Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
5:28 Now to get into the project, I'm going to leave most of the project talk to Jack but I want to kind of hit the high points. You know where it is, Eastern Yukon Territory located on the Canal Road. As you can see from that photo there we can drive a truck and trailer with a D6 on it into the into the site. That means immediate benefits in terms of you know reducing exploration costs but long terms when it come time to build it is much simpler to improve an existing road than to build a new road in Yukon and I mean anywhere. The 2018 PEA I think was an important moment for the company. When we bought the project, the core of the project, I should say, off HUD Bay, there was a lot of concerns that it was remote and simply didn't work, right? And I think what the PEA established was, not only does it work, it works extremely well, as just the Tom and Jason deposits.
6:24 But people shouldn't get too anchored to those. You think about how much we've done since then, and this is not just the expansion of the property. A lot of what I want to talk about today, before I hand it off to Jack to talk about boundary, is that Tom and Jason are a lot better than they were in 2018. We understand a lot more about them. And that tiny corner of our property still for the time being is the center of gravity and it's important to not neglect it. And you know the resource we put out there, you know, 11.2 million tons, 39.5 million tons inferred. Very, very big resource. And that's just between Tom and Jason. That's Tom East, Tom West, Southeast, Jason, Maine and South does not include Tom North, does not include the step out drilling we've done in those areas.
7:18 In particular, we, 2019 Tom North drilled that to sort of define what was there. Good grades for open pit extends the likely open pit life at the Tom West or broadly the Tom area, in conjunction with some improvement of grade in the higher grade parts of Tom West due to historical holes having poor recovery. We think alone, this is a significantly different looking pit when we re-engineer it than it was in the 2018 PEA. And, you know, we still have some really interesting mysteries to crack at Tom. The step out hole that we drilled in 2018, very, very high grade just off Tom East, 16.5 meters of 21% zinc, 13% lead and 240 grams silver.
8:14 This is for a polymetallic project, basically bonanza grade. But what's interesting is we now understand thanks to some additional structural mapping this summer, that's not folded as you actually see in this diagram here. So this cross section you're seeing here is not consistent with our current thinking. We think now that's on the other side of the Tom fault, the major fault through alongside Tom West and Tom East. So we don't know what that TS18004 really intersected and how much more is there and it has this intriguing possibility that there might be a significant amount of mineralization on the other side of the fault. And then at Jason, you know, as we've said from the get-go, This is 2 sides of a sync line.
9:02 They're going to be connected at depth, there are significant possibility for additional tonnage there. We know Jason South is is faulted into several offset bits, that the 2 different lenses being faulted off at least twice. The furthest east faulted area of that does not have enough drill intersections in it to define a resource on it, but has good drill grades, 13 and a half meters of 7% zinc 5% lead 120 grams silver this is very healthy grade so as we get a chance to drill that and define a resource on that again improves the resource at Tom and Jason but you know what Jack's gonna talk about today and I don't want to dwell on this, is that boundary, which we picked up in late 2018 after the PEA and after the resource, which we didn't drill until late 2019, looks Very interesting.
10:01 What was kind of a afterthought for us, the more thinking we do around it, you know, and the more we try to piece together that puzzle, the more intriguing it is. This is a substantial minimalized system at boundary zone, both in terms of size, but also in terms of locally grade. So understanding the genesis and distribution of this massive Zinc system at boundary and area is critical. And we think it's going to play a big part in the future of this project. And it's really going to pull that center of gravity of the project west. So, look, I want to wrap up here and hand it off to Jack.
10:50 Key things being 2018 PEA, 450 million after-tax NPV. Since then, we've done a lot of improvement and expansion of the resource at Tom and Jason. We've got some very excellent news from the government in terms of funding for our road. We've done some engineering work, which has helped us rethink some assumptions from the, some very conservative assumptions from the 2018 PEA. And then there's the possibilities of boundary zone and the broader property. Zone and the broader property. The next PEA, which we expect to deliver mid-2022, is going to look a lot different. And what we're targeting there is what should be, hopefully, a clear tier 1 project. This is a top 10 production profile and zinc-lead projects globally 1st or 2nd quartile costs long healthy mine life and projects like that by definition of being top 10 do not come along particularly often so you know we think there's going to be a tremendous amount of interest in the project from majors more than there already is when we really define the opportunity there.
12:03 Look, so, but I'm not going to summarize this. I'm going to hand it off to Jack. Go for it, Jack. Thanks, Brennan. OK, So yeah, I'm going to get on with talking about the geology of our new discovery at Boundary Zone West and how it ties into what we already knew at Boundary Zone Main. And I will be making some forward-looking statements during this presentation. So first a little bit of background about the Selwyn Basin. And the Selwyn Basin is a prolific zinc basin. And it's split into 3 districts. It spans a huge portion of the Yukon from Faroe, where there was once the world's largest open pit zinc mine.
12:54 And the Faroe mineralization is hosted by Cambrian rocks. Also over at Howard's Pass, It's only 90 kilometers from where we are at Macmillan Pass. There's a very high tonnage zinc-lead deposit, and that's hosted in early Silurian host rocks. Where we are at Mac Pass, all the zinc deposits found so far have been hosted by mid to late Devonian rocks. And this is similar to some of the deposits in northeast BC. But our new discovery at Boundary Zone West, we see mineralization occurring in both the Devonian and we've discovered mineralization in this Howard's Pass style early Silurian position in the stratigraphy. So we're at Mac Pass and Tom and Jason, between them there's some of the largest undeveloped deposits worldwide that are held by a junior company.
13:48 And we've announced a couple of weeks ago, a discovery at Boundaries in the West, and this should shed some light on some of the geology of what was quite a technical release. So before we get to boundary, I'm just going to take a moment to discuss some of the exploration targets that we talked about last year. So the 240 mile target, we did drill at the end of the program, but we did not reach the favorable stratigraphy before the weather chased us out. So that's still an unanswered question. We ran some gravity and some soils at volcanic zone, found a good gravity anomaly, and confirmed the historic lead and soil anomalies that are occurring. And this is the target that could be the source of a glacially dispersed boulder that's lead rich and is found near Boundary Zone.
14:40 We did some prospecting at Zinc Plus Target and at 11 and ran some soil lines, confirming the very large and high-grade zinc anomaly. But what I'm going to focus on is boundary zone and the discovery at boundary zone west. So this is similar to the slide that Brandon showed here, but we've updated it. So these 2 holes with the colors, the colored right here, the holes where we intersected very broad intervals of zinc mineralization from surface. And this included 230 meters. That's a true thickness of 4.14% zinc. And the first 100 meters from surface of that hole was nearly 8% zinc. And in hole 1, we intersected 230 meters of 3.4% zinc. So these are some really significant widths and grades of zinc occurring from surface in a bulk tonnage-style system with very broad large geometry that would be perhaps amenable to open-pit mining.
15:47 The hole 2 that we drilled this year is shown here in the dark grey, black colour. And we drilled this in the other orientation. So we turned the drill around and we drilled back into the deposit. And this, first of all, we had a gain of ground in the mineralization extended further than the target depth. But importantly, we had some concerns at Boundary Zone that some of the veins were following the direction that we were drilling in the core, which could bias grades to be higher than they truly are. Drilling in this direction confirmed that the veins are randomly oriented in a stockwork fashion, And this means that the grades are broadly representative of the system as a whole, which was a really positive result from this year. Although we haven't received any of the assays from the halls this year, But we could certainly see that in the vein textures in the core.
16:51 And this is what they look like. So this is the heart of Boundary Zone. And you see matrix infill, clast replacement in volcanoclastic rocks. You see brittle veins, stockwort veining, vein breches, and sometimes very thick banded veins in the mudstones. And these veins comprise sphalerite of different colors. We have an early red-brown sphalerite and a late tan sphalerite. And we also see siderite and pyrite, like in the image in the bottom right. And in thinking about this last winter, we're trying to find a geological analog for the exploration at Boundary Zone. And the closest we can come up with is Red Dog. And Red Dog is a very large zinc mine and series of deposits in Alaska.
17:41 And these shots on the right are from the vein ore at Red Dog. And the vein ore is the cross-hatched symbol on the cross-section. And this underlies a baryte cap, the bottom portion of which is replaced by silica and replaces in dark grey by massive sulphide. And we use this as an analogue to say that, you know, perhaps what we've discovered so far at Boundary Zone is this vein ore that may underlie a baryte cap where we may expect to find massive sulfides. And that's kind of summarized in this conceptual diagram that we put together last winter, conceptualizing the massive sulfide replacement of a baryte layer that would sit in the stratigraphy just higher than boundary zone. And we know that the barite occurs at this layer in the stratigraphy.
18:37 And we drilled a hole at boundary zone west and we intersected massive sulfides consistent with the model that we're using to target this mineralization. So how do we do that? Well, we ran a large ground gravity survey, which is outlined by this purple box here, over the center of Boundary Zone. And in most of those historic drill holes you see on the map, there is at least some mineralization, some zinc mineralization. And we knew that the boundaries was a very large hydrothermal system. But the ground gravity is showing us the density contrast in the subsurface. And we were targeting the side right alteration, which is very dense, and the pyrite and sphalerite and perhaps galena mineralization, which is also very dense and will show up as gravity highs. And what we were
26:45 And what we were not expecting but were very pleased to see was this large interval of Howard's Pass style mineralization at the bottom of hole 9. So on hole 9, where you see the burgundy color and the letter H, that is what we're terming Howard's Pass style mineralization. And this is stratiform sphalerite mineralization hosted by some older rocks that are late Ordovician to early Silurian in age. And we know this because we drilled through some graptolites, which are these small fossils that can be used to very accurately date the age of the rocks. So this is what this style of mineralization looks like. It's stratiform replacements of laminate and little layers in the rock. It's perhaps replacing radial area, tiny little microfossils.
27:42 And it's either because it's this very fine-grained red-brown sphalerite or this medium-to-coarse-grained steel gray sphalerite that's running along these layers and these then get remobilized into these syntax your quartz veins where it's forming quartz where you have quartz in the wall rock in the siliceous mudstone, and where it cuts the gray sphalerite, you're getting that remobilized as this yellow or straw-colored sphalerite in these veins. So, taking a closer look at these ages, we see the upper sequence is the Tom-style minerization and we know from the stratigraphy very well that this is constrained to the Franium, which is an upper Devonian unit And the lower sequence is represented by this lower, thicker black bar.
28:36 And this is the Stratiform mineralization in the Howard's Pass style. Howard's Pass itself occurs in this red interval. So you can see that the mineralization that we intersected includes the Howard's Parsim's of all, but also spans a wider age range of host rocks and is potentially a thicker portion of mineralization. And this is really significant because this is the first discovery of stratiform mineralization in these age host rocks, in early Silurian host rocks in the Magpas district. Prior to this, all the mineralization that was known was in the late Devonian host rocks. So this was really significant to see not only Tom-style mineralization, but a barite cap to the system, and this all underlain by Howard's Pass-style mineralization in the older rocks in the lower sequence.
29:33 And all of these stars of mineralization are overprinted by multiple generations of sphalerite and pyrite veins. So what is the significance of Howard's Pass? And if we zoom out for a second and take a look at the Selwyn Basin. We can see that we're here at Macmillan Pass and about 90 kilometers to the southeast is Howard's Pass where in the purple box you see there is a large resource on that, 185 million tons of indicated at 5.2% zinc, 1.8% lead, in addition to 238 million tons of inferred at similar or just lower grades. So really large tonnage deposit is present at Howard's Pass.
30:24 And we see this age of mineralization further east at Prairie Creek and the McKenzie Platform, And we now see this at Mac Pass, deeper into the Salmon Basin. And on the left, you can see the detailed age constraints that we have at Howard's Pass. And these are from 3 different sources. We see the pyrite that's been dated at that age as the red line. We see graptolites coming out of the mineralized zone and the rocks surrounding it, which pins those as Rodanian or Aronian, which is part of the early Silurian. And conodonts, which is a microfossil that can also be used to date rocks is consistent with this age too. So very strong evidence that is the age of the rocks that we have. And we were lucky enough to drill 2 graptolites in the first hole that we put into the new discovery at Boundary Zone West. And these perfectly bracket that age of the active mudstone member at Howard's Pass, which is where the mineralization is.
31:25 And it's important to note that the zinc mineralization that we see, the stratiform zinc mineralization, extends above and below these age controls, or graptolites. So what we see is a sort of minimum age range of upper Ordovician to early Silurian, and mineralization extending into both slightly younger and slightly older rocks. So on top of these styles of stratiform mineralization that we see in these holes, we also see overprinting vein mineralization. And these occur as multiple generations of pyrite and sphalerite veins. And typically, the sphalerite in these later veins is this more pinkish color. Or in the middle photograph, you see this early red-brown sphalerite with a later tan sphalerite, and you can see that same sort of pattern in the lower photograph.
32:23 And that's more typical of the mineralization that we saw back on section A to A prime at the heart of boundary zone. But in the top photo here, you can see that early stratiform gray sphalerite as the top labeled sphalerite being overprinted first by pyrite veins and secondly by another generation of sphalerite veins. And this is not just remobilizing this phthalorite very locally on the margins of these veins. This is bringing additional zinc into the system as another pulse of mineralization. We don't know when this occurred during the history of the host drugs. So what does this vein mineralization look like?
33:13 These are 4 photos of the vein mineralization from the new discovery. There's various different colors of sphalerite that we see. We see this pink color of sphalerite, and again, these later quartz veins that seem to remobilize this into a straw-colored sphalerite. We do see a little bit of galena with some of this vanerization, particularly in the lower part of the system. And some of these veins are sheared up, like these ones you can see, with that sort of characteristic early red-brown svalorite and late-tan svalorite colors. So this is a schematic that I put together of the geology. And it's very cartoonish, but it illustrates the different parts of the lower and upper sequences and how they relate to the geology.
34:06 But what we can see is that the mineralization is focused around a fault, which we see is that F1 fault that splays off the Hess fault. And the first pulse of mineralization to come up is likely the lower sequence stratiform mineralization shown in the purple color. And this would be during late Ordovician to early Silurian. And this fault is likely still active during the Devonian, about 70 million years later, where we're seeing baryte forming first in the subsurface diagenetically. And that's likely using that same fault structure to focus fluids that are forming that baryte in the subsurface.
34:52 And then the fault is active again and fluids come up the fault and replace that massive sulfide, or replace the baryte with massive sulfide, likely during, at some point during the late Devonian. And these are then overprinted by this vein style of mineralization. So this is highly schematic and it shows the aspect ratio of this being taller than it is wide. But this is not necessarily true. We really don't know the lateral extent of this system. It could be quite continuous and laterally extensive. But We've basically put the first 2 drill holes into the system, and it's open in all directions. So this could be significantly wider than it is high.
35:46 But the key thing is that there's multiple pulses of mineralization here at boundary zone, and that it's a very long-lived hydrothermal system. And these different overprinting episodes of mineralization utilizing the same structure is going to result in a very large time-integrated fluid flux. And this points to this fault being connected to the Hess fault, which is a very deep crustal-scale fault. And you have a very large plumbing system that is continually active through a long period of time. And this is a key ingredient in forming a very large deposit. And we think that this is the geological evidence that we're seeing that indicates that there's potential here for a substantial deposit at boundary zone.
36:40 So I just wanted to reiterate that all of our assays from 2020 are still pending. We haven't received them back yet, but we shall be releasing them as soon as we receive them. The labs are very backed up right now. But the deposit of Andrés' zone and the new discovery is open in all directions. And we think that the size of the gravity anomaly that we're seeing is indicative of a very large hydrothermal system. And we think that the potential there is very large. A couple of weeks ago, we also announced that we expanded our property significantly to the west, and we now have 936 square kilometers of ground at McMillan Pass.
37:27 And this extends in the direction of the fertile corridor, which is centered around the Hesse fault. We see this in our targeting criteria as one of the key components is being connected to this crustal-scale plumbing system and having access to large volumes of fluid to focus them into these target areas. And the discovery of how it's passed down mineralization at MacPass really blows the doors open in terms of the search space for zinc in the property. Previously, a lot of the exploration had focused almost exclusively on the urn group and a specific part of that where you see mineralization of Tomajason.
38:16 And there is a very large component of Rogue River Group, or the early Silurian rocks, that hosts the Howard's Pass mineralization in the new property and on our existing tenement. So it really opens the search space for zinc. The new acquisition came with a large amount of airborne mag EM and a huge geochemical database that's never been looked at in terms of base metal exploration. It was used for a Kallen Gold style exploration. And it's an opportunity, a real opportunity here to take some high quality data and a new idea in an old district to do some very systematic and thorough exploration for additional deposits, aside from Tom, Jason, Enzo, and Boundary Zone on the rest of the property.
39:16 So just bringing up one of Brandon's slides again here, to reiterate that the base case PEA in 2012, we've done significant work on that. There's a lot of potential in engineering the project, expanding the resources, the funding commitment from the government to reduce our cost of funding the road, are all potential avenues to increase MPV. But I hope I've shown you the geological criteria that we think the boundary zone has to add a stepwise change to the project and move the center of mass of the project slightly to the west. In addition to these new ideas being able to be applied more broadly across the property and that there's lots of blue sky potential for additional exploration targets.
40:12 Well thanks everyone for listening and I believe Now we can move to the Q&A. All right, thank you very much, Jack. And thank you, Brandon. Looks like everyone's back for the Q&A session. We do have quite a few questions coming in, so let's hop right to it. Our first question is from Richard. Richard's asking are there any plans to list in the USA to attract US investors? Yeah and Richard's second question there also relevant about liquidity. We have looked at a US listing, We did a lot of looking in 2018. One of the benefits of being in Discovery Group is that we get to look at other companies in the group as guinea pigs see the ones that have listed in the US and see whether that's helped them a lot my current understanding is that it's not so much the OTC listing that's helpful so much as the DTC eligibility it is something we're we're definitely looking to do but I don't want to make any promises about it being imminent.
41:25 You know, our liquidity now, not bad, certainly has improved a lot in the latter half of 2020 as the market conditions have broadly improved. But look, any way you can improve liquidity improves value. And this is something we absolutely have to pay attention to. Great. Thanks, Brandon. Next question is from Kevin. Is there any copper in the deposit? Yeah, there is a very small amount of copper at boundary zone. But It's really just geochemically anomalous. It's not economically interesting. But the copper does generally show some of the deeper parts of the system. And it's something that we use in the targeting that points us back towards the feeder. And heading back towards the feeder is something where you may also expect higher zinc grades.
42:22 And it's a targeting mechanism that we're going to use to follow up, particularly on the massive sulfide mineralization. What we drilled was mostly pyrite with some sphalerite, some galena. But more sphalerite-rich portions of massive sulfide may be expected closer to the feeder and using copper as an exploration tool or a vector is something that we use in our targeting. All right, well I'll go to the next question. So Constantine Mangold was asking about concentrate transportation costs. So in our 2018 PEA we had calculated about $212 Canadian per wet metric ton to get concentrate from site to I think basically CIF Asia so whether that's Korea or Japan or China it's about the same to get there.
43:18 That's a little bit cheaper than taking it to rail at Fort Nelson and then from Fort Nelson to trail, text melter there, but it's close enough that it could be within the negotiating room on treatment charges. So it's I mean, it's expensive, but it's not it's not punitive. And it certainly doesn't render the project uneconomic or anything like that. Let's move on to the next question from Martin. Is there any cobalt or gold associated in the pyrite or boride zone at depth? No, not really. There's Very slightly elevated gold, but it's geochemically anomalous.
44:05 It's certainly not what we'd consider economic grades. So it's not something that we are factoring into building a deposit at Boundary Zone. Great. So Kevin's follow-up question is, is there enough barite to be an economic resource since it's used as a lot as a drilling mud? You could, my last answer on the transportation cost should answer that because like, is the bear right valuable? Yes. There's nothing left in that value by the time you get it to the market though. It's simply too expensive to transport from site to market. There's also the reality that we would be producing so much baryte that you'd flood the Canadian market.
44:57 So we we make 0 assumptions around the or 0 expectation of marketability around any bear right we could cite. Perfect, thank you very much. Next question is from Kento. Can you talk a little bit about the visual grade of the new mineralization zone? No, we definitely cannot. So, sorry, I mean, no discussion of grade of these zones is possible until we have assays. Broadly speaking, it's a faux pas to talk visual grade, because people usually get it wrong. And our past visual estimates have been not bad, but not like, if there's enough risk there, particularly Svalorite being as nebulous as it is that we would get it completely wrong. So yeah, look for for legal and technical reasons, we don't, we won't talk about that.
45:59 Got it, no problem. So then the next follow up question would be when to expect to receive the 2020 essays? Jeez so this is 1 million dollar question right now. I Had hoped we'd have some by the end of November obviously that's come and gone are based on what we're seeing from the labs so far. I'm at this point I'm not even sure we get our first hole by the end of the year. So look, Eve, maybe first hole within 2 weeks, maybe, and I last hole is quite possibly February at this point maybe worse I've heard some real horror stories unfortunately So this may be a truly epic beard by the time we get the last of our assays.
46:53 Got it. So we'll keep our eye on that to see if there's any news coming. Next question is from Ian. Does the tax negative road decision have any implications for the canal road funding by the government? No. So look, one of the things I mentioned in my presentation was the benefit of having an existing road is that you have existing access. So I want to start by saying that I don't think the attack road is dead. You know, I think they're going to be able to revisit that. But nonetheless, the challenges there are building a road into an unroaded area. Right. So with us, it's a lot different. It's an existing road. Anyone can drive it. We can bring in heavy equipment. It's unfettered access up that road, right? So to us, it's a very, very different thing in terms of pumping, et cetera.
47:48 And it's still full steam ahead in terms of improvements on the Robert Campbell and Canal Road from the government funding. Great. Thank you, Brandon. Next question is from Jacques. What are the types of rocks that contain zinc? Yeah, so at Tom and Jason, the typical host is laminated barite, which is replaced to various degrees. When you're near the feeder, it's almost completely replaced. And when you're in the more distal zones there's a lot more mudstone interbeds. At boundary zone we see zinc hosted at the heart of boundary zone primarily in volcanic plastic rocks. These are alkalic, mafic, volcanoclastic rocks that have been highly altered to calcite and dolomite in the matrix regionally, and a boundary zone that gets replaced by siderite and svalorite and galena and pyrite.
48:50 There's also mudstones and conglomerates that host mineralization at boundary zone. And we see similar rocks that host mineralization at boundary zone west, in addition to the very siliceous mudstones, black, organic, rich, carbonaceous, siliceous mudstones that host just phthalorite mineralization in the stratiform portion of the Howards Pass mineralization. I'll answer James Gwondos' question about metallurgy. Presumably you're talking about difference in metallurgy between boundary and Tom and Jason. We don't know. This is something that we're sending material away for some answers this winter, maybe having results back Q2 next year, late Q2, possibly early Q3.
49:42 The expectation is that by virtue of the mineralization being coarser, that the energy input required to grind it and liberate the sphalerite will be a bit different. There's also areas where we strictly see zinc and we don't see a lot of lead, you might campaign, I think you would campaign material through the mill and not process Tom and Jason at the same time as boundary. But when you're doing boundary, if there's just zinc, you may also choose to run 2 zinc circuits instead of a lead circuit and a zinc circuit. So there's a lot to think about, but all of these are kind of positive opportunities. But we'll know more in the 2021 as we release, as we conduct and then release the results of that metallurgy.
50:39 Great. Our next question is from Colin. How much of the known and inferred mineralization sits above the tree line? He's assuming that the major structures run the valleys, but curious to know how the F1 and F2 faults express topographically. If there is smoke in the Alpine, some high-res spectral data would be a pretty good benefit, especially with the expanding land position. Yeah, thanks, Colin. I first would say we have no inferred resource at Boundary Zone, I wanna make that very clear. And that's- Where we're inferring it as opposed to where it's literally inferred categorically. Okay, so the mineralization at Boundary Zone is exclusively below treeline where it's been discovered to date.
51:30 So the initial discovery was made by soil sampling and prospecting and trenching right on top of the mineralization. But there's no outcrop down low in the valley, so it makes it very difficult to trace those structures in the immediate area of the deposit. But the structures do project up into the Alpine, and they express as topographic lows. They form little gullies in the ridge lines, and you can trace them up there. And what we see up on those ridge lines to the northwest is stratiform baryte occurring in the same stratigraphic interval as the massive sulfide. And this was one of the clues that originally pointed us to say, well, we may expect to see that baryte plumbed into the fault when you move closer back to your boundary zone.
52:23 And that's exactly what we drilled, this massive sulfide replacement of that baryte. In terms of the high-res satellite imagery, yes, that's something that we're looking into right now is acquiring satellite imagery across the whole of the newly acquired ground. And if we can get something with more than just visible wavelength data, then you're right. That's absolutely going to help us key into some of those areas, especially given that the style of mineralization in the Howitz-Pasto rocks is dark gray sphalerite in a rock that is black, which is very difficult to notice in the field, particularly where it occurs just as sphalerite without any galena or pyrite.
53:13 And I wouldn't be surprised if there's places where the people have walked over before and not noticed that kind of mineralization because it's so subtle. Even in core, until you wet the core down, it's very difficult to see. So I think that the potential for looking in those areas in the new ground. And yeah, I think you're right that using high-res satellite imagery is really gonna help us. Great. Our next question is from Haig. So what's the exploration priority? Would you develop a resource or keep finding more potential deposits to make sure you don't miss the best one? And another question from Pat that's similar. What's your timing for the next drill program?
54:01 Yeah, look, my video's frozen, sorry, but it sounds like I'm still on audio. So yeah, you're fine. See my stoic face as I answer here. It's hard to say what the priority is. We kind of got a dual stream priority right now, which is that drill to define an incurred resource at boundary zone, continue doing regional exploration, at some point, you have to you have to kind of put your big boy pants on and drill, get a PFS, commence your permitting, etc. I mean, ultimately, the value in mining is through the extraction, not through the definition. So we have to start that. We're just very wary that that in any jurisdiction and certainly in Yukon, starting your permitting process and particularly getting far into it and then changing your mind about how you want to do it because you find a new deposit is not going to like make you any friends within the communities or the permitting bodies.
55:10 So it definitely makes sense to be as thorough as you reasonably can with your exploration before you start getting you know too deep into permitting. And so for those who don't know, Hegg Farris was involved in the discovery of Jason back in the 70s and is named after his son. So Hegg, I hope Jason's doing well and good that his namesake is advancing here. Now in terms of our next drill program, I'm guessing we're not going to start before May. It's really going to depend a lot on the snow cover this year, how quickly that's melting, what we have access to. There's significant, during the thaw, the spring thaw, there's significant avalanche risk.
56:00 So pushing our luck with that when we can just wait a little bit longer doesn't make a lot of sense. Great, thanks, Brandon. I got a couple of questions here about institutional investors. Can you talk a little bit about whether you have institutional investors? Who are the major players and the proportion of shares owned by institutions and management? Between resource capital funds and other funds, and a few other sort of pseudo funds that are more sort of high net worths, I would say total ownership within large hands is probably closer to 30% plus at this point, plus 12% in management. And then you got corporate ownership in both in terms of tech and Hudbay.
56:53 Great, thank you. So if all goes well, how long will it take to reach production in the best case scenario? It'll be a while. We're still defining what that looks like. Permitting in UConn is not quick and we're not really ready to submit our permits yet. As you know, the previous discussion we kind of alluded to there that you want to make sure you're submitting the right thing. Doesn't make sense to rush this and submit a permit for the wrong project. That sets you back more than having done, just waited and done it properly. You know, the expectation we hope that we're submitting for permits 2025, I think would be, no, maybe a little before then, 2024 perhaps, submit our permits.
57:46 And then it's really going to be up to how long does it take to get through the permitting system in Yukon at that point in time, and has there been changes to expedite the process, or has the process become more cumbersome and slower? We just don't know until we get there. All right, so we only have about a minute left together. So to round off the Q&A session, maybe we'll end off with the last question from Shuresh. What are the major milestones for 2021 that we should be looking forward to? Well, 2021 and 2022 are gonna be pretty milestone heavy. So 2021 itself, I mean, look, there's, boop, there we go, I'm back. Make sure everyone can see my gorgeous beard before we sign off here.
58:37 Yeah, so look, there'll be some metallurgy on Boundary Zone in 2021. We'll kick off what is hopefully, this is subject to fundraising, although I'm not terribly concerned about that right now. Quite honestly, we've had a tremendous amount of interest in people investing in us, and it's really about lining up the right partners for this. 2021 should be our biggest ever drill program. There should be a huge amount of results coming. And what that's going to feed into is a new global resource, Tom, Jason, end zone, boundary zone, maybe something else, maybe 11, maybe volcanic, early 2022. And that then feeds a new PEA based on that global resource, which is now a PEA encompassing more than just Tom and Jason.
59:24 So in terms of the medium term, 18 months, this is about as catalyst-rich a schedule as you can hope for. So we're pretty happy. And you know, there are always in projects like this, sometimes extended patches where you just have to put your head down and there's not a lot to talk about. There's going to be an awful lot to talk about in the next 2 years. Well, that's definitely super exciting to look forward to. Well, I want to thank you very much, Brandon and Jack, for taking us through the presentation, and thank you everyone for submitting your questions. I know we weren't able to get to everyone's questions today because of the time we have together. But if we weren't able to get to your question or if you think of a new one afterwards, please stick around. We do have a short survey where you can leave your details for the Firewood Zinc team to get back to you directly. You can also find more information on their website at www.firewoodsink.com.
1:00:22 And now I'm gonna hand it back over to Brandon for the final word. Yeah, I think I just wanna reiterate, you can email myself, Brandon at firewoodsink.com or Jack, jack at firewoodsink.com. If you have a more technical question. We're happy to answer questions. I see some people I recognize in the unanswered questions here, so of course please reach out. The other thing I want to say is that we're available. You know, the beauty of if there's a thin silver lining on this COVID nightmare, it's that I think we've all come a lot more comfortable with video conferencing and presenting online. So we're happy to give individual presentations. We're happy to talk people through 3D models, pull a screen share, a leapfrog, et cetera. You know, if you want technical answers, we can dive as deep as you want.
1:01:15 We try to be transparent with our data and be as forthcoming as possible. So keep an eye on us, like I said, I think 2021 is going to be a huge year for us and I think the future is going to be very bright for the company. Great. Thank you everyone. Until next time. Bye now.
