant differences. There was a couple of things that we did change from the Highcroft way of doing things to the way that Chesapeake is doing things.

38:59 And At some point I'd be happy to share that with you, but my lawyers tell me I should not be talking too much about the exact incurrencies of the patent. Got you, understood. Another question on the tech, and then when do you expect this tech resource can be used to begin generating cash flow? Yeah, so I would say a metatase, we have to go through the PFS, the feasibility, then we're gonna have to build it. And so we're a few years out for that. But there might be other opportunities, like I mentioned, where someone has material, where we could test the technology. And if we would go down the route like that, say a licensing pathway, where we license the technology to a third party, or there might be opportunities where there's an asset that is abandoned that could use the technology and then we can look at that as well as another opportunity to advance the technology.

40:04 But right now, we're focused more on what we currently have, which is, it's a few years out before we can show value, but there are other ways of testing it and bringing cash flows forward faster. Yeah, that licensing idea is interesting. T. Lee was inquiring about that as well. And just, if at all, are you able to provide a timeline? He says, when might you look to test your process and material from other refractory projects? Yeah, so I can't say what stage we're at on looking at other people's projects, but if the opportunity does put in front of us, you'd be the first to know when we put out an update saying that the technology is being actively used at a different site.

40:56 We have a couple of jurisdiction questions here. Bill is wondering what is the time frame for DFS and permitting? Has the new government shown any interest in allowing a large heap leach to be permitted? There have been recently some heap leaches that have been permitted in Mexico. There's still things, I think Camino Rojo is one of them that has been advanced recently. But there's other, you know, looking at the heap leaching, and I know there's also a question about the potential ban on open pit mining in Mexico. And just to address that question, you know, the new president Claudia, when she came out on her first day, she had 100 pledges of what is important for her and for her government.

41:52 And from that, you know, previously they had discussed the open pit mining ban that actually has been removed from her pledges that she put on her first day and on her inauguration. And so Chesapeake and Metates is in a good position to continue to advance Metates. The other interesting thing that was brought up prior to her inauguration, They were looking at the actual open pit question and they've added additional wording in looking at exceptions if the deposit or project is considered to be strategic for Mexico and the Mexican people. And when I think about that, Metates is one of the largest endowments of precious metals globally.

42:41 And because of that, that would put us in the bin of being strategic. I know that we have a very supportive local community, local Hito, we have a very supportive local government, and our state government in Durango has been very supportive of us continue to advance metates. And so we would start from grassroots and work our way up to provide our case to the federal level that, you know, our technology provides an environmentally friendly way of extracting metal, but also provides, you know, significant benefits to the community, the state, and also the country, if we were to continue to, if we were able to permit and then develop Metates.

43:29 Thank you. Arjun has a question regarding Metates, Just inquiring if you have the mining concession for the Matates project. Yeah, so the only one that's outstanding right now is San Vicente 3. This was lost last year just prior to me joining Chesapeake. Just to go back on that, every year they do a review of all of the claims and every company this happens. And When they do a review, they select 3 claims out of your numerous set of claims to audit. Every year we provide detailed proof of the work that we've done to hold the claim.

44:16 We also offer a site visit. And so all of our claims are up to date around metates for the taxes and everything. It was just a question of whether we actually did the work on the claim specifically San Vicente 3, we provided detailed explanations and detailed bills showing that we've done the work. And we did offer them a site visit to see the work that had been done. They actually said no to going to see the site work. In previous years, they had gone to see site work, but in this case they chose not to. And shortly thereafter we were notified that the claim had been basically removed. So we've appealed that decision by the DGM, the agency that removed the claim, and it's been in the courtroom for about a year now.

45:12 And to put that perspective, there's 3 levels of court, just like in Canada and the US. So we're in the first level. If a positive decision is given to us, the opposite side obviously has a chance to appeal or decide not to appeal. But if we do get a decision that's not favorable, We do have 2 other attempts at it until there's a final decision that's made. If in the worst case scenario, the decision doesn't go in our favor on the last round, that claim actually gets put back into the system and then an auction process has begun and because we were the previous owner, I'm told that we get to match the top bid within plus or minus 10% so we'll get the claim back 90 cents on the dollar.

46:03 And the big thing here is just the time that we need to wait and then the legal fees. But I guess the key point is, we don't believe we've done anything wrong. We have years of precedents showing the work that we've provided and nothing is different this time. Our lawyer that's been doing work with us for decades, he is very firm that we've done everything right. Our board, using their fiduciary duty, got a third-party lawyer to review. They reviewed the whole case and what we had provided and we've done everything right there. So really what it comes down to, I think we have a very strong case that there was a mistake made on the part of the DGM and So we're just now waiting for the judge to provide their final decision on it.

46:50 Thank you, Jean. We have one more question in the chat and I'm just gonna read David's question verbatim cause he kind of stripped some of your irons from the fire in the way he phrases the question. He says, with so much time to start on Matates as a mine, what might move the stock price other than the price of gold, legal resolutions and increased knowledge of Lucy's value? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, There's a couple of, you know, we have the 3 assets, right? Obviously, Metates, we continue to move forward. The PFS would definitely, when we get that out, really highlight to the market the value that has been created by the technology and also de-risk it as well. When it comes to Lucy, we're still doing work on the metallurgical work side on Lucy.

47:45 We're still doing work on the structural side, understanding how the system, the SCARN system, is locked into potential sources of heat and mineralization at depth. All that work is still going on and we're still advancing loose heat. When it comes to the technology, we basically are layering protections around the technology and we're building like a medieval castle, like a big fortress around our technology because we believe at Chesapeake that our technology is probably worth more than any other piece of our company combined because it not only improves Metatis' value, but if we continue to advance the technology, then we're now looking at what it can do on a global scale.

48:36 And that opens up us to many other possibilities. Excellent. John Paul, thank you for the great presentation. And everyone, Thank you for the great questions. There's many of them. If you did come in late, this is being recorded and our team will have it up in a couple hours here on YouTube. So feel free to watch the replay. Sean Paul, do you have any closing remarks before we end the call? Yeah, I just wanna thank everyone for attending today and for continuing to have interest in Chesapeake, Mitates and our technology. I'll continue to provide updates to everyone as new information comes available. But if anyone's interested, I'm always open to having a conversation after this call and don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you