Copper Conviction: Three Explorers in Michael Gentile's Portfolio

0:04 So, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Michael Gentile. I'm joined today with 3 of my top investments in the copper sector in the junior mining space. Just a housekeeping item before we begin, just let you know this is a live event, but there will be a recording available after for others to watch the episode here today. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm going to start just a quick 3, 4 minute overview on my approach to junior mining in the sector. And then we're going to transition quickly afterwards to the 3 companies which are the main event of the interview today. I am a strategic investor in the junior mining space. I personally own the top shareholding position of about 35 junior mining companies. I worked for 25 years as I still do as an institutional fund manager, currently with Bastion Asset Management. I also deploy a lot of my own personal capital in the junior resource sector. So the personal investments are in the microcap junior exploration space that we're talking about today. I also help run about 900 billion dollars for Bastion Asset Management, invest typically in all sectors and the mining space and producing assets. So I have a unique perspective where I go all the way from a $10 million microcap all the way to some of the biggest mining companies in the world in terms of what I cover in the space. And it gives me a unique perspective from that level.

1:10 When I started in 2018, deploying a lot of my capital in the junior resource spectrum, my personal capital, I realized it was a bit of the Wild West, kind of a casino mentality. And I wanted to bring an institutional rigorous approach to investing in junior mining, which I felt was lacking. Having invested in producing companies for close to 20 years at the time, I tried to reverse engineer what are the hallmarks of producing assets and how to identify those producing asset potential as early as possible in the market life cycle of a company. If you look at the analog that I tried to do for investing in junior resource sector, really the venture capital model, which is very prevalent in Silicon Valley, where early stage investors will invest in 20, 30, 40 early stage tech companies looking for 1 Amazon, 1 Facebook, 1 SpaceX that returns them hundreds of times their money and pays for a lot of mistakes and failures you have at early stage venture capital tech investing. I saw this similar risk reward potential in junior mining with very few investors doing what I was doing. The issue is there's about if you look at the Canadian and Australian stock markets, so there's about 3000 listed junior mining companies. So how do you find the handful of companies within that pool of 3000 companies that are going to be producing assets? If you just take a mathematical approach, it's probably 1 in 500, maybe 1 in 100 of a listed companies will actually 1 day end up being producing assets. So what I tried to do is how do I increase my batting average from 1 or 2% to 10 or 20%? If I can get 1 out of 10 or 2 out of 10 right and make 30, 50 times my money when

2:40 I'm right, it'll pay for all the mistakes that you have to make in the sector to have success. So I look to take a long term approach when I invest in a junior mining company, typically hanging on for 5 to 10 years, typically committing to the companies to be there for the next 4 or 5 financing rounds as they finance the company. And I'm targeting a 5 to 20% ownership stake when I make initial investment in a junior mining company. My initial threshold when I write my first check is to look for 20 to 50 times my money. So 2.0 to 5.0 times my money on my first check. Again, that's the venture capital type returns I'm looking for in the sector. And what I try to do is, again, reverse engineer the quality and characteristics of companies that have potentials to be a mine, even before we really know it's a mine. There's a lot of things you can knock off in terms of red flags, infrastructure, grade, jurisdiction. We're going to cover a lot of those in the interview today.

3:29 Today, The interview is focused on one of my favorite commodities, which is copper. As many of you know, for much of the last 15 years, the metals and mining markets have been in a bear market. There's been very little capital available for exploration and even less capital in the copper space available to build, permit and construct new mines. What's happened recently is with the AI revolution, with de-globalization, with a major reshoring effort across the world, we're seeing a major build-out of infrastructure across the developed world to capitalize on these trends, which is putting never before seen demand growth pressure on copper price, the copper market. So the next 5-10 years look very, very robust in terms of demand for physical copper in the market. At the same time, we've had 15 years of massive underinvestment in the Copper space.

4:18 So that bodes extremely well for the long-term Copper price and bodes extremely well for companies like 3 of which are on the call today that are in areas that have really good infrastructure and have potential, in my view, to become producing mines in this cycle. And so that's why we're focused on copper today in a meaningful way. On the call today with me, I have mentioned 3 of my largest investments in the junior copper resource market. We have Graham Downs, president and CEO of Cascadia Minerals. We have Chris Petit, CEO and president of Cantera Minerals and Luke Norman, CEO and director of Leviathan Metals. So they're all 3 companies will be talking to us today about their stories and why I think there's such attractive investments for you viewers on this call today. So I mentioned earlier the copper space. Many copper assets have very long timelines to production and have equally large and imposing capital costs to build out their projects. So when I invest in the copper space, I'm also looking for projects that have advantage infrastructure, advantage location and relatively lower capital costs in order to allow these projects to have a better chance of being economic. I'm going to ask the same question to all 3 of our panelists here to start off. Can you talk a bit about the location of your project, Graham, and why you feel it's an advantaged area that will potentially lower the barriers to eventual production scenario 1 day for Cascadia Minerals.

5:35 Sure can. Thank you, Michael. I think you mentioned all the key things here. Our project is called the CarMax project. It's located in central Yukon. It's about 10km off of a government-maintained road, the Northern Freegold Road, and you can drive right into the CarMax project.

5:56 We're located just South of Saltkirk Copper Mines. They're looking to put that back into production very shortly. We are 10km from power from the Klondike Highway and a large network of roads. In recent years, our project has been enlarged to 180km2. We have a road accessible Copper, it's called the Minto Copper Belt. We've got an existing deposit that we're looking to make bigger. As the Yukon goes, as many people know, some places are infrastructurally challenged. We're very fortunate to have a higher grade Copper-Gold deposit on a road near infrastructure. So yeah, we can go into a little bit more a little bit later. Terrific. And for viewers watching, if you're not able to evaluate infrastructure and the advantage location of a project, 1 rule of thumb I like to use, which is really simple, is ask the company what their drill costs are per meter.

6:49 And as you know, Graham, being in Yukon

6:51 yourself for many, many years, you would know this, the drill costs per meter vary immensely in the Yukon. So maybe you could just share with the viewers what your drill costs are per meter. It's always a good proxy for quality and infrastructure availability next to project.

7:05 It really is. In most of my 30 years of working in the Yukon, it's all been helicopter access. When we saw this opportunity at CarMax, we were like, we can drive in there. We brought our all-in meter costs from about $800 plus per meter down to just under $400. It's an incredibly big advantage to be able to almost double your drilling from what I'm used to. It's amazing. We're very fortunate to have that. Perfect. Thanks, Ben. And Chris, just for you on the Cantera side, maybe talk to the viewers about where your project is located, the infrastructure advantages of some past production in the area as well. That gives you a really good, good starting place to build a project. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Michael.

7:47 Cantera Minerals is building out a district-scale copper-zinc-gold system in central Newfoundland, where we're surrounding and adjoining the region's newest mine, which is Equinox Gold's Valentine Mine. We control the Buckins district, which is one of the world's highest grade copper zinc massive sulfide districts.

8:11 And we've consolidated multiple deposits and former mines, including the Buckins mine into a single land package for the first time in the district's history. There are focused this year is really demonstrating the scale of that district. And that's where we're gonna do this by really delivering a made in resource estimate at Buckins and continuing to delineate out a pipeline of satellite deposits that we believe can drive long-term resource growth within the district.

8:48 And Central Newfoundland is really, you know, it has everything you need because of almost 100 years of mining development, starting with Buckins and then Tex Duck Pond, and now Valentine,

9:05 the Valentine Mine, being Atlantic Canada's largest gold mine. So you have power, roads, we're right near the major town in the region. So our all-in drill costs are $200 a meter. Sometimes we're lower than that, depending on where exactly we're drilling. But so our money goes a long ways in central Newfoundland. Terrific. And Chris, can you talk a bit about the permitting pathway in Newfoundland? I found that very attractive when I invested in Cantera in terms of the willingness of the provincial government to work proactively with mining companies in terms of permitting projects as well as the, I guess, the less cumbersome First Nations consultation process in the province due to, I guess, the lack of First Nations in Newfoundland.

9:53 Yeah, this is a great point, Michael. And when we first started in Newfoundland 5 years ago,

10:00 The premier at the time said they wanted 5 new mines in 5 years, which seemed like a lofty goal. But because Newfoundland, at least the island of Newfoundland is a bit unique in terms there's no traditional First Nations land claim settlement. We saw Equinox really Marathon Gold and then Caliber and now Equinox thereafter go from last discovery to full commercial production in just under 5 years, which I think is probably a record in Canada. It's really because when you go to permit a new development, your stakeholder negotiations are with the local government and the provincial government, which are, you know, they want new mines. And so, you know, they have the first in that goal of 5, and then Hammerdown was the second, which came online earlier this year.

10:58 And now it looks like Queensway or Firefly's

11:03 Green Bay project will become the next mines to go into production. They really do cut the red tape and do whatever they can to get projects in production, which has been great to work in that environment. Perfect. Thanks, Chris. So we're switching gears now. Graham's based in the Yukon and Chris is based in Newfoundland. So we're now moving to another part of the world with Luke Norman, Leviathan Metals into Botswana. A lot of investors I find in jurisdiction have too much of a black and white perspective. Canada is bad, Africa is bad, or Australia is good, and Latin America is bad. My experience is permitting projects and getting stuff done in mining is a hyper-local situation and very much dependent on where you're operating. There's parts of Canada where I would never want to build a mine and there's parts of Africa that would definitely prefer to build a mine to Canada. So Luke, you're in Botswana.

12:02 You're a little earlier stage, actually quite earlier stage for typically my portfolio. I typically like to invest in companies that have made a discovery already or have a resource already where I can get my arms around potential mining scenario at some point in the future. But your project was so compelling to me, Luke, in terms of the potential for discovery, where it's located and how quickly it could become cash flowing copper pounds or tons to how you look at it. So maybe, Luke, talk a bit about the location of the project, maybe even your skepticism about Botswana before you got involved in and how that won you over and how excited

12:33 you are about the project right now? Yeah and just like you said it's just a preconceived notion. It was from my perspective anyway that Africa was kind of a no-go zone. You know Africa was always covered by the Australian early stage startup companies and funded out of the UK generally in the early 2000s. So when our geologist, Jeremy Crozier came to me and suggested Botswana, I was a little sceptical to say the least. Botswana, of course, as I found out, as you are well aware, Michael, is Africa light. And you know, to get into Botswana, I fly in by way of Johannesburg, for example. Land in Johannesburg, feel highly unsafe, dangerous, dangerous part of the world these days.

13:19 Jump on a short flight 30 or 40 minutes up to Gaborone or another hour up to Ma'un, which is the other end of the Kalahari Copper Belt that I'll get into in a moment. And it's a tremendous

13:31 atmosphere. People are pride of ownership of their homes, their vehicles. There's this racial animosity does not exist. Of course, De Beers were in there very early, established some very, very big discovery, diamond discoveries, and that had effect on rule of law there. So mining law, everything is well, well established. So I was blown away when I first got to go there. And the other advantage to when I got to go there, of course, was it's coming up on 2 years now. And it was before this real big shift back into Copper and more in particular, people being now aware of the Kalahari Copper belt. The more traditional Copper belt, of course, in Africa being the central African Copper belt, To the South of that, it rips right through the middle of Botswana.

14:22 We have somewhere in the tune of about 8,000km2

14:26 of tenure along the belt. But the most important asset that we have from our current standpoint, of course, is the central asset. The reason why it's the most important is we're hunting for very shallow, high-grade mineralization, which is, I'll use the wrong term, but just to help people sort of picture it, image it kind of on strike to Komacao, which is a massive mining operation owned by MMG Mines, a Chinese conglomerate. We neighbour them. They are a multi-billion-dollar recent acquisition a few years ago. They've sunk another close to $1Bn into upping their throughput and we have just the same analogous geology to it. So really excited to get in and be drilling for Copper at 40 to 100m in depth.

15:18 So Graham, Chris and Luke all share one thing, a lot of things in common, that's why they're all in my portfolio, but all 3 of these assets are in the shadows of either currently producing mines or soon to be producing mines. And that is very important to me because what that does from my perspective is dramatically lowers your grade and scale requirements to get into production. If you've got existing mills and infrastructure and power and only running through your facility, then you really don't have to find that much good grilling, copper grade or scale to get into the economic hurdle or be an economic project. And so that's really what I like to see in a project. In Luke's case, it's pre-discovery, but literally in the shadows of a massive copper operation. Graham's got a mine being built just to the north of him. And Chris has new mines to the north and south, 1 going into production soon and one's already in production now. So that really helps in terms of the infrastructure being in place. And if you're in the middle of nowhere, you've got to find a heck of a lot of copper or gold to justify all the infrastructure that has to go in. So your chance of success on these 3 companies is much higher just based on pure math and pure numbers here, which is why I really like the setup. Taking 1 step back, guys, you guys also have a long history in the areas you're working in or in junior exploration. Let me just spend a couple of minutes each to maybe introduce your backgrounds, why you're working where you are right now, and maybe some of the key people on the team that complete the package. I always say that the right combination of rocks, people and shareholders is really what drives success in junior mining. I think all 3 of you companies have the right ingredients. Maybe you can talk about the people part of the story first a little bit for us. Graham,

16:49 please. Sure. I've been working up in the Yukon. I started up there in 1994. I started working with a geological engineering consulting firm called Archer Cathro. Long story, I ended up working through every stage of mineral exploration until I became CEO of a company called ATAC Resources. We found Canada's 1st Carlin-style mineralization.

17:12 Long story short, we sold that to Hecla a couple of years ago. In that deal, we spun out our Copper Gold assets. We were already transitioning to adding Copper Gold projects in ATAC at the time, spun out, put them into Cascadia. And then we saw this opportunity to merge with Granite Creek Copper to pick up this Carmack Copper Gold deposit. So that's how we kind of got there. A bit of my background, mainly working in Yukon. I invite everyone to look at our presentation on the website. We've all been working up in Yukon most of our careers. An amazing team, very technical. And then again, we've got, I haven't mentioned it yet, but we'll probably get into it. We just brought on Agnico as a key shareholder up to 19.9%.

18:00 We've got McKenzie Funds, yourself, Michael, Hecla. We've got a very nice registry of shareholders and obviously a long-term exploration history in the Yukon. It's what we know and It goes a long way when you're working up there. So that's my background. Thanks, Graham. And Chris, maybe talk to us about what lands you in Newfoundland and maybe some of the key people around there and yourself around you at the table here to help build Cantera. Yeah, Sure. So I'm a geologist by background. I'd spent most of my career

18:35 in Yukon with Graham and elsewhere in the Arctic, you know, jumping out of helicopters, chasing bears, looking for gold and copper. But really, It was when I was working in the US in Nevada with a company called Contact Gold, where I met our chairman, Andrew Farncombe. And

18:54 between him and I and some other people working in that same office with Integra Resources, we started looking for an asset. And Newfoundland was just coming to the forefront first with, you know, Valentine's discovery of the Marathon Zone and then later Newfound.

19:16 And really some of our network knew the Alteus resources guys who had the project adjoining what is now the Valentine mine and we ended up doing the deal with Alteus to get our foothold in on the island there in Newfoundland, and then really augmented the team, Andrew and I, with Matt Manson, who led Marathon through the discovery, construction, and ultimately merger with Caliber. So having him as part of our team, he brings a wealth of experience in central Newfoundland in particular, and particular on the development side of things.

20:00 Terrific. And then Luke, mentioned you maybe your background in junior mining, some of the success you've had, the team around you. If you want to take the anecdote of telling you how one of your top guys, Jeremy, got you into Botswana in the first place, it would be a fun time to tell that story to our viewers here. I'll do a double-edge here. My original reason I'm in the industry is through attrition. I used to finance a whole bunch of junior mining companies and get frustrated I think with management groups.

20:31 I left the brokerage side and I started, that was in 2000, started supporting management groups and then even more so in the last half a decade, decided, right, I've got to also step up and be on the board of these companies. So, you know, I'm a chairman of 2 and the CEO of this particular company. I was adamantly

20:52 focused on wanting to get into a really good Copper jurisdiction. Jeremy Crozier and I had this conversation half a decade ago And he went on a global hunt. We had Leviathan that still has some Gold assets in Australia, but let's go find something in the Copper space. So Jeremy set off. He was already familiar with Kalahari Copper belt, Discovery Metals, who had made the original discovery there. Cooper Canyon, ultimately consolidated what is now the Comacar cluster of deposits owned by MMG. He came to me and was extremely excited about this opportunity. And again, we'll defer back to what I mentioned in my previous little chat, which was in a complete unknown jurisdiction to me, Botswana.

21:41 So now that we're in there and We're actively drilling right now, which is exciting. I'm glad to tell everyone that we are in there now and drilling in towards the contact and enjoying where we're at with it right now. I won't get too far into that.

22:00 Jeremy's enthusiasm about the project has been just remarkable. He definitely got me on side, but he's also managed to get, you know, we've raised in the area of only around $15 million to date, but a lot of excited and happy shareholders alongside of us. Perfect, thanks Luke. So Graham and Chris, and I'll switch to Luke right after. Both of

22:22 you guys are both starting with pretty decent historical resources here at your projects. You know, my view, I'd classify you guys as knocking around the doorstep of an economic project, a little bit more exploration success, a little more grade, a little more tons. I think both your projects could be rapidly pushed into the economic winner category. So Graham, if you wouldn't mind just walk in the viewers view, what is the state of affairs now? What is the historical resource at Granite Creek?

22:47 Maybe walk through, You're well-funded with a pretty robust drill program for the first time in the company's history. Walk through, in broad strokes, what you're targeting and where you're hoping to move that resource. Obviously, no 403-101 compliant numbers here, but just in broad strokes, where are you trying to move that resource?

23:02 And what is sort of the economic threshold for you in your eyes where you sort of say, yeah, this is something I want to build? Great. So I think that's a key thing. There was a PEA done on the Carmex property a couple years ago. It's economic. It's just a 9-year mine life. And again, this deposit is kind of languished for, it's been around for a while, but it's languished because 1, it was looked at as just going after the small, shallow oxide for a long time. And then it was just in bad markets, like you said, for the last 10, 15-years. A total of 44,000m was done to get the 36Mt

23:37 of over 1% Copper equivalent. It's a great grade. The deposit, all 3 zones come to service. It's just a 9-year mine life. Actually, on the centre deposit, it wasn't even put in the PEA because it was done at lower prices. So, right out of the gate, we've got a huge head start. We're of the opinion that, listen, we know it's good now. We could rerun the numbers at current prices or even conservative prices from here. And this thing would look amazing. What we want to do is

24:07 build the resource. So we've got 36Mt, can we get it to 70Mt plus? We've got 651Mt of Copper. We want to get that closer to 1.5Bnlbs. We want to get the Gold closer to 1Mlbs and really hit this thing out of the park. We've embarked on a 15,000m drill program. It's going so fast we're already over halfway done in a month. We're going to have to drop down to 1 drill for a bit here, but we're well on our way. We got a program, because we just merged with Granite Creek Copper late last year, and we scrambled and got a small program done last fall. We demonstrated that we could step out and make this bigger. And That's what this 15,000m is going to do. We should have our first results out in a couple of weeks here. What we want to do is demonstrate that we can make this

24:54 bigger. I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to do that. Having a deposit that's over 1% Copper equivalent is amazing. Like I said, it comes to surface. We're very fortunate. What was the other part of your question there, Michael? That's more on the deposit. You alluded to it. What do you think the threshold would be?

25:14 When I say economic, lots of people have PAs that have economic PAs, but my version of economic is that a major mining company and or the capital markets will want to provide you the funds to build it now and they want to accelerate that. So what do you think the threshold, you sort of alluded to like 1 billion plus pounds of Copper and 1 million ounces of Gold sort of gets your firm on the radar screen, a bad grade of bigger mining companies that would really want to take this project seriously. I think that's exactly it. And I think what's really nice about our deposit is it fits this little area between these massive Copper deposits. There's going to be multi-billion or billion plus capex. Our capex is probably going to be closer to 300M. It's not going to be that much. We have a mine that's probably going to come onto production just north of us shortly in the next year or 2.

26:00 We just want to get after and build this resource as fast as we can. We'd even like to bump up the amount of drilling with how fast it's going this year.

26:08 We're well on our way and having this kind of grade is so critical. There's not very many of these in North America And it's just languished. Not many people have known about it for so many years. We're just getting the word out now. So, yeah, very fortunate. Yeah, I think it's a good point. I alluded to earlier, if you look at some of these mega copper projects, when you're talking 3, 4, 5 billion in capital, there's probably 5 or 10 mining companies in the world that could handle a capital number that big. And so if you have a project that's that size,

26:39 great for shareholders if it really happens to be one of the top 5 or 10 projects in the world of that size. But if you don't, it's very unlikely those big mining companies will take on 2 projects like that in 1 cycle. So you got to be really, really good if you're a $5 billion tag capital project number. So I like to focus on exactly what you said, Graham, on $300 million to half 1 billion to 1 billion dollars of capital. Because in that stack bracket, there's probably 150 mid-tier mining companies in North America, Europe and Australia that would happily build those projects. So your audience of buyers grows

27:09 and the audience of potential funding partners grows. And that's all 3 of you guys think are on projects. So in that snack size, in that bracket, that would make it much more appealing for potential acquirers, which is very important to me. So Chris, the Buckins project, you mentioned it's one of the highest grade, past producing BMS projects in North America. When you have very, very high grade projects, you tend to leave behind quite a bit of what today is now considered high grade back then would probably be considered low grade. You talk a bit about just just the resources you have currently around your arms around today, the historical

27:42 resources. And same question I ask, Graham, What are you targeting kind of goalpost wise for a made in resource and putting putting Cantera's, you know, VMS copper project on the map as well for investors in the coming months ahead?

27:56 Yeah, and so Buckins was a former mine. And And so, as you mentioned, they left out all the lower grade stock work material that fed the ultra high-grade massive sulphide that they so successfully mined for 50-years. And so right now, today, that resource within the former mine is 16Mt, 17Mt with the inferred.

28:21 Then we control also all the satellite deposits, which brings the global resource, those are historical resources, to 26Mt today. I think When you look at a massive Sulphide district, the threshold where you'll get a major mid-tier to push the button to invest or purchase, as we just saw with Foran. Agnico invested when they got to 30Mt.

28:54 I'm sure Firefly will garner significant investment in the future as they're now well past that, but it's 30Mt is the critical threshold.

29:06 For us, where we see our main resource growing this year is at the former Buckins Mine and our Lundberg deposit. As I said, right now that's 17Mt, but we've proven over the last year and a half now, in particular, through infill and step-out drilling on the northwest side of the deposit and at depth. We've been building out some higher grade areas of mineralization.

29:37 5m of 7% Copper equivalent in an upper zone. We've delineated through lots of drilling now, as well as a lower zone of 90m of 1% Copper equivalent that we've really started building out at depth. And that really is the low-hanging fruit here that's going to contribute to significant resource growth. And we're aiming to have our published first maiden resource at the former Buckins mine by the end of this year. But I think we've demonstrated over the last year and a half that it's going to grow significantly and get us where we're at today at 26Mt, really close to that 30Mt number.

30:23 Perfect. A couple of important points for our audience to know is that this area, it's the first time it's been consolidated in over 50 years, I believe. You and Andrew, the chairman, did a lot of hard yards of consolidating these various deposits. Now you have the bulk tonnage Lundberg deposit and you have these satellite high-grade pods. It's a wonderful economic mix for a project when you can have base bulk 1% copper and supplemented by high 3%, 4%, 5% pods and hybridization. That really helps the project economics work. And why it hasn't looked at in the past, I believe this project is because they've been owned by separate owners. So the consolidation that you did to put this project together, not only is allowing the project to grow for the first time in decades, but also to view this as a holistic entity of multiple deposits feeding 1 mill and potentially giving you some great economic benefit there. That's another key point that the viewers should keep in mind here.

31:15 Absolutely. It's the consolidation of those satellite deposits. They were disparately owned previously. Right. So we've already just, you know, in the last few weeks through, you know, putting together all of the satellite deposits and the property packages and all of the existing data sets, there's targets like really compelling geophysical targets that existed previously. It's just the previous operators didn't have all the ground, and so they wouldn't have known that conductor was just off their land package, but it's now within our package. And so, you know, there's going to be a lot of potential across this relatively immature district in terms of yielding a new massive sulfide lens discovery.

32:04 So while our Maiden Resource Estimate is an important milestone this year, we really see it as a starting point. And our objective is to demonstrate that the Buckins District is a growing critical minerals district, and not simply 1 deposit, but a pipeline of satellite deposits that can grow and ultimately feed the bulk tonnage Lundberg deposit at the former Buckins mine. Perfect. Thanks, Chris. Luke, you mentioned we're pre-discovery here at Leviathan. Obviously, drills are turning now and optimism is running high as we wait for those results. But the real story here, maybe you can help frame for our viewers, What is the size of the price? So what gives the more detail on MNG's discovery just to the north of us? How big that deposit is? And maybe like what kind of what kind of grade and tonnage potential are you targeting? If you have a if we have a similar, you know, closeology on strike target, you talked about it, it is pretty compelling as viewers look into the details here. What's the size of the price you're playing for here in Botswana?

33:12 Luke, I think you're on mute. Sorry, that'd be helpful. Comacao is a cluster of deposits with 1 centralized hub for, obviously, processing. Now, we're on strike, but what Komakau represents is about 280Mt of near 2% Copper. She's a behemoth. These deposits are laden along the edge of these domal structures. I won't try and get into creating a visualisation too much here, but we've got about currently 24km of a repeat dome, a long strike right next to some of their major, most significant new discoveries. In fact, when we flew over the project a year ago, there was just over a year ago, there was about 8 or 10 drill rigs operating just off our property boundary. So, definitely the inference is there that the mineralisation is going to continue within our camp.

34:12 We're also continuing a consolidation programme in and around. There are some other assets that we started working on about 12-months ago. We could be adding another 10-12km of strike to our already 24km of strike. One would imagine that there's going to be very good potential for several or a cluster of deposits along the edges of the dome. We're looking for, hopefully, multi-percent Copper. Again, very shallow. These are sedimentary hosted. When I say shallow, like I said, we're hunting anywhere from 40 to 150 meters under surface. It is compacted sand.

34:58 It's just recent technology that's really helped people be able to go in and highlight and find these. Central isn't all we have. Central is about 300km2 of tenement, again, directly adjacent to Komakau, but we have thousands of square kilometres all the way along the Kalahari Copper Belt. We're currently going in, we're drilling about $425 a metre. We pay down there just for people's interest sake. We're doing a 10,000 metre campaign right now. We're very, very early into the start of that campaign, into that program with some tremendous geophysics that we're following up on. It really seems to light up how the mineralization is potentially there.

35:45 So We'll see how things proceed here in the coming weeks and very short months. Luke, you're not a one-trick pony, Leviathan. You've got another asset that I'm quite keen on as well in Bosnia. I'm really impressed with you and Jeremy. You said you took a global view and try to find previously unexplored copper districts. I think you might have found 2 tigers by the tail here in terms of your search. Can we talk a bit about Bosnia and what you're seeing there, the work you've done to date and what has you excited about that project as well? Yeah, absolutely. So, Jeremy, of course, boots on ground. He's located in Poland, so he's on the right time zone for Africa, but you know, a good 10 or 11 hour flight away. But our project's in Bosnia, you know, he can get to and from in a day's travel.

36:31 And A polymetallic system that he insisted we take a serious look at, and lo and behold, we've got in there, we've done some trench sampling. Originally, it started off as about 2km of strike. This sits about 110km away from the old Adriatic, now Dundee precious, their mine. We have since gone in and done a mass amount of consolidation in and around the area. We're really excited with all the mineralisation that we're seeing there. As you pointed out, we think we're actually beyond just the polymers there. We've got some really interesting copper showing. We do want to deploy capital there, but really, for the sake of using the tiger by the tail, we have a tiger by the tail. Not that there are Tigers in Africa, in Botswana.

37:20 We are going to focus in on Bots, but we continue to consolidate in Bosnia. If we have the type of success that I do believe we're going to have in Botswana, I'm sure there'll be a good reason to maybe split the company at some juncture, but we will see. That's all in the future. Thanks, Luke. Obviously, the market's pulled back quite a bit since the January, February exuberance that we've seen. You've seen that in all 3 of your share prices, guys. But I guess what I think investors are really missing in the junior space, unlike previous downturns in the market, is most junior mining companies, including the 3 on this call, are very well financed. You guys are all financed with record treasuries, record drill programs. So while the pullback in the share price temporarily is frustrating for shareholders like myself, the long-term guys like me, this is a great opportunity. Can you speak to the state of the balance sheets for each of your 3 companies? And then also just the magnitude and scale of the drill programs that you guys are drilling versus previous iteration when the balance was a little skinnier in the past.

38:19 Sure. That's exactly what the CarMax project has suffered for the last couple of decades is just not having the money. Granite Creek, who we acquired, did a great job. They were turning things around, but it was still in bad markets. They did a lot of the geophysics and things to get that up and ready to go. We were able to just come in and step in and follow up on their good work. With the financing with Agnico last month or a month and a half ago, we were up to about $14M. We're probably, With all the drilling that we're doing down, we probably have about $10M in the treasury right now, but that gets us well into next year for a bigger program. Like I said previously, to date, or prior to this program, there's a total of 44,000m ever drilled on it. We're doing almost half of that this year. That just shows you the magnitude of what we're getting after.

39:10 I think we're going to be able to add pounds and ounces quite quickly if we continue to get great and we've already demonstrated that we've been stepping it, stepped out and found more. That's what we're doing. Our plan is to finish the 15,000 this year. If we can bump it up closer to 20, great. This year, do another 20 to 30 next year. And then let's do all of the baseline work and get a new resource out and probably go straight to pre-feasibility because so much work has been done on this project. I won't get into the details, but it had been permitted before to an extent with just minus a water license back in the 90s. So it's a brownfield area. So I think this is something we can move forward quickly. We've done this work before and we are super focused on moving this forward as fast as we can. And The other thing too is that, Michael, you might remember up because we, Granite Creek, who we merged with, they did do a great job of consolidating the district. So between ourselves and Selkirk, we own pretty much most of the entire Minto Copper Belt. And when they did that, there's other zones on our project, like zone A, where they drilled some of the best Copper grades in the 80s, like 25m at over 2% Copper with 2g Gold.

40:23 There are numerous targets or potential satellite targets around on the property. We need to get after those. Obviously, just stepping out on the deposit itself is what we're focused on right now. There are parallel zones as well that we're going to be testing and then all of these regional targets throughout the property. Lots of targets, but I think just focusing just what we're doing right now, we can really build pounds and ounces quite quickly. Perfect. Thanks, Graham. Before I go to Chris, just wanted to mention, we might have some time at the end of the show today for questions from the audience. So if you have any questions for the 3 companies on the call, you can post that in the chat and I'll try to address as many of those as I can before our allocation runs out. So Chris, I've been a shoulder for Cantera for several years. Really excited the fact that it's the first time you've got a big boy drill budget here at 15,000 meters. Can you speak to the size of the programs you've had in the past and what the size of the program could mean for this year in terms of the company potential to really crack this thing open for investors?

41:27 Absolutely. This is our largest drill program in the company's history by a wide margin. Previously, we were always hemmed into sort of 2,000 to 5,000 meter programs. Last year was the biggest at 10, and this is a step up yet again. Massive sulfide systems are drill intensive, just like orogenic gold systems also present in central Newfoundland. And so what we've been demonstrating right off the hop here with that increase in drilling budget is we've demonstrated the resource will grow by being able to step out more significantly than before.

42:14 We'll continue that trend through the rest of the year. But also it gives us the flexibility to go to some of the satellite deposits, which haven't really seen any modern exploration and or drilling and start to prove that not only are these higher-grade satellite deposits robust, but there's a lot of growth potential near deposit and within the property boundaries. Ultimately, it's our largest drill program in history and that will result in a significant resource upgrade. And but I think more than that, by the end of the year, we'll have demonstrated that there's a lot of growth opportunities at some of these high-grade satellite deposits in the district.

43:05 Thanks, Chris. And Luke, you mentioned the $10 million financing you did. You mentioned the low drill costs. You also mentioned how shallow these holes are. Can you give an idea of that money in the Treasury? How many holes can you drill? How much of the strike do you think you'll be able to test? And how clear an answer do you think we'll get by the time we're done spending this money in Botswana in terms of the prospectivity of the package? How much can you test with the budget you have today? The initial budget is the US$10,000m. We've left US$5M worth of runway for that, which should get us in the realm of 45 to 50 pairs points. One has to assume the odd lost hole. That's going to give us a really good first look. I would hope and imagine that we start to get onto something that we're going to continue to drill.

43:55 The intent clearly is we announced a 10,000m drill program but one does not want to stop drilling and 1 does not have to stop drilling in that environment. Even in the rainy season, it's more than workable. Get a hold of it and just keep drilling. We're not going to race towards trying to build a resource or anything like that, I think we would start to garner a lot of imagination of some of the surrounding companies. Michael, as you know, when we were down there at the Indaba conference this year, there was a lot of interest from the majors just in terms of what we've managed to do to consolidate this land package there. I think the discovery is going to be huge for us. Whether we get to see that discovery through is down to the status of the market.

44:45 You talked about the juniors and us kind of pulling back, everyone pulling back and the junior space may be led and driven by gold. But I mean, you look at the copper price and what's happened with that over the last 6 months or so, and it's just been tremendous. So I think all 3 of these companies are going to all of a sudden get a lot of limelight when the realisation that the economics of these deposits could be just as good as they are. When I'm invested in Junior, I love when the company's got a high-impact exploration program like all 3 of you guys have going on right now, but also has the money already in the Treasury to follow up with future drilling after those discoveries are made or after the catalysts are in the market. That's been lacking quite honestly in the junior resource market the last 5-6 years. A lot of companies are living hand to mouth crisis, you mentioned, and you mentioned Granite Creek, your predecessor before this. So I love the fact that you guys are all cashed up, have high impact drilling on the go, and with success, don't need to come back to the market to go drill some more. That'll allow the share prices to appreciate on the back of any good news that comes out of the 3 companies. That's an important point for investors to appreciate. So the question, you know, I'm sure you guys get this all the time. I'll give you the chance to answer this. Investors always ask what are the catalysts for the next 4 to 6 months? I tend to invest for 5 to 10 years, so I'm less worried about the short term catalyst. But I think it's important for the viewers to mention Graham, Chris and Luke. This may be a serial rapid fire here.

46:06 What can investors expect from the company between now and year end in terms of catalysts? I can start. I think I've laid it out. We've got this 15,000m drill program underway and I think we're encroaching on close to 8,000 completed. We're going to start having steady news of drill results. Again, any of the viewers, please go take a look at our presentation. Last year we hit numerous holes of over 1% Copper equivalent, 43m of 1.3m. We have got a really nice high-grade course of that as well in the middle of those zones. Keep an eye out, look for those grades. Hopefully, we can keep hitting those. We'll have constant news out on that front.

46:55 The Agnico, we did a strategic alliance with Agnico, so they're funding exploration throughout the Stikine terrain and the Yukon. Probably not a lot of news out on that just because it's such early stage exploration. But again, we've got Agnico in there looking for new discoveries. The way that we look at that, we're kind of backstopped or it's kind of the icing on the cake, if you will, or whatever it is. We've got Agnico working with our crews, team of 10 looking for brand new discoveries. And that's a lot of work. That's a lot of fun because we're exploring in areas, the same package of rocks as Golden Triangle, that's just in areas that have never been looked at before. So they can earn in up to an 80% interest and then we get 20%. That's all fully funded by Agnico. Super fun and exciting. You never know what's going to come from that.

47:43 But really, the story is The amount of drilling that we're doing at CarMax, I think we're going to have lots of news out and hopefully good results. For our viewers, Cascadia owns 100% of Granite Creek, which is the Copper-Gold resource that you're drilling aggressively. That's 100% owned by Cascadia. The Agnico JV is 80-20 Agnico. They can earn into 80-20 after spending tens of millions of dollars over multiple years to get in there. That's a completely separate project. Earlier stage kind of grassroots exploration is the key. Sometimes viewers get confused. Agnico did not earn 80% of the core resource, which is the flagship asset of the company, but we've got a great partner at Agnico now, which will be helping Cascadia potentially make brand new discoveries, which we could basically earn a carry in for free over time as they earn their way into those projects.

48:33 Exactly. Thanks for that clarification. It's absolutely right. CarMax is one thing. The strategic is completely separate from that. And then Chris, for your perspective, you mentioned a few of them. I'd like to itemize them for our viewers here, but in the next 4 to 6 months, I guess, drilling and the resource updating the big 2? Absolutely. It's really continued drill success at Buckins as we've been demonstrating last year and early this year, with maybe throwing in some Gold drilling next to the Valentine mine. But really, it's our largest drill program in history. We've completed just almost 5,000m of that 15,000m program right now.

49:22 There'll be near constant drilling news flow through the rest of the year, culminating in our made in resource estimate for the Buckins district, which should be the significant re-rate opportunity for Cantera. Terrific. And Luke, you mentioned, obviously, the drill story, we're waiting for a breather for future assays from Botswana. Maybe you also talk a little, Luke, other catalysts the company might have and thinking about the other asset packages we have in the company in Botswana and other parts of Australia. What the company's plans are, potential value surfacing events there, if any, that you're working on? Ironically, Our Copper portfolio came along with a Uranium portfolio in Botswana. It's not something that I'm keen to pursue, not in the energy metal type industry or sector.

50:12 We're definitely trying to find an active partner for the Uranium portfolio right now. The Australian Gold assets, same sort of story. We've definitely moved ourselves away from being a Gold explorer, which is the company I adopted when I first came into it. Those assets, I imagine, will be getting vended off, sold off along the way here. But ultimately, we are going to get active and do some work in Bosnia. We don't want it to create too much confusion amongst our shareholder base. Clearly, the focus is Botswana, the 10,000m drill program and really, I think, just the ongoing drill program, how I would envisage it. So yes, continue to drill in bots and really start to evaluate how we're going to approach the Bosnian portion of our portfolio, with ultimately the view being potentially a spin-out.

51:08 But potentially not. We don't want to get ourselves too far ahead of it. We have a couple of questions from our audience before we wrap up here. First one's for Luke. A question on Botswana being landlocked. One of the viewers had a question on how does ore and supplies move through the country and how do they move the Copper and necessary supplies in and out of Botswana? Right. It's not smelted in country. It's actually, they run a concentrator. So it's flotation and they ship concentrate. So pretty simple stuff. I'm not actually truly sure which direction they send it now that I come to think of it. But it's railed out of Botswana and shipped into Asia and not smelted in country.

51:55 Great. Thanks, Luke. Cantera, Chris, I wasn't aware of this either, so maybe you're not either, but for Cantera, one of our viewers is asking, does the Pirate Gold recent drill hole change anything for you guys and the company? I'm not sure which drill hole is being referred to there. I think they're referring to the Pirate Gold announced a new epithermal Copper-Gold discovery just last week, I think. And it's just northeast of us in our land package. So I think it doesn't really change anything for our immediate land holdings and the potential there. It's quite clear where we're sitting that you have the orogenic gold belt and then distal to that you have the massive sulphide, the copper zinc gold massive sulphide belt, which we control as well. And so I think more than anything is it just shows the immaturity of Newfoundland as a whole in terms of exploration.

52:55 The pirate can go into a new segment of ground in the general region and make a brand new sort of discovery in a different deposit type that wasn't previously identified on the island. Perfect. And then one more for Luke on the chat here, just asking where the assays are going on the Mud Swanna results. What's the turnaround time right now in the labs for results? Maybe, Graeme, you could speak to that, and Chris as well, just the turnaround times you're seeing for assay labs these days. My understanding is we should start seeing initial results within the next 3 or 4 weeks. Our assays are actually going down to South Africa under the agreement that we have or the setup that we have. So, in the next month or so, we should start seeing preliminary results. We know we're in the contact.

53:41 We know that there is mineralization there. It's an iterative process and you know how Jeremy is, of course, Michael. So we're working our way along and let's get into the right fold. And Graham and Chris, what's the turnaround time these days for labs for you guys? Well, it started out really good in early June and it slowed down pretty quickly. So realistically, you know, it's going to be 4 weeks to 6 weeks. It's just so busy. The last year was like that as well. We're fortunate we started early, so we're going to get the initial 4 or 5 holes back pretty quick. We should have our first results out the week after next, hopefully. For us in Newfoundland, it's typically 1 month. Sometimes it stretches to 2 depending.

54:32 There's 1 actually now. There are 2 labs on the island, but previously there was just 1. And because it's so active, you're really, you know, at the whims of, you know, just which companies, you know, are dedicating how many samples to the lab at the same time. But so far it's been around a month and that seems to be holding. Terrific. Well, thanks. I don't see any more questions in the chat. You guys did a great job covering a lot of ground. I want to give some breaking news at the end of this little webcast here. If you liked what you saw today from Cascadia, Cantera, Leviathan, all 3 of these companies will be in London, England with me on October 19th for a Jatility Mining Conference. So my 20 top holdings, including these 3 companies, will be in London, England, October 19th, available to meet with investors for one-on-one and do presentations for investors there. So if you like what you heard today and you want to meet these gentlemen one-on-one in a great setting, I invite you all to sign up for that conference in London, England, October 19th.

55:28 If you want to know more about that and you want to follow the work I do in the junior mining space, I invite you all to sign up for my free newsletter at SaturdayMorningMining.com, SaturdayMorningMining.com. You go to the website there, enter your email and get it in your inbox every Saturday morning at 7 a.m. Not investment advice, but I talk about news coming out of my portfolio companies. I post in interviews like this that's been done during the week. And you keep up to date on the live events like the conference I'm hosting in London, England in October. So I encourage you to sign up there to keep up to date with what's going on. And Graham, Chris and Luke, I thank you very much for your time. And as a shareholder, I'm very excited to see what the next 6 months has in store for us shareholders of your companies.