First Look: Clean Air Metals

0:03 Hello everyone and welcome to Clean Air Meadows inaugural 6th event. Today we are joined by Mark Garbutt, President and CEO. I'll first pass over the reins to Mike for a brief presentation, then we can open it up to a Q&A session. So if you have any questions, please submit them in the chat box, which can be found in the bottom right corner of your screen. Time permitting, we will address try and address all of your questions. And as always, this event is being recorded and will be made available for review on our platform and YouTube channel shortly after we conclude. With that said, Mike, thank you for taking

0:34 the time out of your day for this. The floor is yours. Thanks, Kyle. And thanks everybody for joining me for the discussion about the Thunder Bay North project. And hopefully I can give you a reasonable introduction with some level of detail. I will be making some forward-looking statements. They do contain some known and unknown risks, so please be aware of that as I go through this presentation. I always like to start off the presentations with, we'll call it a land acknowledgement, but I like to talk about the relationships with the First Nation communities. So the project is encompassed by the lands of the Robertson-Siberia Treaty of 1850, and includes the territories of Kiyoshkis, Binjinawabiks, Red Rock Indian Band and Fort William First Nation.

1:26 So together those communities, we work with those communities and in fact, you know, enjoy some personal relationship. And, you know, I find the members of the community and the leadership, they work with integrity. They're really excited about seeing this project go forward and they're very supportive and they really want to participate in what we're trying to do. So we're very fortunate to have them as partners. So our project located in Northwestern Ontario, it's about 40 kilometers northeast of Thunder Bay. So it's a drive, no camp required in the future. We are also about 65 kilometers south of Impala Candace Lactazille mine, which has a 12,500 ton a day mill.

2:17 Our 300 square kilometer land package, also the 527 highway runs through the western part of our land package and the 230 KV east-west transmission line runs through the southeast portion of our claims. Both of them were about 7 kilometers from each of those, so we're sandwiched in a bit of infrastructure there. And within our land claim, we do have 5 magmatic intrusions, 2 of which comprise our Thunder Bay North project, namely the escape deposit and the current deposit. So this shows our updated resource that we put out with the PEA late last year. As I mentioned, the project is made up of the current deposit and the escape deposit.

3:07 Both of them are magmatic intrusions that were part of the mid-continent rift event about 1.1 billion years ago. The current deposit 8.9 million indicated. You could see the grades there, decent platinum, palladium grades, copper and nickel as well. We also have payable amounts of gold and silver. And the escape deposit 6 million tons indicated. Again, similar grades. Generally, the escape deposit has higher copper tenor. As you can see, it's almost half a percent copper. Both are open down plunge, and I will talk to the down plunge opportunities at ESCAPE. And in addition to the indicated resource, we also have 2.4 million tons of inferred resource that occurs in the lower part of current here and kind of in the upper part of ESCAPE are the 2 major areas for inferred resource, lower grade. But all together, they make up the entire resource and putting some dollars to it, it's about a 2.3 million platinum equivalent ounce resource.

4:13 So it's in itself Great resource, but it also has some upside potential that I will talk about within this presentation. So we like to say we're a rare primary platinum asset and platinum does make up the largest portion of our future potential revenue. But I want to share a bit about the platinum market because PGEs in general are misunderstood. And if you go to any bank and look for long term pricing, no 1 really pays attention. So there's very few that actually pay attention to PGEs. And I won't get into the significant detail, but essentially on the supply side, it's driven by mining and recycling. Mining, 70% of platinum is produced in South Africa.

5:02 And some of these operations are primary Platinum, but they have been undercapitalized. The mineralization is changing from Platinum rich to Palladium rich in a lot of these assets. So the forecast is a general decrease in primary supply. And then you can understand as a catalyst, a lot of the use of Platinum historically and Palladium has been

5:27 as a catalyst for exhaust. There's a lot of build-up that's driving a lot of the recycling, but right now we're at a 15-year low in terms of recycling of PGMs. There's a drop in scrap availability. A lot of it has to do with logistics, but the costs, increasing refining costs are causing some challenges. So the supply side is struggling. Now on the demand side, and people have followed and I'll show you the price graphs, the big drivers, certainly plug-in electric vehicles and hybrids will win the future, I believe, of electric vehicles. A large portion of the current use is in internal combustion engines or ice, but we see the future for both platinum and palladium. There's higher loading of platinum and palladium in an equivalent plug in hybrid vehicle than there is in a combustion engine. So really just got to look at future car sales. Are they coming back to pre-pandemic levels? That's going to drive a lot of the demand.

6:34 And globally, there's an increase in emissions. Now on the investment side, increased investment, platinum is a store of value, particularly in Asia. It's garnering more interest on some of the exchanges in China. We can't forget about geopolitical protectionism and the changes of government's view in protecting their metal content is driving up the price of platinum in particular. Now, on the right hand side, there's other uses and future uses. Certainly, we've talked as a company, we've talked a lot about hydrogen, green hydrogen. So it's used in production of hydrogen and the use of hydrogen.

7:22 Big time use in Asia in jewelry. It's starting to become an alternative to gold because of the price of gold. It has tremendous industrial use in chemical production and also in glass production. It is a precious metal, but its utility is well beyond its value with respect to being a precious metal. Now, our company, we talk about metals for global decarbonization. We do have a significant amount of copper. I'm not gonna go into the detail about the copper market, but everyone that pays even a little bit of attention knows it's key to the energy transition and global electrification and grid expansion. And the future is only bright for Copper.

8:09 Right now, there's a refined Copper shortage in 2020, look at in 2026, and it's forecasted to grow as demand goes from 27 million tons to 33 over the next decade. So really good future for copper. And palladium doesn't get a whole lot of love. It's seen some great price appreciation, but it's getting pulled along with platinum. Again, it's big uses in the internal combustion engine, but higher loadings in plug-in hybrids and hybrids. And those plug-in hybrids and hybrids, we're seeing 40% growth year on year and long-term there, the forecast is a 6% compound annual growth for plug-in hybrid vehicles. And then on the supply side, we're pretty sure most of the stuff from Russia is getting through in spite of sanctions.

9:00 And then 35% is a supply from South Africa. But a lot of these operations chronically under capitalized, you know, with the prices over the last few years may take a while to get back on stream. So, and then recycling supply, Same thing as I covered with platinum under investment is really challenging the investment. And then if you've been paying attention since January 1st to January, January to January 25, 26, we've seen 156 percent increase in Platinum and a lot of that has been in the last, you know, it's been pretty steady over since June, but recently seen some spikes. Copper, over 50% increase now from $4 to $6. And then Palladium, over 100% increase from below $900 to almost $1,800 now. So we call performance meeting fundamentals. We've been talking about the fundamentals for platinum and palladium for a while now, and it's finally nice to see them coming around.

10:01 And similarly to gold, you know, I feel some people get frustrated. Not every gold company's equities match the spike in price. Sometimes the equities followed later and we're still seeing a bit of that. So our asset, as I mentioned, primarily Platinum, Palladium, it makes up 60% of the value if we look at the payable recoverable basis on their PE8, but Copper is actually 1 third of it. Copper makes a significant difference. Nickel is around 8%, Gold around 3%. That makes up the 6 payable metals. We have done pre-feasibility level metallurgical testing back in 2022-2023 that supports these numbers.

10:48 Also, towards the end of last year, we did put out a PEA and the PEA did envision a toll milling option whereby we keep the infrastructure quite small, Spartan at the site, and ship the material to a toll milling facility. On the left-hand side you see the metrics here. It's study pricing, which we had about $1,400 Platinum, $1,200, $1,225 Palladium. Strong economics on $90M capital price tag. We have 158 million post-tax NPV with a, oh, and sorry, that number's wrong. It's a 32% IRR.

11:33 And pre-tax over 200 million. Operating costs around $100 a ton and the all in sustaining costs around $700 an ounce, right? For combined platinum palladium. But if you use spot prices, the numbers are a little more shocking. We're close to 500 million post tax and 84% IRR. So with the suite of metals here and the recent price appreciation, this is a great project and looking at the project itself and the design of it. The assets are the 2 deposits are fairly close to surface, so it is a ramp access. Open pit doesn't work. It's too much of a strip ratio because of the tube-like nature. I'll show you a picture of how the deposit works. The stripping ratio doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This deposit is a ramp access but fairly large bulk mining opening.

12:25 The plan is to access the current zone and then continue our ramp shown at the bottom here to the escape deposit. So production rate is 2,500t a day, all bulk open stoping. Our mining grades, if you compare them to our resource grades, we look for high margin areas so we mine the average grade 3.2g per ton, 0.4g Copper, 0.25g and again payable gold and silver. And again with the toll milling option we want to get that grade up because all the material will be dropped off the site. But the key of this is low risk, small footprint, reduced permitting requirements, and I will talk about the standalone mill option later on in this presentation. But that's the crux of the PEA, exceptional economics and particularly in the current price environment.

13:24 And I'm talking first about project development here and notwithstanding we do have exploration upside, but our push is to move this project forward in a meaningful way on a project development stage. So, looking at baseline environmental work and permitting, we're in pretty good shape. We continue to collect baseline environmental data. We do monitor it at the site. We did a permitting roadmap a couple of years ago to look at what it would look like to move this project forward. We don't see any fisheries offsets anticipated. There's no overprinting of water bodies. There's no significant species at risk. We don't see an impact assessment for this site. We'll have a small EA. We've got to do a power line. We've got to do the road.

14:16 So those will be one-off assessments. So relatively simple assessment in permitting is what we were told by the consultants we used. We have put in an application for advanced exploration designation and later on this year we will do a closure plan for that. But essentially, what that allow is the development of a ramp to the current deposit and and potentially taking a bulk sample. And the critical part of that is the ramp is actually, you know, if you're moving this project fast, the ramp is on the critical path. So what it allows you to do if you have the advanced expiration permit is to develop the ramp while you're permitting for the operation. And so it, you know, cuts, you know, 6 months to a year off the project timeline.

15:05 So that's the project development side. I'll talk to you a bit about what we see on the exploration side and then the assets. So some of that have been following us, we'll know in 2024 and early 2025, we did some drilling at the current deposit, the upper part of the current to expand what we call these high-grade ballrooms. If you're looking at the screen, the yellow portions are all mineralised, all above cut-off grades, good mineralised material, but We're talking about the really high-grade ballrooms. The picture below is a simplified picture of the intrusion, which in some cases is a bit of a tube, but you've got these abatements where sulphides sit. If you look at the picture on the left, that shows an example of some of the massive sulphides that this deposit does carry.

16:04 It's probably about 5% of the deposit. We haven't worked at trying to expand these ballrooms and we're quite successful. I think in some cases we expand them by 50%. The modelling had a ballroom or had a good hit 1 single hole and nothing followed up around it. You had it very much constrained, so we drilled a little closer and expanded these ballrooms. It doesn't add a whole lot of volume to the resource, but what it does is add grade. We've pulled in a bit of grade over that drill program. The second one, when I mentioned about scale, We started looking at the escape downplunge when I joined in 2022.

16:51 This was on our radar, but not necessarily a priority. So what we've done, there was a magnetic anomaly, 2 and a half kilometers magnetic anomaly. Our VP of exploration, Lionel Jean came in, we did some passive seismic survey and reprocessed some MT data and came up with some pretty reasonable targets here that we were excited

17:13 about and they followed, they seemed to follow the right direction of where we thought the intrusion was. So you can see on the plan view, this orange part is what the known escape indicated resource area, and then we have this long 2 and a half kilometer

17:33 untested anomaly, and we generated these 3 targets. So Looking at a section of that, you could see the scale. We have the escaped conduit is about 3km. The main part of this escape high-grade zone, that's 3Mt of over 3g per tonne Platinum, Palladium and 1% Copper, Nickel. It's an area of great value. We have these 3 targets shown here and what we did in late summer, early fall, we decided to test and do some downhole geophysics. The one hole we did drill, we intersected 50m of mineralization. Out of all the stuff I'm talking about, this is the most exciting to me because it does, 1, it proves what we were trying to do in terms of targeting works.

18:25 And secondly, opens up that escape, that entire 2.5km to potential. We had that successful step out and now we could start to get some excitement about even more potential scale. So you compare 3 kilometers that carries 6 million tons of indicated, you extrapolate that, there's a lot of potential here on that down plunge target. So the path forward for our project for the Thunder Bay North project so on project development activities and I know we'll I may have talked about some of these but what we want to do is do a little more due diligence on a toll milling option. When we looked at toll milling, we had some metallurgical projections based on our current net testing. What we want to do is take some circuits of potential toll milling targets and do testing.

19:18 We've applied for the Critical Minerals Innovation Fund funding to help us with that. We should hear about it any time. We want to evaluate pre-concentration. Anytime you're doing toll milling, What you'd like to do is eliminate as much waste as you can and leave it at site. Ore sorting pre-concentration could help with that. We'd like to do that testing. We do want to rapidly advance a technical study for a standalone mill option. That would allow Clean Air Metals, we could be the regional processor for PGE feed because Northwestern Ontario is a fertile area for copper, nickel, PGE assets. And there's a few even on this, on Highway 527 that we could look at.

20:05 So we want to advance that technical study as quickly as possible. We're going to continue permitting efforts. And as I mentioned, for advanced exploration, get the closure planning done. We are going to start early design work for access road and power infrastructure, and we've engaged our First Nation communities for input in terms of the path, the location of the road, the location of the power line. And that's just a starting point in our minds about the collaboration and meaningful participation in the project development by the local community. So we're excited about that. And then on the exploration phase, I did talk about the escape down plunge. We have a program planned. We're going to do a little more detailed MT geophysics to improve upon the targets we do have. And then we have a 2500 metre drill program covering parts of that 2.5 kilometre strike. And so really trying to try to improve up a little more of that scale. And then of the second priority, we do have additional ballroom structures at current that we could follow up on and maybe potentially few at Escape. The 2 intrusions are our sister intrusions, they behave very similarly. So there's always that chance we could expand ballrooms at escape.

21:23 Really quickly, the 24 month outlook for the project and I won't get into it in too much detail, but the darker blue is really around advanced exploration and some of the work we wanna do in 2026. Ultimately culminating, we believe in the designation and having permits in hands in early the first half 2027, if all goes well. And then the lighter blue, that's more the project development. We're going to do, as I mentioned, the met testing and the technical study. We are going on parallel paths here. We're going to develop this tolling option and see how far we can take it. And maybe we can get to a definitive toll milling agreement, but alternatively, we're going to do a technical study for standalone mill options and some of the infrastructure. And in the end, looking to make a decision on the path in 2027, and then continue on with detailed design and permitting of that selected option.

22:22 So that gives you an outlook of where we think we are, where we think the project will be over the next year and a half. We do have a small team, So there's myself, Dr. Lionel John, he's our Vice President of Exploration, been with the team since early 2024. Lots of experience in the region. He was part of Lactazille, that's up the road from us. He was the exploration manager there. He's kind of an expert in mid-continent rift PGE assets and has been vital in terms of the success we've had in 2025. And then Chris Toodle is our VP of sustainability and community relations. Extremely great experience in permitting, but also has some great relationships with communities and, you know, very, very proactive and forward thinker.

23:15 And then Jim Gallagher, again, lots of experience in the region, former CEO of North American Palladium that owned Lactazille before it was sold to Impala Platinum, provides a lot of direction to us. So we have a small team, but we're a team of doers. We don't use a whole lot of consultants. Terms of our capital structure of 250 million shares outstanding. We're trading, fluctuating between 10 and a half cents. So market cap around 26 million. We have 1.1 million in cash and we're heavy retail. Back in 2020, 22 when I joined, we had a lot more institutional investors, but the palladium price kind of tanked on us and we ended up with a lot more retail. So part of what we're trying to do is build that back.

24:05 I've talked at other presentations about looking at strategic investment and our JV partners, those sort of things. So we're always on the lookout for that. That will certainly could help with our capital structure. And so the investment summary here, investment case for Clean Air Metals, the PEA, strong PEA and the financial support, a hard push towards project development. And as I mentioned, we're going to look to do that next phase of study. Our resource, you put up some of the intersections we've had in the last 2 years up against anyone, any Copper, Nickel, PGE exploration asset.

24:53 We're right there, but except we have it to get put together in an actual resource. With those high-grade ballrooms, if we could expand a few more, it's only looking better. Further than that is the potential for scale as demonstrated in that first step out hole at the escape down plunge. That could add a couple of 3Mt to this resource, maybe even more, which then if you're looking at the mill option, makes that even more attractive as a

25:20 regional producer. Our team, we have a small team, but poised to execute on this project. Timing, the PGE market is taking off, getting a lot of attention, getting a lot of eyes on the project, and that's only going to help with the potential for JV partners. And then I've mentioned briefly, we believe there's an opportunity here regionally to be a regional PGE producer and it's shown by the amount of activity that's actually increased in the region with junior explorers taking in more interest in PGEs in Northwestern Ontario. Now we're opening up to questions, and I believe Mia's on the call, but there's Mia's contact information if anyone wants to reach out to us.

26:16 Great, Thank you, Mike, for the great presentation. It's a great time to be exposed to platinum and palladium. There are a few questions in the chat as well as some that were submitted in advance upon registration. Given the dramatic improvement in project economics from a 39% pre-tax IRR in the PEA to 100% of current spot prices. What's your timeline for moving from the PEA to a feasibility study? And are you accelerating development plans given these exceptional marketing conditions? Yeah, so ultimately we do want to move as quickly as possible. If we had unlimited resources in terms of money, we would move extremely fast, but we do have to be prudent.

27:07 We want to advance the project in that next phase of study as quickly as possible, but we want to be prudent. We're worried about dilution, So we need to raise a bit of money, get that study done, prove that this asset is as good as we say it is and back up with the PEA saying. And then, yeah, Ultimately, a company of our size, yeah, we'd like to advance this. And with the provincial government, federal government, First Nations participation, there is an interest in the opportunity to move this forward. But I think we'd also should not discount the possibility of having someone else come in and help us with that on a joint venture basis, as an example.

28:00 No, for sure. Staying with the PEA, it indicated you could be in or within 7 months using ramp access. What are the critical path items that could impact your timeline to first production? So certainly On a toll milling case, the permitting is relatively simple. We're not going to develop a mine on a PEA, that's just irresponsible. We need to do the next phase of study and get some permitting out there. Part of, if you look at my timeline, we had a big part of that is working with the First Nations, looking at their interest in participating and what does that look like, certainly having them as partners on this project would one, make the project stronger, but 2, would actually, you know, working with First Nations make projects go faster.

29:02 And these communities are really interested in working with us. So to answer the question, on a toll milling case, yeah, we could probably be, get through a study and permitting, and you could be driving that ramp. And it's kind of what I had in the timeline starting in 2027. And if there's no other infrastructure built, you're just shipping the ore offsite in 2028. But if we're building a mill, you can imagine the permitting is a lot more involved, a lot more design work and permitting, and we'd have a tailings facility. So things do get more complicated and I would expect we could easily add a year onto that.

29:55 You mentioned developing a parallel path with a standalone mill case for toll milling opportunities. Can you elaborate on the economics of the toll milling option versus building your own processing facility? Clearly, one of the advantages of toll milling is lower capital. We have under $100M capital that A lot of it is driven by underground development. If we're looking at a mill, and this is a massive forward-looking statement off the top of my head, with a mill, It's by no means one of these big, I get challenged all the time, but these big, large Gold mills that people build, you know, this is a 2,500 ton a day, you know, crushed dry float mill. So with the mill and tailings, you know, round number 200 million, you know, let's say 170 to 200 million.

30:51 So add that on, but with, you know, current with some improved prices, not improved from today, we don't need today's prices. With having our own mill, we would redo the mine plan and take in some lower grade material because with our own mill, our operating costs should go down. And so we'd have the opportunity to take on that material. So if we're sitting here today, we'll call it pre-tax $700 million, could the mill pull in pre-tax $500? It could be in that range, but that's a pretty big forward-looking statement. But those are just numbers off the top of my head. No, for sure.

31:36 Let's pivot to exploration potential. The first 400m step-out hole at the escape downplunge showed promising results with 2.5km of strength length, still largely unexplored. How significantly could the resource base expand and what would that mean for the overall project scale and mine life? I guess just using geometry and what we see in the other part of the escape, yeah, I think 3Mt at resource grade are within the realm of possibility. That would take time and I don't want to sugarcoat things. It's, we're looking at 600,700m holes across that. So That would take a lot of money to get that even to an inferred category.

32:31 For our perspective, priority is project development. If we could hit on a few more holes, do some geophysics, show some larger targets, that would be exciting. The reality is how these deposits are set up, they're really set up for what we'd call reserve replacement. So if you're actively mining these and you're continuing to ramp down and drilling these areas as you're mining, if we're mining 1 million tonnes a year, the idea would be we would be replacing that million tonnes a year in the resource as we go down plunge. That's the real opportunity with respect to these 2 assets, both the current and escape. But I think the escape, if we can demonstrate those scale and maybe those different targets hold together without getting it necessarily into an inferred category, that level of scale could attract somebody else into the story here.

33:32 From the chat here, Ken is saying from the presentation you mentioned going for an exploration permit in 2026. Can you please expand, i.e. What exploration activities are you currently approved for and what exploration activities are you looking for? Thank you. Yeah, so for early exploration, we're doing it for some of the permitting is advanced exploration. So that would allow us to drive a ramp and take a bolt sample. Now, taking a step back and looking at early expiration drilling activities, we have the permits in place for any work we want to do on the areas of interest we have. And we do have 1 permit that expires in November that we're working on putting the plan together to get that expiration permit renewed.

34:29 And that one would allow us, I think it covers the current deposit. We get that renewed in November, so it would allow us to do any work in and around the current deposit. But I believe the escape deposit permit is still good for another couple of years. Neil is wondering in the chat, how deep does the vein run? We don't know. It's intrusions from depth. I think on the current side, we probably hit it at 700m deep because there's shallow dipping. Right now, we hit it on the escape this past fall and it bottomed out at 550m-600m in that range. It comes from depth is the thought.

35:24 You've mentioned outreach to multiple federal and provincial funding agencies for critical minerals. What level of government support are you anticipating and how does this fit your overall financing strategy to move in the project forward? Yeah, so right now, I've said before, Ontario and Canada have done a lot to try and advance projects and provide funding. There's not a lot of funding for where we're at right now. We've met extensively with different parts, just trying to find out and put together a roadmap of all the potential funding as this project develops. We need to get this project to the next phase of study, at the very least.

36:12 Certainly, there is money available, but if you look at the generation minings of the world that do get commitments from Export Development Canada or through the Feds for the Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund. It's kind of last money in, so you need to, you know, the money's there. You've got to actually still put something together that's bankable and attract investment, but they'll come in with the money and particularly again, I'll go back to having First Nation partners that are potentially interested in participation, that would make a big difference as well. Staying with the financing topic, with 1.1 million in cash roughly, how will you be looking to finance this work for 2026?

37:01 And another question upon registration here, How close are talks with partners or JVs? So I'd say the second one first is, I guess, you know, ongoing, we're still on the search. And, you know, If there was anything material, we'd be putting out a press release. But yeah, we've, you know, some interested parties we've had lots of discussions with, but I guess nothing to report. And then for funding for work this year, yeah, we are currently looking at what we'd wanna do for a raise in early this year to get going on some of this study work, the MET testing, the technical study permitting.

37:51 We do have to do a raise coming up in the early part of this year. That's it for questions here, Mike. So Thank you for the presentation and thank you everyone that joined us today live and submitted questions. If you came in a little late, the recording will be available shortly, so keep an eye out for that if you missed the beginning part of the presentation. I'll pass it over to you, Mike, for any final closing remarks before we close things off here? Yeah, I just encourage people to pay attention to the platinum market and and encourage people to take a look out there at other platinum, palladium, copper projects and and then come back and look in comparison to what we have at Thunder Bay North in terms of our volume, the size of the resource and the grades and our relatively close ability to move this project forward. We're right on the cusp. So yeah, pay attention to the market and feel free to reach out if anyone has any questions.

38:53 We're always open to talk.