EV Nickel: September Corporate Update

0:08 Hello everyone, welcome to EVNickel's live investment 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 take us through their presentation and after we'll be answering some questions that you can ask using the Q&A tab found on the right-hand side of your screen at any time. And as always, this summit is available on demand in the coming days on six.com, so be sure to check it out. With that, Sean, Paul, I'm gonna hand things over to you to get us started. Great, thanks Cam. So I'm gonna run through these slides. They

0:39 are also on the company's website. So these are all publicly disclosed information. So to summarize EV Nickel, what we are is a company focused in on the trying to find nickel sulfide and develop a nickel business around that. We think that with the expanding demand, growing demand for nickel sulfides coming from the electric vehicles, Our Shaw Dome project and clean nickel specifically, which is something that we're planning to provide, we're hoping to provide, that's really what we're building our business around. We have an enormous land package. We have over 30,000 hectares upon what we call the Shaw Dome, southeast of Timmins. And it includes on there, a starter resource, the W4, which in 2010, the historical resource had 677,000 tons at 1% nickel sulfide. So what we are is Ontario, critical minerals, and we are financed to do the drilling that we have planned for.

1:36 So we love the location we have. We're just southeast of Timmins. It's a great place to to try to figure out a new operation. It draws on hydro power, clean hydro power. We also have great grades. Our reserve resource at 1% is the type of grade, and there's even better grade that's produced from the Shaw Dome, the type of grade that gets turned into mines. And then we have this enormous potential, huge land package, over 100 kilometers of strike. We'll talk through that today. We're doing 3 things. One is we have a high-grade deposit that we plan to grow. And engine 1, we call that. That's our high-grade mineralization. And engine 2 is a large-scale potential, that we have these targets in the north of our property. We'll talk you through that today and what we're doing on them.

2:25 But we have the 2 engine plan. And then we're also pulling together a clean nickel. So we're wrapping it all together in a branded clean nickel business. I'm joined today by Paul Davis, my VP of Exploration. We're going to run through really quickly what we think of for clean nickel and why we're bullish on nickel. We're going to introduce our project. We're going to talk you through the phases of drilling, and Paul's going to get into some of that detail. We have some new data that came out this week as we move from 1 phase of results to another phase of results. And then we're going to run through our catalysts, and we'll get to, as Cam said, Q&A.

3:03 So let's jump in right now. The macro story for nickel is, of course, the growing demand. So nickel is different than many of the other battery metals, stuff like lithium and cobalt. Nickel currently has a global supply-demand balance. Nickel is currently a stainless steel metal. So what that means is you have miners around the world producing the stuff for that stainless steel demand. When you layer on the battery, the forecast battery growth, is going to shift the business. People think by 2030, majority of nickel will move over to being from the EV batteries. And it's really hitting its speed, not just through the EV companies that we hear so much about, but also when all the other OEMs, when you stack up as we do on the top left of the slide, when you stack up all of the existing car companies and their plans to get into EVs, it becomes very material.

4:00 Bottom left, no matter how you stack it up, there seems to be a shortfall between supply and the forecast growth and demand. So it's that gap which turns on miners like us that think we have a lot of nickel in the ground and we can help address that. So we're a nickel junior. So of course, we're going to have a quote from Elon Musk, where so many miners are latched on to what he said about if nickel companies can produce more of the product, that's one thing. But the other thing is, the new buyers of the nickel are really cluing in to the complexity of the supply chain as it's been developed. So when you speak to battery companies as we have, when you speak to the EV companies as we have, they're perplexed by what has developed, what has evolved in the nickel space.

4:46 And we think that tighter supply chains with a focus on clean nickel is really the way it needs to go and it's where that new demand is demanding. So that's what we're trying to address, that's the void we're trying to step in on. Part of it of course is the supply demand imbalance with the growth in nickel demand, but also trying to deliver better than your average nickel sulfide and focusing in on lowest quartile carbon cost per nickel unit. So let's get into our project specifically. So I said it's southeast of Timmins. It's down in an area called the Shaw Dome. So Timmins, Ontario, major mining town, great place to develop additional operations nearby. So a couple of things on this slide. You see the yellow is the original Langmuir project.

5:31 That is what EV Nickel started out with last year. We've since bolted on the additional land on this slide. So on the Shaw Dome, all is an easy 1 hour drive down from Timmins. On the Shaw Dome, there's been historic production, good high grade production, And you see our W4 zone at the bottom. That's with the red star, the 677,000 tons. Across the street, our neighbors, a privately held company, have an additional deposit at 1.4%, and it's at 1.5 million tons. So we think there's really good mineralization. That'll be part of what Paul will talk about here in a moment. Also on the Shaw Dome, there are 2 permitted production plants. So you've got the Karshaw Mill in the north.

6:18 That is a permit but it's currently mothballed, not operating. We have a right of first refusal to purchase the land that that plant is on. And then in the west is the Redstone Mill. Redstone Mill is permitted for 2,000 tons per day. It currently operates as a total production facility. Historically it's produced nickel and it's very well situated just 7 kilometers away from the W4 for us to potentially get into the high-grade business, that engine one which we'll speak about. So that is the Shaw Dome overall.

6:50 Paul, perhaps you can speak through the historical resource for W4 and what we inherited when we put this on last year. Yeah, the W4 was originally discovered in 2007 by Golden Chalice doing some drilling testing coincident mag anomalies with EM conductors And they found this W4 deposit. W4 we did a resource or they did a resource in 2010 that came out with it as you said 677,000 tons at about 1% and that really a majority of that is down to about 200 meters below surface as you can see in The pictures on the right now, there's a couple unique things about w4 which really make it interesting one the sulfides are composed almost 100% of pentlandite and pentlandite is a nickel-bearing sulfide. So if you take a look at the pictures on the left side, picture B doesn't look that exciting, but when you analyze that it has between 5 and 10% sulfide which will actually grade anywhere between 1 and 2% nickel. So it's really a great source of nickel.

7:51 It gives you nickel tenors in around 35 to 45 percent and what that really is a reflection of is that when we can concentrate this sulfide we should get a really high quality nickel con out of the W4 deposit.

8:05 So if we move now, that was the work which we inherited. If we move now into the work we've done on our W4 since EV nickel took it over. Paul, do you want to run us through what we did last year? Sure. In phase 1, none of us had really seen the W4 mineralization prior, and we wanted to gain an understanding of the morphology and how it was in 3 dimensions. So we came in with our drill program, but we didn't just twin drill holes. We actually picked blank spots within the current or the 2010 resource to infill drilling and to get a really good feel of what the mineralization looked like. We also tried to drill it on the eastern and western boundaries to expand the mineralization. We had some pretty good success there. If you look at hole 9, we hit about 15 meters of 1.14% nickel there in a blank spot in the resource. And then on the west side, hole number 8, we also hit about 10 meters of 1.13%.

9:00 So very successful program. We tested a little bit on strike as well to see how far the mineralization extended as well to confirm whether this stratigraphic horizon had prospectivity and we definitely confirmed that we feel that this is a very decent area to further explore.

9:19 So that then set up phase 2, which was us moving to the other side of the river and going with deeper shots. So we thought that was a better orientation to go after this mineralization. We spaced out our sections at 50 meters to get this initial understanding. We did 17 holes for over 5,200 meters. That included some samples that we sent for met analysis. Our primary objective was to identify if the mineralization of that W4, that known 2010 resource, continued down. And we were successful. So we have announced the W4 extension, that's the below 200 meters, and we also think that the 3 lenses, as it was interpreted in the top part of the deposit in the 2010 resource, we think that those lenses are actually as 1 instead. So we anticipate more tons out of phase 2.

10:12 We're going to get back in for subsequent infill drilling, all geared towards a new updated resource on the W4 next year. Paul, do you want

10:21 to run us through some of the details of the Phase 2 results for the W4 extension? Sure. As Sean said, we were drilling it from the north and basically hitting the mineralization at a much better orientation to give us a better reflection of the true width of the mineralization, the continuity. We released the numbers for 12 and 13 previously in June and you can see like you know we had some really good hits there, about 14 meters of 1.5% nickel and what you do see is this continuity of the mineralization through the section and it lines up very nicely with the hits that were historically from above you can see there EV1 hit about 20 meters of 0.93%

11:00 nickel and we see a lot of potential here to extend the mineralization to depth. If we move on to section 500 which is the next one, you can see again this is 50 meters further to the east from section 450 and we have some very good hits there showing that the mineralization maintains a similar thickness along that basal contact of that commandeitic flow. And it's still open at depth on this section below that 200 meter sliver that we tested. And really our drilling that we completed in the phase 2 was an attempt to kind of see what we can expect from that next 200 meter slice. And from these results, what we're seeing is that it's going to be at least a mere, if not maybe even a little bit better than what we saw up above.

11:47 So that's great news. Beyond W4, we also have really interesting additional high-grade targets. So again this is our engine 1. Looking across the land package which we acquired earlier this year, We have in the west an interesting anomaly with Croxall, down to the south on the Matthews, so that's on the Groves land. We did a bit of work there this summer, not drilling, but just preliminary exploration. That's really of interest. In addition, there's the Langmuir No. 2, which was a past producer, which is known mineralization in the ground, high-grade mineralization, which we could potentially go after as well. But our main focus now is W4, and trying to figure out how many tons we can pull into resource there. Paul, do you want to talk about the prospectivity, you know, looking more broadly across the Shaw Dome?

12:37 Sure, this is a 3D mag map showing, like, you know, just highlighting the high magnetic features within the Shaw Dome, and you can really see The areas that have higher elevation and are colored red are really the comedic flows and sales that occur within this particular area. We do know that we have 4 separate stratigraphic horizons within the Shaw Dome that are prospective for these high grade targets. There's no mineralization high grade on 3 of the 4. And that basically, I believe we have in excess of 100 kilometers of strike length that we can explore for these high-grade deposits just within our property package. And that gets really small when you compare that to the success that had in Western Australia, right? Do you want to talk us a bit through the comparison to Cumbalda? Sure.

13:23 I had the fortune of working in Western Australia for a while, visited Cumbalda, and really the things that take away from Cumbalda are when you find a stratigraphic horizon with nickel mineralization on it, they tend to occur in clusters. And once you find one, you often find others. We see a similar

13:39 distribution there on the Shaw Dome in that little black box, which is the same area as the picture on the right of Cambalda, that we have a number of deposits occurring there, many of which have been mined, all occurring on the same horizon. W4 is in the most upper horizon, the only one on that particular stratigraphy. So we see that as a really good exploration target, as well as that entire area around the dome that our property covers.

14:05 So that high grade is really interesting for us and what W4 is just getting us started and then we're going to try to figure out what else is out there. Let's shift now to our second day of Engine 2, the large scale targets in the phase 3 work that we have underway now. So our target here, as we talk about large scale, otherwise known as low grade, is really the success that our colleagues at Canada Nickel have had with Crawford. If you look at the drilling that they did initially on the Crawford main, they came up with, after drilling about

14:38 15,000 meters, they came up with something that was a little under 2 kilometers long and 360 meters wide, and that got them their billion tons. Now that was at a 0.25% nickel grade and they've had tremendous success in the market with that Crawford main zone. They like to refer to it as having been the largest nickel sulfide discovery since the

15:01 1970s. So that's really what we're trying to sort of identify and get onto the board. When we look at large scale targets across our property, there's 2 very interesting areas. There's 1 in the West, Adams Eldorado, and then up in the northeast, the Carmen Langmuir. Paul, do you want to talk us through how these look when you look at the aerial data? Sure. These are mag maps from the VTEM survey completed in 2007 over the property package. And basically just like that 3D mag image, everything that is colored a bright red or purple has high magnetic signature. What we're doing is targeting these Dynetic Comadiate cells on the inner part of the shard dome that really have this continuity. And you can see here on the CAR-LANG, which is the current project that we're working on, there's a long linear mag high feature that we're focused on. It's 6 kilometers long. We're only taking a small sliver of that testing it, and then it's on average anywhere between 4 to 600 meters wide.

16:05 And it's neat because they've had grab samples done there. Paul, do you want to run us through sort of the outcrop issue and grab samples? This is my third time here in the Shaw Dome over the past 30 years and basically in the 1990s when I was running Otakonpu's exploration program we had commissioned the University of Alabama to do a field surface sampling program across the outcrops in the Shaw Dome. Basically car land was one of the areas that had great outcrop exposure. You're looking at something in 10 to 20 percent outcrop of Dunites, which is perfect. We took 40 samples, or they took 40 samples, they ran them, they averaged about 0.33 percent nickel from surface grab samples, and the lowest sample was at 0.25. So we had a really great head start here knowing we had the right type of rocks and getting an idea of what the grades would be.

16:55 Right and and we have roughly 10 kilometers of them so bringing it back again to the Crawford main zone which they were able to identify their billion tons off of something less than 2 kilometers, and it seems as though we have the potential up on just the Kar-Lang for multiples of that. So the area we're working now with our phase 3 is identified there in that box. And then Paul, here are the drill holes. This is what we're into right now with phase 3. Yeah, we're taking a systematic approach to drilling this section of Dunite. You can see our drill spacing is about 200 meters apart. We've conferred with our third party, Gio, who's going to be doing any type of further work on this reporting. Make sure that we're here. This is an indicated distance, so we'll be able to come out with an indicated potential resource in the future once we've completed this. We're over 80% done, our drilling, we're on to the last section now up on the north there, the drill hole is highlighted in blue, and basically we're cruising along and should start seeing assays and results coming out of this over the coming weeks to the next 2 to 3 months.

18:05 Yeah, so this is us taking one small piece of the 10 kilometers of the car laying for us to initially test and try to figure out if we can get ourselves a resource out of that. So we're really excited about the drilling as it's coming. And when we get to the catalysts and the future news flow, this is gonna be a big part of it. This is us talking about our developing the large scale business, which our initial target up in the northeast is the Karlang. So this drilling is what we've been active in this summer, and we're hoping to wrap it up now in September. But it's been really exciting, as Paul says, on 200 meters spacing, dealing with the third party QP, the same QP that our friends actually at Canada Nickel use, we intend to be able to pull a resource on this first area up on the 10 kilometers that we have in the northeast.

19:00 So Paul, if we compare, so let's talk a bit more about your experience in the area and how many of these large-scale type targets exist up there and how you think about them. Yeah, I've spent over 30 years exploring for nickel in a gold camp in the Timmins area. And I really have seen all of the areas of nickel mineralization, as well as tested any number of other areas within the Timmins camp, basically to the Quebec border. And really these type of deposits

19:31 or zones are probably fairly common in the Abitibi within the Dunites. And so really what I see is there's 4 main things that are going to differentiate the projects and really determine which ones get advanced first. And those 4 things are first, your proximity to processing and services. So we're located about 30 kilometers south of Timmins. You have drilling contractors there. MPLH is a group that we use out of Timmins, so they have all of their drills and men coming from there. We also have all the other services including laboratories to run our analytical samples as well as like in a lodging for our own employees. Secondly it's the access to the drill sites. We're able to take a pickup truck and drive right up to our drill site on the well-developed roads due to the fact that there was recent logging there over the past 5 years and they clear cut basically our ridges within the area. The second is grade. What we're looking at is a potential grade

20:33 boost here of anywhere between 10 to 20% over what's seen in some of the other ones that have been published or announced over the past few months. And the last thing really is the overburden depth. And basically, if you take a look at our project, I estimate that our overburden depth is going to be somewhere between about 5 to 10 meters on average, but we already have 15 to 20% outcrops. We know that donites are there, and you can see them on surface. Other areas of the Abitibi, almost the entire rest of the Abitibi, I'd say your overburden averages anywhere between 20 to 40 meters, which really is going to be a reflection of your upfront CapEx you're going to need to invest just to get started to actually pulling out where I think pretty much from day 1 you can start pulling rock out of our project.

21:19 Yeah so we think that pretty soon after these are identified when you compare them they're not all apples to apples these sort of large-scale aka low-grade deposits in this this part of the world.

21:33 So that was a quick run through. Let me go into some detail about what's ahead for us. So we have now come out with the final results from our phase 2, that's the W4 extension. So we identified that with results earlier this summer, followed that up with the final holes this week. It's very exciting as Paul ran through, the mineralization continues to depth. And we're gonna get back in there with drilling later this year for infill. So we've gone through a phase 3 with you just now, that's for our large scale targets up on the car lang. So we're at 80 percent done on pulling the core for that. It's been at the lab and the results are now going to start coming. We anticipate those will be boring and consistent results, But they'll show good consistent grade through that area that I think will stack up into a nice deposit.

22:28 In addition, something that would be a very nice comparison as well to other companies that are out there. So those are the results coming out this fall. Drill results from phase 3, plus we have metallurgical analysis, which is just finishing up at the lab now about the W4 rock. So that's coming this fall. Then our drills are going to be next back on the W4 for infill drilling and they're going to go after additional high-grade targets. Paul showed you just a glimpse into the work we're doing with a third-party consultant about the prospectivity across the land package. And I've said this before, one of our big problems is prioritizing our targets because there's just so much interesting

23:08 stuff out there. So in phase 4, we're going to go infill W4 plus go after some additional targets. And that's all going to be driving towards new tech reports with a new maiden resource on the car lang the large-scale car lang up in the northeast and then we hope an updated resource on the W4 and we're aiming for something in the indicated level because we're going back in to do that infill drilling. So that's really exciting news ahead for us. Again we're done with phase 2. Phase 3 will come and it'll be consistent boring grade results across 200 meter spacings. All that will be driving towards a new resource on a new deposit, which we hope to have out next year, in addition to doing the extra work on W4.

24:00 So really quick, if I compare our business with the 2 engines, we have both the high grade and a large scale. I think we compare very favorably against some other companies that are out there. You've got a high grade deposit with class 1, but that's all they've got. They don't have the options of both sides. If I look at the low-grade companies, so the ones with the large-scale targets, I've spent a lot of time in this presentation talking about how we think our deposit, our expected deposit compares against Canada Nickel. Similarly, in Western Canada, FPX is also trying to make a go of the low-grade mineralization. I'm excited for what we have in that large-scale potential. Plus, we've got the high-grade alongside. And then finally, if I compare ourselves to Talon. So Talon has wonderful mineralization in a tricky place to try and permit.

24:54 I feel like we may have that type of mineralization, like Tamarack, somewhere on the Shaw Dome. And if we can find that kind of mineralization as we develop our high-grade business, I'm much more excited about trying to get that permitted where we are near Timmins than I would be in Minnesota. So I think no matter how you look at it on a valuation basis, what we have with our dual track, our 2 engine strategy is deeply undervalued. Okay, and that was the quick drive by of our story. Do you wanna get into Q&A? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks guys for going through the great presentation. I'd like to remind everyone in the audience that you can ask questions using the Q&A tab found on the right hand side of your screen. But to get started guys, first question, what's the target tonnage for the high-grade W4 and the large-scale caroling deposits?

25:46 Right, well Paul, so we can't really talk about tonnage necessarily, Paul, but perhaps can you give what our target indicated tonnage will be? Well, what our objective is for the drilling on W4 will be basically identifying something that's going to be north of 1 million tons. That's our objective. But really, like, you know, on the higher range, we may see something where we actually are able to double the existing resources that's out on it. In terms of car laying, we've designed the project to really identify a volume of material that should be in, I can go anywhere from 400 to 600 million tons of donites. And really it's just going to be determined by what the grades of those donites are and the consistency of the units that we're identifying through the drilling now.

26:35 Yeah, and really our target on that one is something that looks like that Crawford main zone as we've been setting it up. Great, okay, thank you. Follow up question, when do you expect to have the resources ready to release? Yeah, everything's shooting for 2023, 1st half of 2023. We're trying to figure out if we do them all as 1 or if they're separate reports, but That'll be all for 2023. Of course, the W4, we need to get that phase 4 detail in there. We anticipate for Carlang, once we're complete that drilling up on Carlang with phase 3, we'll have all the data we need. So we're trying to figure out if we do them at different stages or if we wrap it all together in 1 big report. But it's safe to say first half of 2023.

27:23 Absolutely. What was the deal with applying for the mining lease on W4? Right. Paul, do you want to talk about how that fits into the process in Ontario? Sure. Getting a mining lease is really just one of the steps required to advance any project. So it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to get a mining lease. We wanted to make sure we have all of our ducks in a row, if and when we make a decision to advance W4, being at 1%, it's a high grade deposit, I think that it has a reasonable likelihood that we'll be able to advance it further along. So I just wanted to make sure we had everything in place and it's a fairly straightforward process. We filed our notice of intent letter, which is really just the first step, and now it's going to go through the process with the Ontario government where we'll provide more information and get that mining lease set up.

28:16 And we announced earlier this summer that we have now restarted or started the baseline testing, which is something that goes into that permitting package down the road anyways. So these are all indicative of our excitement around the potential for the W4. All right, great. Well, John, that looks like all the questions we've received for today. So I wanna thank you and everyone who's attended, especially those who participated for joining us. But Paul, Sean, I wanna hand things over to you before we wrap up the day, just to close us out with some final words. Yeah. Thanks, Cam. So real quick, we're a straightforward story. We have an enormous piece of land and a great place of the world to find more nickel.

29:04 We have these 2 tracks, so we're racing ahead to get ourselves an updated high-grade resource and a maiden large-scale resource. And I think those 2 stack up to create very interesting optionality for our company. We're all financed up to do that drilling and do that work. And I think we're deeply undervalued when you look at some of the other comparables that are out there. I know everybody says that, But we're now moving from the talking phase to the showing results phase, which is really exciting. And I think we've got a ton of news to come over the next few months. Wonderful. That does sound exciting. All right, Paul. All right, Sean. That's it for today. I hope you had a good time, everyone. And With that, I hope you all have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Great. Thank you. Thank you.