Exploring for Copper-PGE in Canada: Cupani Metals & Clean Air Metals

0:04 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for this live event. We're here with Brian Voss from Kupani Meadows and Mike Garbutt from Clean Air Meadows to discuss their Copper PGE exploration projects. When I was putting this event together, these 2 caught my attention as compelling plays worth a closer look. And my hope is that by the end of the call, whether you're already familiar with them or hearing about one of them for the first time, you'll be curious enough to dig a little deeper. Just a quick note today, this event is being recorded, and the replay will be available shortly after we wrap up. Feel free to submit questions if you have any in the chat, because we are focusing on company specific questions. It doesn't hurt to have your engagement. So I'm going to start this off with a question for the both of you. Maybe we'll start with you, Mike. What was the moment or insight that made each of you decide this was the project worth betting on?

0:55 And what does that conviction look like day-to-day when you're out in the field?

1:00 I joined Clean Air Metals in 2022 as Chief Operating Officer. I left the Iron Gold Coltade project to join. What attracted me to Clean Air Metals and the Thunder Bay North project was essentially the belief that it was a buildable asset. My background is mining engineering. And then really thought that within a reasonable amount of time, this asset could get built. And so what does that look like when I'm in the field? I think what you realize when we travel from Thunder Bay to the site, it's a short distance, 40km, it's surrounded by infrastructure, it's got all the checkboxes to advance.

1:46 But really and truly, I think that, you know,

1:51 you realize this asset was only discovered in around 2006. A lot of work's been done since then, but it makes you realize that in our region, the mid-continent rift in and around Thunder Bay and south of the border, there's a lot of potential in that region and that also gets me a little bit excited about what's the future potential in this region. Yeah, we're going to get into that today. Brian, what about you and the Blue Lake project? Yeah, I got multiple points along the timeline, Kyle, where it became obvious that it was a good bet. And the first one, the first one, I guess, goes all the way back to 2018. When I first heard about this, I was working as a fund manager in Toronto and I was working at a company called Dundee and the chairman of Dundee had bought himself 25% of the equity of this company.

2:46 And then he couldn't push it forward, he became ill. And the first moment I knew this was worth betting on was when he and another guy named Douglas Macquarie, who built Asante Gold, they explained to me what they thought they had and its market cap was next to nothing. So I knew that it was going to be a good bet. I also knew it was going to take a long time to play out. So we'll skip ahead several years to about 2024. Douglas Macquarie and I rented a chopper and 2 geologists for a week in May of 2024. We spent a week visiting the It's a huge land package, 682 square kilometers now on an old continental rift.

3:34 We spent a week looking at the highlights and examining the footprint that this thing represents and the historical tonnage that's there from drilling in the 80s. And Douglas got out of the chopper at the end of the first week and said, I'll put my own million in for 2024's exploration budget. Find that, match that, let's go. And that was big because at the time, you know, his prior company, Asante, which is 3 Gold mines in Ghana, is now, I don't know, $2Bn market cap. And he said this is going to be faster and better than that. So those are 2 of my moments along a long stretch. And I guess the most recent one is when our geology team came up with an entirely new interpretation of what they've seen. And, we are now chasing the, the, the model that we have the second raglan mine or a raglan type mine, and also buildable, we hope and buildable we think. So rather than spend 20 minutes on 1 answer, Kyle, I'll hand the microphone back to you. No, no, that's great.

4:37 So Kupanyi's Blue Lake sits in Shefferville area and Clean Air's Thunder Bay North runs along the Thunder Bay corridor. Both historic districts with existing infrastructure, but still genuinely frontier ground. How has that paradox shaped the way you design exploration programs and sequence your targets?

4:59 I can be fairly brief on this. Because of our location, our drilling cost is, a contractor sleeps in town and drives out to the site. Our cost per meter is quite low. That would drive you maybe drilling more than you should. I'd like to inform the listeners, we do have almost a 15Mt indicated resource. What we have is generally well drilled off. We do have downplunge potential. How do we decide what we're going to do? Well, it's all about what's best for what we're trying to do with the project. And We'd like to say we'd like to do both.

5:48 We're moving ahead with trying to develop that 15Mt indicated resource. As such, there are some targets within there to infill, but there's also the downplunge potential for scale that it's a little bit deeper holes. And that would be priority 1 in terms of drilling. But the reality is we're so close to town, lower drilling costs. We still want to be very specific with our drilling and not overdo it. Not drill for the sake of news flow in particular. No, definitely. And Brian, frontier ground, how does that shape your exploration programs and your tour?

6:34 It's frontier and it's not at the same time. It's really a unique situation. So Shefferville was built for mining in the 1940s. It's been running almost continuously open pit iron ore mines since the 1940s. Currently, most of the open pit for iron ore there is owned by Tata. It was originally built by the Iron Ore Company of Canada. They built the railway, they built the airport, they built the town site, and that's all still there and it's all taking ore down to the Atlantic Ocean by rail right now. Our site is 65 kilometers from that railhead and so when we're drilling we send things up on the rail and then we fly it out or drag it out, as the case may be, to the site. In the winter, that's easier.

7:24 How does that affect us? The first thing is, we have a historical estimate, because it was drilled before the 43-101 rules came in. It was drilled on 60-meter, 100-foot spacing, so we know it's there. And it's 4.4 million tons of more than 2% Copper equivalents. We'll get into all that later, or you can look at stuff on our press releases on our website. But how are we doing it? Because that tonnage is in less than 10 square kilometres. We have 682 square kilometres of the same surface indication rock type. So we're essentially thinking of it as a brownfield, right? Assume that the smartest thing to do is to start from where there's already that tight space drilling in the historical estimate and move out slowly from there.

8:14 And the move out, which is what we're talking about this morning with Drilling's press release.

8:20 There's 15km of undrilled magmatic river flow, as I'll call it for the generalists,

8:32 that our existing tonnage or historical estimate is part of, but there's 13 kilometers that have never been touched. And it looks like it's all the same kind of rock type and the same metallogenesis, hopefully. And over time we will step out and step out and step out. So what we're drilling right now is, I guess you could call it brownfield cause it's in the shadow of an existing thing. But it's clearly green in the sense that we're testing new ideas. And if the test proves accurate, there's a huge inventory of obvious high priority corridors sitting in front of us. So staying with you, Brian, as you both mentioned, there's historic work on both of your projects. What was the key data insight or geological reread that unlocked the next leg of exploration for each of you?

9:21 Yeah, this one's August. August of 2025, VP of Exploration, Israel Cotier and independent director Daniel Giopinazzo were in camp and they were looking over the project. They were looking over the prior work done by prior teams. And Jacques is quite right. He would tell you the story. He was in the chopper and we were flying along and he pointed down and he said, that's columnar jointing. Columnar jointing for those who don't know is if there's a river of lava and it cools quickly, it always makes hexagon shapes. So that proved that our historical tonnage is at the bottom of an old river of magma or river of lava, whatever you wanna call it as a generalist.

10:17 And that told us so much about where to go look next. So that's our one key moment of reinterpretation. Hello?

10:31 Yeah, I'm there. Sorry, my internet was a little laggy there, but I hope it came in clear for everyone. I just lost the last 30 seconds of that. It was brilliant, Kyle. No, no, no, I'm sure if you're in the chat, please let me know if there was any issues on your end, but it was just, it might've just been my end. We'll move on though. But I did get the just of it. So despite Blue Lakes district scale land position, well, I guess I never give Mike an opportunity to talk on that last question. Mike, if you have any commentary on Clean Air? No, I actually had pretty sure. I was the one who started with that one. Thanks for the technical difficulties and your patience, everyone. Despite Blue Lake's district-scale land position and Thunder Bay North's established resource footprint, both companies remain relatively unknown compared to bigger Copper or PGE names.

11:32 What do you think explains that? And what would it take for the broader market to sit up and pay attention? And Mike, we'll go with you. Yeah, I think that's the million-dollar question there. I can speak to the reasons why I think we should be. If you look at some of our intersections from our exploration programme last year, I think we had probably the second best intersection across

11:59 North America for Copper-Nickel PGEs. The challenge for us, which is why we are jumping back into looking at the downplunge and maybe shoring that up a bit, I think in the market, the early exploration gets a lot of attention. You get a lot of good drill results.

12:24 Projects that are close to ready to build, if you look at the Lassonde curve and we're into studies, we just completed a PEA on our asset and looking to carry on with studies, that really doesn't get a whole lot of attention, doesn't really get a whole lot of love. So the nice thing about Thunder Bay North is we can do both, right? We could drive that scale through that downplunge exploration. But also, again, the timing is hot to advance this project and we need to take advantage of that. For me, that would be the big difference there. I think we need to demonstrate some scale in the downplunge area. And Brian, would you agree that Kupani is relatively unknown and why should people set up and pay attention?

13:13 I would absolutely agree we're relatively unknown. As you just heard, we got serious about this project in 2023-2024. Why are we unknown? Well, it takes time to put the name out. It takes time to get recognized. But I would also say we're probably 2 or 3 years into a metals bull cycle, both for the pricing of the metals like copper and platinum palladium, but also for the kind of investors who buy mining equities, right? There's 2 groups of mining equity investors. There's the people who want the dividends. They want to own Agnico. They want to own things that are in production, have multiple mines and in multiple jurisdictions that you can value it on.

14:02 How much cash flow is it creating. And the royalty companies are, I guess, at the top of that stack. And then there's another group of investors, the one who make their money by answering the question, well, how big can it get?

14:13 And that's the exploration group that Mike was talking about a minute ago. So we're getting onto the radar screen of the, how big can it get crowd? And I'm doing things like beginning road shows, going to different cities across Canada. We have a huge audience in Quebec. We'll be going down to the U.S. For the first time next month. We have a great project. We have a great team. I have complete faith in both of those. It's my job to get the word out. And that's what I'll be doing. And as the word gets out, you'll see the stock price go up and up and up. So what about the sense of urgency? What's one thing you're seeing at Blue Lake right now that tells you the under the radar phase has a finite shelf life?

15:03 Yeah, If we come back out of the drilling program that we said is underway today with results that show mineralization is not just in the area that has already been known about it for decades, then the idea that we have this immense possible camp or district scale thing to explore becomes clear for everyone to see. The other thing I'll point out about running public companies is you really get valued in my experience on what you did 2 years ago. I find that when I was running other companies, the stock would be at, I stock it around from 50 cents to 5 bucks and the people who were buying it at 5 bucks were telling me the reasons they were buying it. And it was all kind of based on work we did 2 years ago. It takes that long for the company narrative to percolate into people's minds.

15:56 So what this company was doing 2 years ago was just finishing its land package accumulation. So 2 years from now, people will be, if I can speed it up, all the better. But it just takes time, Kyle. You need to keep knocking on the door. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves, I need more Copper and Nickel exploration exposure. But they do wake up thinking, I wonder how I'm going to make some money in the stock market. And that's the answer we're trying to give to people. Well said. Mike, what's one aspect of Thunder Bay North that you think the exploration community still hasn't given enough credit to, and why does it matter? I'll divide the exploration community into ones that understand the potential of the mid-continent rift-related intrusions in the Thunder Bay region. They're well supported and they're some of our biggest champions.

16:52 But outside of that, people that do pay attention to Nickel, Copper, PGE systems, and I'll speak to those that understand Stillwater, understand South Africa, understand Stillwater, understand South Africa.

17:05 They see what's in the mid-continent rift region and don't see scale or even grade. And unfortunately, we're probably one of the better grade deposits in mid-continent rift. But the one thing I think that people are starting to pay attention more is, you know, if you have a similar deposit to ours is the Tamarack deposit by Tallinn. And then their down plunge of one of their intrusions, they hit a significant intersection of massive sulphide. So I think the broader exploration community doesn't really appreciate, give enough credit to the potential massive sulphide accumulations you can get. We are just starting to understand in the last couple of years, we've actually done a better job

18:00 of understanding what drives the accumulation and where it occurs. That's kind of the vector for our future exploration. I think the local exploration community do understand that. I think broader, really letting credence to the quality of mid-continent rift related intrusions, that's kind of missing from the broader exploration community. Just staying with you, Mike, and you kind of already addressed it, but just to put a fork into it and a nice clear question. Looking at the next 12 to 24 months, what is a single drill target or target area each of you is personally most fired up about? What would a genuine aha moment look like if the geology delivers?

18:53 Okay, so yeah, start with me. I talk about it enough. I think we kind of had an aha moment this year. We reinterpreted some past magnetoluric data

19:09 and looked at what Talon was doing with respect to trying to understand massive sulphide flows and where they occur. We re-analyzed that data and came up with a bunch of targets that we didn't have before and drilled the first one with some remaining flow-through funds we had. And as I said, hit 50m of mineralization, 500m deep.

19:34 So on an aha moment, I think that was 400m away from the known resource. We have 2.5km of strike in the downplunge with a number of targets along there. So I would like to think that stepping out even further, maybe a kilometre or so, and intersecting or downhole geophysics that's showing a good conductor, that would be a great aha moment for us that really shows that potential. And Brian, care to provide context for you just announced drilling this morning. What would the aha moment be when you get the results back? Yeah, So I'll broaden the question a little bit by answering to say that, you know, we've been having aha moments every Every 6 months to be honest You know the the aha moment about this could be the next raglan style exploration mineralization and then before well almost simultaneous to that, but just before that, we ran a huge V10,

20:41 magnetics and electromagnetic survey. And we found what looked to be 2 entirely new regions that have never been explored before that had the same response, the same surface sampling as the area that has our historical tonnage estimates. So it might already be a triple. We just don't know it and we'll need nothing but time and money to figure that out. So that's what's happened just in the last 12 months, those 2 things. But the next, obviously, if we find the mineralizations in the places we expect to find it, that proves our theories. That tells us that this immense inventory of land to look at is going to be super fertile for a long time to come.

21:27 And that would be our biggest aha moment yet. This next question is more directed toward you, Brian, but Mike, feel free to add commentary regarding clean air after Brian answers here. But both of you control substantial ground with more targets than you can chase at once. Walk us through your decision-making process. How do you rank targets and decide what gets drilled first when a dozen areas are compelling for the rig? Sure. It's almost like doing a crossword puzzle, Kyle. You're going across each line, looking for something that might connect to a word you're chasing, right? So on each square, you're looking at all the squares around it. And that really keeps us focused on what I said earlier, we want to stay near the known tonnage so that when we step out and we find something, we know how to relate it back to what's already understood.

22:22 So that's why we're to the North and to the South of the existing tonnage with our drill program. There's a map that came out today about that. But we're not leaping 2, 5, 10 kilometers away, although we think it's the same kind of length, because if you find something there, you don't know exactly how to follow all the magmatic channels back to the time that you know about. So that's how we're staying close to making sure that when we learn something new, we understand how it fits into what we already know. And then related to that, the historical tunnels that we're talking about, the places we're drilling now, they're all pretty much flat line. They have a 2 degree dip.

23:11 And so that's an easier drill, it's a shorter drill than some of the other spots on our landscape where you might have a 30-degree dip. We're doing that first. Mike, I'd argue yours is a more two-pronged approach, competing for dollars than over rigs, right? Yes. We have a 300km2 land package with 5 intrusions. We're only working 2 of them. The 3 other intrusions, there's no mineralization. I would say they're under-explored. They are on our radar. But the question, and then so that's at one end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the opportunity, you know, and a lot in 2024 and 2025, where we had these ballroom structures within the known indicated resource that we thought were undersized.

24:09 We drilled some tightly spaced holes in a few areas and expanded some of these by 100% and added a bunch of grade to to a resource So, you know on those and there's the bookends of what we can do but in the middle is you know when I've talked about it quite enough is that that potential to Actually expand the resource and and so if you say, you know, how do you decide? I mean, I think the the resource expansion will actually move the needle for us more than the other 2 targets. That makes sense. I have one more question queued up, but I think it's a good one to wrap up with. There are a few questions in the chat, so I'm just going to ask them right now. We'll start with you, Brian, an individual in the chat is wondering the expected drilling in terms of cost and cost per meter.

25:01 Yes, so our cost, the total drill program, including everything that goes with it, you've got to get it up the rail and you've got to move it over and all that other stuff, and then you assay it, I think that total estimate is 2.4M$, which we have in the bank. We raised through flow-through already. And then how much will that get us? 3,000 to 4,000m is the current number. And we'll know that final once we know that final, right? There have been some pretty big blizzards up in Shefferville away in the last week. So we're a few days behind plan, but that's all right because we have the ability to leave the drill there and just come back after the spring breakup, which we're probably gonna wanna do anyway, there's a lot more work to do. So what does that mean per meter?

25:53 I guess I'll answer that question once we know how many meters we get done in which time frame. So yes, It'll be more expensive than having the guys sleep in their own home in Thunder Bay as Mike can do and my hat's off to him for that. But we've planned ahead. We have a camp with several buildings. They've been winterized. We've got a cook, a chef, hot water heaters, generators, everything we need, And that's on a annual renewable permit from the province of Quebec. So, you know, we don't fly everybody back and forth from Shefferville per shift. They fly out, they'll stay 2 weeks in the camp. And then the distance from the camp to the drill site is, it's about a 2 kilometer snowmobile run. So yeah, we'll know our numbers better and we'll talk about our per meter numbers once we have the final numbers in, but yeah, it'll be more than Mike's and less than you think.

26:46 And I should note that the 3,000 to 4,000 meters, you're not drilling 600 meter holes, right? They're rather shallow. Oh, Lord, no. These holes are, on average, they'll be 150 to 200 meters. So there is a, I'll use my hands to explain it. So imagine an old river, except the river instead of water was lava or magma. And now that river is turned to solid rock and it's at surface, and it's at the bottom of that river, which is anywhere from 150 meters to 200 meters down, that our mineralization is sitting. So it's kind of Distilled itself almost like a oil refinery. It's distilled itself within that heat cycle of the lava 1.9 billion years ago, So it's a straight drill down and the riverbed is basically 150 meters in some points, 200 maybe at its deepest.

27:40 So those are straight simple holes and we'll get a lot of them. Yeah. Great. Touching on angles, there's a question here for Mike. Neil's wondering, does clean air metals, platinum vein go downward or does it go sideways? So yeah, It plunges at about, so it comes up from depth, right? So the source is somewhere quite deep. We haven't hit the source for both intrusions, but they trend up towards surface at about 15 degrees, give or take. So it's nearly flat, but it's shallow dipping. So it's neither, it's not horizontal or vertical, it's about 15 degrees. All good.

28:30 Last question in the chat is for Kupani. Brian, the size of the historical resource, and you mentioned Raglan a couple of times, the size of Raglan and distance from Raglan. It's a little history lesson. Raglan opened in 1997 and it had, I'll say 30 million tons of copper-nickel PGE when it opened in 1997. And at its production rate, it was due to run out of material in about 15 years It's now been open for I guess 30 years and it still has not just 30 It's got I think now 40 million tons in reserve and that's because it's on like these other places I mentioned at the start of the call, it's on an old suture where 2 parts of the continent of North America came together.

29:27 And so there's this big complex plumbing system that goes down from surface for miles and miles. And so the Raglan mine started there and is continuing to find material faster than it can produce material. So that's the price, that's what we're chasing. That's what we think and hope that we have and what our geological theories and proofs so far are pointing us towards. So that's Raglan. And then give me the other part of the question again, Kyle. Historical resource. Okay, 4.4 million tons of calculated then 2.3% copper equivalent. That equivalence math assumes 100% recovery and In basis points 45 of the economics is copper 45 of the economics was nickel and then 5 each platinum palladium and Basically, it starts the surface It's in lenses along that bottom of the magmatic river, like I said, which is exactly how Raglan looks.

30:28 And we think there's a lot more to be found because there's a lot more magmatic river than has ever been drilled. Nice and concise. Thank you, gentlemen. Last question here is to wrap it up in a nice little bowl. What is it about where each of your projects stands right now, the data you have, the ground you've walked on, the targets queued up, that makes this the most compelling entry point for investors paying attention to early-stage Copper PGE plays? Mike, we'll start with you. I'll be brief. I think it's the balance between that we have a really good development story and we're in a region where there's additional processing capacity. Our PEA is based on a toll milling scenario and we're 65km south of an underutilized mill. So right there I think you know even though you know we have the potential for scale, some early exploration targets that you know we could advance this project and actually add additional life, additional scale once we get going. And I think that's kind of a unique position for where we sit right now.

31:45 And Brian? We've got 685 square kilometers of what we think is the same type of rock that hosts these magmatic rivers. The historical tonnage that I just talked about is kind of 1% of that 685. And this company is a time machine. No one has looked at this land since 1987 and the people who did look, they didn't understand the Raglan theories cause Raglan hadn't been built yet. They only had exploration ownership for about 1% of the land. And so today we get to go back, it's been untouched since the 80s, we get to go back with today's technology, today's knowledge and see what there is on the whole land package.

32:32 And that's a fantastic opportunity. Add to that, you've got great team and high insider ownership and patient management. It's going to be good. It's a good run. I invite everyone to give me a call and talk more. I'd love to wrap it up this way, but I know people take the time out of the day and I do like to address any question. There was just one more snuck in here for Mike. Have you considered a name change at all that reflects the current environment better? So, I mean, the name has been around for, you know, about 5 years and yeah, you know, it's, you know, it does reflect, you know, the, the, the, the characteristics of platinum and palladium as catalysts.

33:18 Yeah, does, my question is, does main change actually fundamentally change anything you're trying to do with the project? So yeah, would we consider it at some point perhaps, but very low on the priority for us. Certainly. Gentlemen, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. Great conversation. And thank you for the patience with that little flip up there with the tech. Thank you, Carl, for putting this together. Thanks for coming along. All right. Thank you. Have a great day, gentlemen. Bye.