EV Nickel: 2022 Wrap-Up & Upcoming Catalysts

0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to EVNickel's live summit today. I'm pleased to introduce their president and CEO, Sean Samson, as well as their VP of Exploration, Paul Davis. Sean and Paul are going to walk us through a company presentation and after going into a Q&A session, you can submit any questions you like using the Q&A tab on the right hand side of your screen at any time today. And as always, the event is being recorded and will be available on six.com in the coming days. But without further ado, Sean, Paul, I wanna hand things over to you. Take it away. Thanks, Cam. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. So with this

0:38 presentation, as Cam mentioned, we hope to just run through some slides with a quick update about where we're at and you'll see where we're going. And then we'll follow that up with Q&A. So please get those questions in and we'll address them at the end. So starting now with our typical disclaimer slide, talking about forward statements we may make in this presentation. So if I get us going, you know, what we believe with EV nickel is that there's not enough nickel in the world for the electric vehicles. So the current market is all serving stainless steel, vast majority of it goes from where nickel is produced primarily to China into stainless steel and then gets distributed around the world and final products.

1:24 By 2030 electric vehicles will be the majority of nickel demand so the world doesn't currently have the supply to match that forecast increase in demand. Second thing we believe is that the electric vehicles, they require nickel with low carbon costs. So this is different than it has been in the past for a nickel supply. So the buyers of stainless steel have to date never been really focused in on the carbon cost per nickel unit. With the new European legislation and the mandatory declarations around carbon footprint on electric vehicles starting in 2024, it's very real for this new demand category, the electric vehicle buyers. So it's a new consideration for nickel miners and we anticipate that going forward it's going to become a differentiator on nickel price as sold to the end users based on the carbon cost attached to the nickel units.

2:22 The third thing that we believe are that there are immense complications that exist beyond just trying to source low carbon. So there are the geopolitical issues. Those extend to access. There's been a real shakeup in access to the world's nickel based on the war in Ukraine. And you hear from the car companies, If Taiwan, for example, shakes up geopolitical access in Asia, it impacts very large nickel-producing countries. Then there's protectionism. So the new US legislation is a wonderful thing for nickel companies sitting on nickel assets like ours in Canada. But what it has done is it has put up walls in a way around Canada and Australia, including them as domestic suppliers of nickel to US demand.

3:20 And in a way, it closes off the rest of the world from direct access to that nickel. So there's protectionism and then finally there's also this catch-all around general ESG and that includes if it's a nickel operation in Asia with ocean tails, if it's not clear who the actual owners are of assets, if, for example, state-owned companies are behind assets in different countries, in addition to the issue that our mining industry has been dealing with for many years around whether the labor conditions are correct. So much of this is coming into the nickel situation and you have buyers with the new demand electric vehicles, they're coming up the value chain and trying to understand where they can source their supply. But it's not just that simple, because there's a lot more complexity beyond just trying to get their hands on the nickel.

4:15 So if you think about what's going on with this new demand category with electric vehicles, there's just, as I said, not enough nickel. So on this slide, we of course have Elon Musk quote, bottom right, which you already talked about, the world needs more nickel. But he also called into question the complexity of the current nickel value chain, where nickel goes around the world for each of the steps where it becomes the final product for buyers. This new demand category that's coming from the electric vehicle companies has begun to question that. And it is really interesting to look, as we stack up on the top left, all of the different car companies that go well beyond Tesla and go well beyond Tesla, Rivian, these EV-only startups.

5:02 We've talked to most of the car companies and they are fully invested in pivoting over from internal combustion to electric vehicles. And you really see it when we have on the chart there on the top right, When you stack the battery forecast, the forecast demand, it's going to get bigger and bigger. It's growing at a quicker rate than the stainless steel is. And what that's leading to, bottom left, is that demand is outstripping supply. So we're going to have this gap, which again is a wonderful place to be if like EV nickel you're sitting on a lot of nickel in the ground. And to this point that it's not just going to be about sourcing and supplying the nickel, the emissions related to it, the footprint related to it, is very real for these electric vehicle buyers because they have new legislation where every vehicle in Europe in 2024 is going to have the carbon footprint stamped on it. So what that's going to mean is when you go into a dealership in Europe just in 2 years time there's going to be a comparison between the internal combustion engine cars and the electric vehicles and the big difference on the starting footprint is going to be the big hunk of metal in the EVs for the battery inside. What that means is that the electric vehicle companies, the OEMs that are now coming out with electric vehicles, they are very focused on getting that footprint for the battery as low as they can.

6:30 And people think that that's going to be the blueprint for the world, where all electric vehicles are going to start having the carbon footprint declared on each vehicle. So then beyond just carbon, this point around just accessing nickel. So Ukraine, with the war, really cut off discussions between Western car companies and Norilsk, one of the largest nickel producers in the world. Now these same car companies see concerns when they look at what's happening in Taiwan, because the world's biggest producer, Indonesia and the Philippines, much of the money behind that production is from China. So if that potentially gets out of bounds as well, it really makes a small world for the car companies to be getting their nickel from.

7:19 Similarly, with the protectionism, as I mentioned before, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, what it has meant is that the US domestic production of batteries requires domestic inputs. And the definition of domestic now includes Australia and Canada. Great news for the US car companies because they can access a broader pool. What that means is it becomes tricky for car companies in other parts of the world to get their hands on the nickel supply because of these protectionist walls that are going up. Then more broadly, there's issues around environmental ESG concerns, how labor is treated and who actually owns the assets. You bundle this all together and it really leads the automakers and their battery company partners to become more creative about how they're going to get their hands on the right nickel and their partnering up the supply chain. And this is really what we're living now as we are in more and more talks with the end users, the buyers of nickel.

8:21 So when I think about those 3 sort of guiding principles of what we believe, think about electric EV nickel, our company. What we have is known mineralization and huge exploration potential. And we'll show you this just south of Timmins we have over 30,000 hectares we have more than 100 kilometers of strike and we have 2 tracks that we're looking at for our potential development. Our first track is the high-grade mineralization focused around the W4 zone so we'll show you this We had an historic resource from 2010 that was just under 700,000 tons at 1%, and it was all 200 meters and above, so very near surface. We have discovered this year, and we'll show you this drilling, from the 200 meter level down to the 500, the W4 extension, which we're really excited about. We're going to do a bit more work on and then come out with a updated resource next year.

9:17 It's really interesting as well that high-grade business because there's a potential mill, a concentrator, a plant that is permitted and operating just 7 kilometers away in addition to another high-grade deposit which is a mining lease just 3.5 kilometers away. So we're targeting from that high-grade business production, nickel production, in 3 to 4 years. Our second track is what we call large-scale, focused around the car laying trend. We'll show you this. That's where we drilled this summer. We drilled the A zone. It's 1.5 kilometers of something that's 10 kilometers long. Our drilling's coming back at 0.25. There's minimal overburden. It's all been clear cut for logging. There's wonderful access. We're really excited about the potential for that large scale, which we're going to have a resource coming out on that in the first half of next year. So those were our 2 tracks for development.

10:16 We've also got a clean nickel business, which is how we wrap this all together. So our strategy around clean nickel is a trademark term that we use, where we're targeting the lowest possible carbon cost per nickel unit. We're doing a lot of work in the lab. We'll talk you through that. And we're in this wonderful position because where we're located, all of the electricity we draw is hydro-based. So it's a wonderful energy source from a carbon perspective. So clean nickel for us extends from how we do our mining through to our processing and then how we treat our tails and the carbon capture potential of our tailings as well, which is really interesting to think about, especially with a large scale business where that 0.25% nickel that we've been having the drill results on, with an enormous 10 kilometer long trend, there is a huge potential for carbon capture off of that mineralization.

11:12 But that's really what we have. And we want to run through that with you today. So if I set up where we're located, this is Timmins, Ontario, a short one-hour flight north of Toronto,

11:24 a global leading gold-producing area. It's got a population of about 85,000 or a little more. It's serviced, as I mentioned, by clean hydropower. We're 1,000 kilometers, inside 1,000 kilometers from Detroit. So really the hub of car making. Our huge land package of over 30,000 hectares includes our large scale zone, our large scale area. We call it car laying. We've drilled off the A zone. And then we have our track 1 which is our high grade, the W4. 3.5 kilometers away from the W4 is another high-grade deposit owned by a private company who are investors of ours, the Hart deposit, that same group owns the Redstone mill which is operating. It's only 7 kilometers away. So this is our Shaw Dome project and on this we have our 2 tracks, the high grade and the large scale.

12:20 Paul, let's have you run through starting with the high grade W4. And I guess we begin here with our historical resource and what we inherited when we started the company last year. Sure, W4 was discovered in 2007 by a precursor to another company. And basically, they defined a resource down to approximately 200 meters of 677,000 tons, grading about a percent nickel. What makes W4 really unique is that it's sulfide chemistry is such that the nickel is contained in pentlandite, which is just a mineral that contains between 30 and 40 percent nickel, and our nickel tenors are within that range of anywhere between 20 to 45 percent. So it's a really high-quality type of sulfide.

13:04 We came in, we looked at it, to give you an example of what that nickel tanner does, if you take a look at the pictures, in picture B, most times when exploring for nickel, that would not really be of much interest, but that sample actually runs anywhere from 1 to 2% nickel based just upon that little bit of sulfide.

13:25 So we started drilling in 2021, testing kind of the central part of the W4. We had never seen the mineralization. We didn't know its association with the flow contacts and all of that. So our original drilling, we went in just to kind of get a feel for what it was. And we had some very good success, 1 at hitting holes within the block model, which means we're going to have an improved resource when we do come out with 1 in 2023. Plus, we were able to extend the mineralization both to the east and to the west through some of our drilling that you can see from the results of the holes like hole 9 and 10 and hole number 8. And we had that 8.66% nickel in there as well. So really juicy stuff.

14:11 Yes, for sure. That's just a nice blow up slide showing you the pentlandite within a sample from our first hole which was over 17.6% nickel so really exciting type of hit. And this mineralization how deep was that Paul that 17.6? That mineralization was probably at about 100 meters vertical depth, so very close to surface.

14:38 So this was in 2022. We went back in. We had some indications that the mineralization was plunging down, and we wanted to test that next tier. So from the 200 to about 450 meter depth, just to kind of see what we would get. So we came at it from the north side. We know the deposit is dipping at steeply to the north. All

15:01 the drilling before had generally been drilled from the south so it wasn't at the best angle. We came in to hit it perpendicular so we would get closer to true winds. We drilled it at 50 meter spacings. We completed a little over 5,000 meters and 17 holes and we were very successful in actually identifying the down plunge projection of the mineralization. We were quite excited by what we saw.

15:25 Here's a section, this is section 450. And you can see when we originally took it, you can see all the drilling coming from the south, not the best angle, our holes coming from the north, hole 12, that was a great hole. We hit 14.3 meters of 1.5% nickel with a nice large core of 5.4 meters of almost 3. Now a few things to take from this section are, 1, you can kind of see that the mineralization now is along a single plane

15:54 or horizon. The 2012 resource estimate had it broken out into 3 separate lenses. So what this means is that we're going to have a better continuity of the mineralization as we go down the plunge below the 200 meters with the historical resource completed above it. As well we're going to see better grade continuity which will lead to a more improved estimate of what the grade will be. And I think that we'll see some improvement in that as we come out with a new resource estimate. This is section 500. Again, it's a 50 meter step further to the east. You can see that like in other deposit, like any mineral deposit, it pinches and swells. But then again, as we hit hole 17 and 18, the mineralization swelled out again, in 17 hitting close to 21 meters of 1.2% nickel.

16:46 I know These are very encouraging hits. It isn't closed off to the east or at depth. It's still open. It's still open to the west as well. And so we see a lot of potential here to expand upon what we've already outlined here on the depth extension to W4. So that's our high-grade business focused around the W4, where we had an historic resource, and we've done this drilling and discovered,

17:12 one of our 2 big discoveries this year, we discovered the W4 extension. So we're excited for Paul and the team to put all the data together. We're gonna do a bit more work on W4 and come out with an updated resource in the first half of next year. So that track 1 has a lot of synergies. We mentioned before there's a second high-grade deposit in relative terms. It's very nearby, 3.5 kilometers. It seems to mirror our deposit as well, where they've got 1.4 million tons above

17:43 500 meters of depth. So as we're talking W4 now with the extension, they look very similar on both sides of the road as we say. So 3.5 kilometers at surface and 3 kilometers apart at depth. So they come in towards each other. Then 7 kilometers from the W4 is the Redstone Mill. We've got a photo of it there. That's an operating permitted mill and obviously wonderful synergies. Both of those assets are owned by investors in EV nickel.

18:16 We think more broadly, there's great high-grade targets all around our shadow area. So to the west, we've got the Redstone trend, where there's a very interesting anomaly, just up the trend from the Redstone mill. Then looking to the east, we have the Langmuir No. 2, an historic mine. That stopped in the late 70s. They had been mining there, producing at 1.47%

18:41 nickel. We have the level plans. We actually have a 446-meter shaft that still exists. And we want to get in there, poke some holes and confirm that there's good high-grade mineralization again near surface. So to our east there's both the Langmuir No. 2 and also Langmuir South, It's very interesting. And then to the south of our property, we've done some initial exploration work on the Matthew target. And we'll be talking a bit more about that in the new year. So Paul, this one's an amalgam of all the exploration data around the Shaw Dome. I guess we have the 2 areas outlined there with the ovals. Do you just want to talk a bit about your excitement and interest in getting in and better understanding more for high-grade? Oh, for sure. Like, you know, this is a 3D mag model, basically, and the mag highs represented by your reds and golds really do outline the favorable areas to explore for nickel within the shadow.

19:41 So if we take a look along the let's say Langmuir number 2 and south it represents a horizon that also hosts the McWater's, Hart, and Redstone nickel deposits, as well as the Croxall on the Redstone tread. So when you take in an aggregate all of the favorable stratigraphic horizons within the Shaw Dome, I'm quite confident to say we have over 100 kilometers of favorable horizon to test, of which there's only been limited exploration completed since the 1960s. And that's a big part of this, right? That it's never been systematically explored. So not only are we so close to Timmins, but this area, and once you amalgamate all the known exploration data, which you're seeing on this slide, which is just indicative of sort of a 100 page deck that Paul's been through with external consultants, there's a huge amount of exploration potential here, very close to Timmins. And it's never, again, it's never been systematically explored.

20:40 So that's our track 1. That's the high grade business.

20:44 And Paul, you wanna compare this for us to the Combalda in Western Australia? Sure. Through my 30-year career exploring for nickel, I did get the opportunity to spend some time in Western Australia and visited Combalda, which is the picture on the right. And like in Combalda, they extracted over 50 million tons of better than 3% nickel since the 1960s. And what that slide really represents is once you find 1 zone of nickel mineralization associated with a chlamydia unit, the likelihood of finding additional deposits goes up exponentially. If we take a look at the picture

21:19 on the left now, that is the Shaw Dome, and we can see that we have identified or there has been identified a number of these nickel deposits within that stratigraphy. So The likelihood of us discovering more goes up really significantly, and that little dashed box represents the same aerial coverage as that box on the right covering all of Cambalda. So you can see there's multiples of the Cambalda Dome area to explore just within our property package. And that Cabalda dome has since the 60s, they've produced over 50 million tons of nickel. So with a small geographic footprint, you can have lots of these deposits along the flow and ours have not been systematically explored yet. So this is really what gets us excited about the high grade business.

22:08 If I shift over to track 2 and what we call the large scale, really our targeting on this has been the success of our colleagues at Canada Nickel with the Crawford project. So their initial resource a couple of years ago on the main zone at Crawford, they did a bunch of drilling and they came up with a deposit that was 1.8 kilometers by 360 meters. They had 0.25% grade. That's what got them their billion tons. And that was what they've been able to promote as the world's largest nickel sulfide discovery since the 1970s. So we feel like we have similar mineralization. On our land package we think we have it in a couple areas. 1 in the northwest at the Adams-El Dorado set of targets and 1 in the northeast with Carmen Langmuir.

23:00 If you look at our EM data, we have very similar sort of mag intensities in the west with Adams-El Dorado, very large 1 in the northeast with Carmen Langmuir, or as we call Carlang. And you see with the pinks and purples there, it lights right up. And for perspective, on this slide we have the oval drawn, which shows you the scale of the Crawford main zone. So what we have in Adams-El Dorado seems larger than the Crawford main zone. We've been focused instead on the northeast at the Karlang to get us started with large-scale. This is another shot of the Karlang where you see it's 6 kilometers plus 4 kilometers so we think it's 10 kilometers long that full Karman-Langmuir area. Again we've got the oval there to give you some perspective on how that compares to the Crawford main zone. And this is really interesting because a lot of historic work has already been done in this area.

24:00 So starting with surface samples, because there's so much outcrop at surface, which is part of the story here, outcrop has been checked and as we note here on the slide, there are 40 samples from an historic study that was done which averaged 0.33. So very, very good mineralization, very near surface across this Karlang. And we focused in on this with drilling that we did this summer on the A zone. So we show that dotted box, which is really just 0.125 or even less of the full car laying exposure.

24:38 Paul, do you want to run us through the results we have so far from the car laying a zone? Sure, we've reported on about 11 of 28 holes for the car lying. And you can see here the distribution of holes that were reported are in black. They're basically coming in very similar grades as what you would see is reported from the Crawford deposit. And what really is interesting about this one is having that outcrop exposure, which represents

25:04 15 to 20% of our actual coverage there on car lying a, we know the dynamics extend for approximately 400 to 600 meters on surface. From our drilling, we maintain about a 300 meter drill depth, which is 250 meter vertical depth, because we didn't see the benefit of drilling it super deep, paying that extra amount when we would have the ability just to expand any type of mineralization laterally along strike. Some of our holes, if you take a look at number 30, we hit close to 260 meters of 0.26. A lot of these holes have bottomed in dunnite, so that we haven't closed it off at depth. And a number of these are shoulder holes where you're seeing less than the amount EV23 or 2223 is a great hole again 0.25 over the full length of the drill hole. We basically add 3 meters of the collar into an outcrop that then the remainder of the hole stayed in the done at this 0.25 percent grade.

26:03 So this is the kilometer and a half that we've looked at first. We've done the spacing and worked on this with our QP prior to setting up the drills. This is what we anticipate we'll come out with our maiden, our starter resource on these 1.5 kilometers, which represents 0.125 or less of the full car lang. And we're really excited about these assays that we're getting back from last summer's and importantly, last summer's drilling and importantly, the resource that we'll come out with next year.

26:34 So as you mentioned this is less than 15% of the overall car lang and it's neat because we've pulled together all of the historic assessment files and all of the drilling. So Paul you're in your long history in the camp, you actually drilled this before we got going on the work this summer, right? I've drilled portions of this. Out of all the holes represented there, I probably drilled close to 10 to 15 percent of the holes. But basically, yeah, this is work that's been completed since the 1960s on these zones, looking for different types of minerals. But you can see that in a number of holes, they reported over 100 meters of dunite prototype,

27:14 and that the hole was still in it at depth. I know one of the holes I drilled we hit close to 300 meters of dunnite at the bottom of the hole from about 200 meters down to 500 meters and we basically stopped the hole in it. Our previous exploration criteria was we were looking for another Mount Keith, so anything less than 0.6 we didn't look at, but this gives us a great idea of what we would expect when we expanded our exploration program if we wanted to test that full 10 kilometers of potential. Yeah, so back in the day you were always looking for a 0.6. When you didn't find it, you moved on. But in today's world, we anticipate that this sort of grade, this quarter, could become economic. We've seen that with our colleagues at Canada Nickel. And it's really interesting if you think about the historic nickel copper ratio of being roughly a 3x.

28:08 If you discover something that has 10 kilometers of mineralization, and you're looking at something in the many hundreds of millions for a potential resource on the starter area you've drilled. And if I told you that that was 0.75% copper, that becomes a very interesting asset. But that's the world we're in right now. So we're talking about 0.25, and it could potentially go for 10 kilometers. And it's neat to begin to compare this to others in the region. So we compare straight up wherein none of us have the processing which would be required for this major type of mining operation. But if you look at the access that we have to our car laying a zone and entirely mainly the whole car laying trend, it's all been clear-cut by logging. So our guys drive right up to the drill.

29:04 That's very different than other deposits around the Timmins area, which have lots of swamp, few roads for access, and they're relying on choppers for access on their drill program. That adds a lot of dollars into the drill program. Then there's a big one here. You've heard us talk about outcrop. The overburden for us, we think it's going to be less than 8 meters, around 5 meters. You've heard Paul say at least 15% of it is outcrop across the A zone that we're drilling now. That is much different than a 40-meter average overburden that others have in the region who have no outcrop because it's covered with swamp. So that's a lot of dirt to get through down into the mineralization. And then another big kicker is the depth of the mineralization. So you heard Paul say, you know, we have 250 meters of vertical depth is really where we're seeing this mineralization.

29:58 We're drilling 300 meter holes. It's all in the ore except for the initial 3 meters to get into it. So we know there's a lot of dunnite there. We could have gone much deeper but our focus here is really trying to get an understanding of what the resource could be and obviously with 10 kilometers in an all-in-a-line you would continue to go a long trend as opposed to going deeper. There are others in our area that have pit depths that they're talking about close to 700 meters depth which is really tricky when you get into that much development and a two-to-one strip ratio. So we're really excited about what we've got in terms of this being the beginning of Karlang. We'll put up a resource early next year and we think it's going to compare very favorably to other resources in the region.

30:50 So again, to recap, what we have is something we think that can address this problem. We know the world needs more nickel. They need nickel with low carbon costs attached to it. There's a lot of complications attached to much of the nickel that gets produced in the world. We have an enormous land package with a huge amount of interesting strike. We have the 2 tracks for our potential development, the high-grade business that we hope is going to be into production in 3 to 4 years. We're permitting W4 now. Then there's the large scale, which is enormous. We're going to put up a resource, and that's us just getting started. And we wrap the whole thing together with our clean nickel strategy and the work we're doing on trying to have the lowest carbon cost. So on that clean nickel, we're really rethinking each of the steps of our business. And for us, that's in the DNA of our company, where we're targeting the lowest possible carbon cost per nickel unit. And what that means at the front end for extraction, we mentioned before that there's hydropower where we are, we will electrify as much as we can. So that will mean we anticipate almost all mining operations, which is really neat because with the new technology around accessing underground, whether it's monorail off the back, allows you to go much steeper with your ramp trying to get underground.

32:12 We'll electrify everything, it'll lead to a lower carbon cost and we think it actually has knock-on benefits for cost beyond that. We'll sort the ore when we can. We have a bunch of experience doing that before. Again, that will be electrified. On the processing, we're doing a lot of work on carbon capture, very similar to some of our competitors who have a similar geology. We anticipate that we're going to have very good sequestration, especially from across the Karlang area, which has been really interesting. We're in the lab right now testing that. And then the bio-leaching. Paul, can you talk to us a bit about what we're hoping for on the bio-leaching for the processing? Sure, we're hoping to be able to process the ore straight at the site. So basically, it would be an addition onto the flotation mill. We'd be looking at that leaching using bio-leach technology and basically being able to tailor an end product that would be suitable to the customers that we had, be it copper or nickel sulfate, be it nickel hydroxide, even if somebody wanted nickel sulfides to run through the smelter, we could precipitate out specifically millerite out of these solutions. So it really is a great way to capture more of the value stream versus shipping it off to third party to process where they always take their pound of flesh.

33:33 Yeah, we're really excited about this. And this gets very interesting as well when you talk about this with the different levels of government, where they understand the complexity of the supply chain and that next step, which is the smelters. If we can have a product that leaves our site, I'm thinking about the high grade business here, and potentially goes to Southwestern Ontario directly into a battery facility, that gets very interesting for government, for the buyers as well, so the OEMs and the battery companies, this is really going to be a game changer if the bioleaching thing works. And we're in the labs studying the bioleaching right now in addition to the carbon capture. So that's going to be a big part of our news next year. We hope for good results on that because, again, it's going to be a game changer if we're able to produce from our site an end product as Paul says. So we're wrapping that all together starting with the high-grade nickel ore is actually the best way to get clean nickel but This is us questioning each step of the business as we try to have the lowest possible carbon cost per nickel unit.

34:37 So we're charging ahead. If I think about what we're up to, we've got continued assay results coming out from our summer drilling on Karlang. We've got the new resource coming out on the Carlang A-Zone, the first quarter we anticipate in 2023. And then after that, we have our updated W4 resource. So it's really exciting in terms of what's ahead for the company. I should talk about our stock price as well. We have a very tight share structure. We have 44 million shares outstanding. Our stock is considerably down from where it had been, where we IPO'd last year at 75 cents and we trade now for 10 to 12 cents. So we're deeply, deeply undervalued and I'd encourage investors to look at our valuation as compared to other companies who have whether it's a high-grade deposit, which we have with W4 and our potential high-grade business, or if it's a large-scale business. You've heard us talking a lot about other companies that are up in the Timmins area which have radically different valuations than ours and I would say that our mineralization looks very similar to what they have but the difference being within our company we have the combination of the high grade and the large scale, which is really gonna be, you know, coming out with these new resources next year will

36:07 become a very compelling comparison between what we have and other companies. So Cam, that was our quick run through of the company. Do you wanna move into the Q&A? Yeah, absolutely. And just as a reminder to everyone in the audience, if you have any questions, please ask them in the Q&A chat on the right hand side of your screen. To get started, though, first question, are you fully permitted for your planned drilling next year? Yeah, so our initial drilling will be subsequent work on the W4, so the high-grade track, and we are permitted for that. And we're working, as I mentioned, on our mine permit, moving towards a mining lease, which we're well down the path on. And we hope to have news back on that towards getting a mining lease on W4 in the first half of next year.

36:58 Absolutely. Stephen in the audience wants to know if the 2 mills that you refer to have the licensed capacity to process all of your ore. Yeah, so I've referred to 1, the Redstone mill, and that has the capacity to process very nicely our high-grade business. So if you think about how many tons they can process in 1 year, it roughly comes out to about 600,000 or 700,000 ore tons. And when I think about today's W4 resource, that's roughly 1 year at the mill. You've heard Paul say that we've had success with the drilling. We have the W4 extension. That gets us, I think, maybe a double on that. But we'll see when we come out with the resource next year.

37:43 And then more broadly, we know about the heart deposit across the street, in addition to more high-grade mineralization around the Shaw Dome. So in our mind, we're really focused in on that high-grade business, trying to pull together known mineralization, near surface, relatively near surface, because that helps you with cost, and keep that redstone mill operating as a nickel mine. So we have processing in place for the high-grade track. We do not for track 2. There is currently no processing capacity in the Timmins camp for the type of the type of throughput you would require to make a go of that type of mineralization.

38:29 So there is not a processing option right now nearby for the Karlang. The Karlang is going to be enormous, we anticipate. But that's the same situation as other competitors of ours up in the Timmins camp with similar mineralization. Right, okay. And the next question kind of deals with that, but how big do you think these resources will be? Well, we'll know when we pull all the numbers together and work with our third party, our third party QP and pull out the resource. But Paul, with the data you have now, what's your visibility into both the Maiden Carlang resource on the A zone we hope to come out with in first quarter and then the updated W4 once we've done a bit more work, where do you think those 2 stack up?

39:24 I think that at Carlang, we'll start there, we're probably looking at something that's gonna be a similar quantum to what Crawford is. And basically you can work that out fairly simply by just multiplying the width by the length of our drill program by a depth of about 250 to 300 meters and multiply it by your specific gravity of 2.7, you can come up with an estimated tonnage. And that's just, it's a very boring type of rock type to drill, and it's consistent all along through our drilling. So it's really, it's more reflective of a large iron formation versus a high grade nickel, which swings me into W4, with based upon our drilling that we did on the extension of the mineralization, I'd be comfortable to say that we probably look at at least increasing the amount of area that we've identified nickel mineralization to double to what we have, I think it isn't unreasonable to think that we'd be able to see a significant increase in the nickel pounds based upon our drilling and that when that result comes out, I think that it's going to be fairly positive.

40:34 Thank you for that. Greg's question deals with that. Given what you have, could you help him and the audience for that matter understand why your market cap is only at $4 million right now? That is the elusive question, given what we have, especially, and I mentioned the valuation comparison is absurd right now between our 2 tracks and other companies that are just sitting on a single track. So we are similarly confused by that. Our focus remains on trying to move the company forward and add as much value into it. What that does though, Greg, is it just makes this valuation mispatch all the more compelling.

41:22 As you've just heard Paul say, that he anticipates the Carlang A zone is going to look very similar to the Crawford main deposit, the resource we just showed you on that slide. So if that comes true, when we come out with our resource at the beginning of next year, it will just aggravate the current situation. So we are focused on trying to add as much as we can in terms of value into the company. I think we've been very successful on that with this year. We tripled our land package. We made a discovery with the W4 extension. That was the first half of this year. This summertime drilling we did, we've now discovered the Carlang A-zone, so a second discovery in the year. But over that period, our stock prices declined significantly.

42:12 And this is all in a nickel market where nickel has been up significantly. So it's interesting to look at what's happened since we announced on this new large-scale discovery up at the Carlang with the A-Zone. I think the nickel price is up 30 percent since then. And our stock has not reacted at all to that. So a long response to a short question about why are we so cheap. I don't have the answer for that but I do know we're going to be putting up our resource and doing the things we say we're going to do, we'll continue to do that. And I anticipate at some point, hopefully soon, the market begins to rebalance back on where companies have added value. So we're just making it look even more compelling in terms of the valuation potential for us.

43:04 Right. Another question. Has there been any MET work recently completed in the Carlang mineralization? Paul, why don't you run through the MET? MET work on Carlang, we haven't specifically started the MET work, say on anticipated recoveries or what the different bond mill indexes for crushing, the things like that. We have done some preliminary petrographic work and mineralogical work on it, and we have seen that it contains similar minerals to what you see throughout these type of deposits in the Abitibi. And then, Paul, on MET, the W4 work. Yeah, the W4 work, we are drawing that to a conclusion on the recoveries that we can anticipate from it. And we're really dovetailing that network with potentially into the bio-leaching test work. And so we'll be using some of the products we generate to confirm what we could expect from that leaching.

44:01 Yeah, So we're taking the concentrate, which through the network, we have created a concentrate where we've mimicked what it would look like coming out of the Redstone mill or coming out of the Sudbury mill and using that con to do our bio leaching work. Awesome. Okay, great. Stephen has a question regarding your low market cap. Are you currently discussing offtakes or strategic partnerships with OECs or battery makers? Yeah. So our low valuation, we sort of spoke to that already. I think it represents a deep value opportunity. Our conversations, I could talk about where we spend our time. So we obviously spend our time dealing directly with financial investors like this call and in this summit.

44:51 Beyond that, we spend a bunch of time with 3 broad groups, 1 being levels of government. So we are in active and very regular communication with the Canadian federal government, the Canadian, the Ontario provincial government, and in the US as well, so with federal groups. So there has been news with other companies regarding funding and partnership coming from the US Department of Defense. We're in regular communication with them and we anticipate having some news on that in the new year. Because in the US, and we mentioned it before, with the legislation, considering Canadian resources as being domestic, we are treated very similarly by the US federal government as opportunities for nickel production within the domestic borders.

45:43 So first group that we spend a lot of time with are various levels of government, Canadian and US. Second large group are private equity funds and mining specific investment groups. So obviously, if we are successful in doing the things we say we're going to do. So it's taking the steps beyond just drilling and putting up resources. We need to tap into additional funding. And we have attracted attention from groups that are looking to support along and develop large nickel opportunities. And the dual track nature of what we're promoting, where we talk about the high grade for production in 3 to 4 years, plus the massive optionality of the large scale that plays in very nicely with many mining specific investors and specifically fits well with often what private equity funds are looking for. So I think of large mining focused institutional investors as being that second bucket with whom we spend a lot of time.

46:48 And then the third group with whom we spend a lot of time are the OEM, the car companies, and their battery partners. So investors that follow our story know that we spend a great deal of time, especially with the European car companies. We've had discussions more broadly with the Asian car companies as well. And that's really what informs our observations of how the world is becoming much smaller for these car companies as they need to source their nickel supply. So we're speaking with all of those groups, not specifically around offtakes yet. The thing about offtakes, it's very interesting. If we are successful in developing a nickel business where we are selling the lowest carbon cost nickel in the world or very good carbon cost nickel, that nickel will be bought.

47:38 So it's not a function any longer of having that clear relationship with the offtaker. The relationship with the offtaker is gonna go beyond just a simple offtake as I see the world forming in front of us. I anticipate that the car companies, the battery companies, this new demand for nickel are going to become more involved, and you hear me talk about it in our slides, up the value chain. And that's going to include partnering and very likely being involved financially with companies like ours as we move along projects like the ones we're talking about here. So we're in conversations with each of those groups and each of those groups I see as potential participants going forward as we develop this company. And in the case of the OEMs, the battery companies, not just there at the end of the path waiting for the product. They're going to be involved along the path because they acknowledge that that's something they need to be doing if they're gonna be able to source the supply that they need.

48:39 Absolutely. Sean, Paul, I wanna thank you so much for going on today, running through that great presentation and Q&A. That looks like all the questions we received. So before we wrap up, I want to pass things over to you for some closing remarks, if you have any. Thanks Cam, and again, thanks everybody for joining in. It's the end of a very busy, very long year. I think that Paul and the team, we have jammed enough developments into 1 12 month period after having gone public last December. It's almost like we had a few years this year with the amount of things we accomplished. So that includes, you know, having tripled our land package, having made 2 major discoveries, 1 being the W4 extension, so going deeper on our high-grade business, and then the other discovery in the summertime of the Carlang A-Zone.

49:29 It's been a very busy, very productive year where we've added, and this is a theme for us, significant value into the assets of the company. Meanwhile, the nickel market has been very strong, and I anticipate that that is going to continue, whereby the nickel market is beginning to figure out. They have a whole new demand category that's coming from these electric vehicles. And as we started out talking about, the nickel's not there. So I think you've got developments within the company. You've got the macroeconomic sort of tailwind of the general nickel market. And we're really excited about what's going to happen in 2023. We've got these resources coming out and we think this point about when will the market begin to notice, we hope that that's coming in 2023.

50:16 But until then, we represent a deep, deep value opportunity. So again, thanks everybody for tuning in. It's been a very busy, very productive year, and we anticipate that 2023 is going to be even bigger and even better. You