Ground Level: Open Pit Projects in Focus

0:00 We're live, gentlemen. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's live event. We have representatives from 4 different companies with us. So if you like the simplicity or economics of open pit projects, hopefully 1 or more of these companies will pique your interest enough to request a meeting with the team and dig deeper into their story. Joining us today is Daniel Cohen, Executive Chairman of Caprock Mining, Graham Downs, President and CEO of Castelia Minerals, Mark Haywood, President and CEO of EDM Resources, and Michael Michaud, president and CEO of RPX

0:32 Gold. As always, this event is being recorded and will be available for replay shortly after we conclude. I have all the questions prepared for today's event, but if you do have questions feel free to submit them in the chat. If the company specifically most likely won't get to them today, but if we do, that's great. If not, I will pass those questions along to the respective teams after we conclude. To start off, could each of you introduce your company through the lens of your flagship project, focusing on what about the deposits geometry, geometry, depth, or grade that makes an open pit approach the right fit. I'm just going to start from right to left on my screen. So Mark, why don't you kick it off here?

1:11 Good morning, Kyle, and thanks for the opportunity to meet with such an extreme group of participants here or with open pit mines as well. So EDM Resources, we're focused on restarting our zinc, lead and gypsum operation in Nova Scotia and it's called the Scotia Mine. It's a past producing mine, so it's not a greenfields project. In terms of geology, it's a shallow, gradually dipping mineralisation, which is well suited to conventional open pit mining. We have an existing mill, tanning facility, We have grid power on site, roads and a lot of site infrastructure. We're only about an hour from Halifax on an all season highway.

1:57 We have excellent access to labour

2:00 who are in the region of used to operating in an open pit environment. We have a lot of supplies nearby in Halifax and Dartmouth, and we have deep water ports. And EDM's job is to de-risk, optimize and restart this existing open pit mine. So the key takeaway I guess from EDM is the Scotia mine is fundamentally a restart story, not a build it from scratch story.

2:32 Great. Thank you, Mark. Michael, tell us about RPX Gold and the Wawa Gold Project. Thanks, Kyle. RPX Gold is really their flagship property. It's just outside the town of Wawa, Northwest Ontario Gold Project. It's been mining here since the 1890s on and off. It's a very large Gold system. Over the years, it's been mined as an underground project, but the deposit comes right to surface. It's 2.5km long. It's about 10 to 15m wide, dips about minus 45 degrees. No lakes in the area, less than a metre of overburden. It lends itself perfectly to starting with open pit production. That's really our plan. We have a PEA that we put out in February, really outlines going in, utilizing the toll milling since this is an area with a lot of infrastructure, a lot of good mining companies in the area with excess milk paddy seed. So We're trying to nail down the toll milling contract now, but it's really starting with open pits, lower risk, low capex, reduced timeframe because of the toll milling option.

3:43 That's really what the thesis is for our company, get started with that pit, but then at some stage transitioning to a larger open pit or continuing with the underground mine. So good optionality, really depending on how the conditions are as we go forward with the Gold price and other economics, but really the pits provide a good opportunity to get in production quickly and leverage the high Gold price that we currently have. Thank you. Graham, over to you. Tell us about Cascadia. Yeah, thanks Kyle. So our project is located in central Yukon. We have a copper gold deposit. It's been around for quite a while, but you can access it off of a government maintained road and then off what I call a kind of what British Columbia logging road type thing where it could be easily upgraded.

4:34 So great infrastructure, which is South of the Minto Copper Mine. We have the same style of mineralization. We're 10 kilometers from power and

4:41 we're hitting some of the best grades outside of the previous or historical resource shell. So really exciting times. The deposits made up of 3 zones, they all come to surface. So the previous operators did a PA on it, but it looked at it as all open pits. But with the grades that we have of over 1% Copper equivalents. We suspect that when we do our next study, we'll minimize the size of those pits and end up going underground because we're very fortunate in that our mineralization is steeply dipping and we're getting grades over 1% Copper. And then we're getting a good increase in Gold as well. So that's kind of the layout of our project. Great, thank you for that. And Daniel, tell us about Caprock Mining and the Destiny project.

5:29 Hi everyone. So Destiny is a very interesting project. We're probably the earliest stage project in this group here. We took the project over about a year and a half ago. And what's really interesting about it is that we started with a new resource. And it's the first time there was a notional pit shell put on the resource. But it definitely showed us right from the beginning that we have the beginning of a very interesting pit from the standpoint that it's only about 5 to 10 meters of overburden. But there's a very, very strong metal factor. There's about 7 horizons. And there are sections where we have 100 straight meters of ore grade mineralization.

6:10 The deposit itself is 75 kilometers northeast of Val d'Or. So we're in the heart of Quebec gold country. We're south of the Casabarardi fault and we're north of the Cadillac fault. There are 5 mills in the area that are just a few hour drive. I'm still early to decide whether we can do Tomeloo or not, but you know if we want to there are mills in the area. But the other important part is that there's a lot of infrastructure, there's a lot of quality you know experienced workers there. The interesting thing about our project is because we're new, People are still trying to figure out whether we already have enough to a critical mass for an economic open pit. We're of the belief that we already do, but the market needs to see that. But what we like is that we know that there's more ore south of, or not south, but just below the notional open pit. And it's just the first open pit. We think we can make it go deeper. Right now, we're only going to about 300 meters.

7:11 But we also know that we haven't even started drilling in the pit. Our first drill programs were drilling for depth to see if there's high-grade depth and we did hit some, but now we're going to start focusing on broadening out the pit. We know the mineralization extends to the southwest and we know that there's the beginnings of an extension of the pit on the east side, drilling only done to about 125 meters of depth. And all those holes ended in mineralization. So what we're going to see over the next 6 months is drilling out the pit to show that we can get to a critical mass of ounces. Right now we have just under 1 million ounces at about 0.9 grams per ton. But like I said, it's just the beginning. We believe we can make that a lot bigger.

7:57 Now, I wanna go in reverse order here. And Dan, you kind of just addressed the question I had planned, but feel free to really drive it home. But each of your projects sit at a very different stage of development. So what is the single most important de-risk and milestone you expect to hit over the next 12 months? For us, it's quite simple. I think we need to just show, you know, the market has a notion in its mind of how many ounces you need to make your pit economic, depending on what type of pit is. It's not necessarily reflective of the truth, because we've done a lot of our own internal math and we believe that we're already in the economic pit. But just because you believe you have an economic pit doesn't mean it's going to get financed. So you do have to hit those milestones that the market is looking for. And so us being the earliest stage in this group here,

8:44 our critical point over the next 6 to 9 months will be to drill out the pit to the southwest, drill out the pit to the east, and be able to show that also through rock mechanics that we can get better pit slopes from the current notional pit, which are way too conservative, which means we can make it a little bit deeper and come out with a new resource in the spring that will, I think, turn some heads in terms of how many ounces we actually have to be able to put in an open pit. And based on our valuation, I think there's a, you know, there's some there's some true upside here Because we're trading at less than half the valuation of the cheapest open pit developer in our area.

9:26 Graham, over to you. The question is, what is the single most important de-risking milestone you expect to hit over the next 12 months? I think we've already done it this year. It just happened sooner than we were expecting. And it's not even that it was a real risk. Our goal was to make this bigger. We just bought this project just over a year ago and their previous PEA was done at 375 Copper and 1800 Gold and it made money then. We could probably go out and do a flash in the pan new PEA, but what we wanted to do is go out there and let's do, you know, we're doing the largest drill program since 20 years ago. So basically what we've done, the season couldn't have gone any better. We want, when we did our due diligence on this deposit, we thought we could make it bigger and we started stepping out. We've doubled the strike length of one of the zones outside of the resource shell.

10:24 We're making it bigger and that's what we're solely focused on this year. We'll do an internal resource this year, but we want to do another 20 to 30,000m next year. We haven't even gotten to one of the other zones because we're having so much success at 2000 and S. It's just all about getting as much drilling done. Look at redoing the resource. Can we get this over 1Bnlbs of Copper? I really think we can. Can we get this over 500,000oz Gold? And then that's just really de-risking it, in my opinion, do a new resource and do all the base work on our studies, environmental baseline, so that we can tee up maybe getting into pre-feasibility in 2028. We're just laser focused on getting as much drilling done as possible, making this as big as we can and finding other deposits on the project.

11:13 Great. Nothing wrong with that. Michael, over to you. I think some of that's really similar to what Graham just said. Since we completed the PEA in February, we've been doing a lot of drilling to really de-risk the project as we enter into the pre-Feasibility Study stage. That really means collecting a lot of data for the geotech analysis for the slope in the pits and underground slope sizes, the metallurgy, which has been important, the environment. With that information, then we can continue on with the baseline studies. And then really that leads into community support and IVAs with First Nations, which I think we're really progressing well on.

12:01 The permitting, we've certainly submitted the project description and applied for the permits. All of this information is helping a lot with that. That will be another big de-risking of the project as we continue down this path. We've got the metallurgy results just as a couple of weeks ago. Now we're starting to look for a toll milling. At this stage,

12:23 one of the biggest aspects that we need to nail down now is the toll milling agreement, because obviously that has a big impact on site infrastructure, the capital costs and also the operating costs and recovery. So really important to try to nail that down over the next several months. Thank you for that. And Mark, anyone following the EDM story knows the answer to this, but why don't you tell people that don't know this story, what is the most important de-risk and milestone you expect to hit over the next 12 months? Well that would have to be the Fisheries Act authorization, Kyle. We're expecting that this fall. That's been in the process for the last 2 years, 3 years, if you like. And so, beginning the completion of that. The next major milestone is updating the mineral resource estimation and pre-feasibility study. The pre-feas was last done in 2021.

13:19 So the new update is going to include an updated mineral resource, an open-mine plan, of course, current costs and metal prices. The zinc price has taken off since we did our last 2020 Pre-Feasibility Study. So that's all going to be included in that, as well as some updated processing design work in Lumile. And then, of course, we have the exciting gypsum

13:44 and hydrate opportunity, which we expect to expand the resource, and that will also be included in the revenue stream, which wasn't included before. After that, the next one is the offtake financing and the production decision. And We expect that all within the next 6 months. So, the key here is basically our permitting establishes what we can build and the PFS update demonstrates why we should build it. So, it's a very exciting opportunity coming forward in really the next 6 months, as I said. Starting with you, Mark, we'll go the other way again. Everyone on the call has projects in Canada from Yukon and Nova Scotia.

14:31 So what advantages do your specific jurisdictions give you when it comes to infrastructure, permitting or community relationships?

14:42 Well, I guess, Kyle, the biggest thing for us is The infrastructure puts us in a very high competitive advantage to other zinc producers. We're roughly an hour's drive from downtown Halifax. We're close to the international airport and all year round deep water ports and of course we're on a highway. We also have grid power. We have established industrial service sector nearby, basically 40 minutes away. Burnside in Dartmouth, so that's where CAT and all the other equipment supplies like Komatsu and industrial centre is basically of Halifax. So that's very close. We also have a skilled workforce. We're not a fly-in fly-out operation or I guess a long drive or distance operation. We're really close that people can commute 30 to 40 minutes from Halifax, downtown Halifax. So that gives us access to the skilled workforce.

15:44 We also have strong local relationships with our First Nations and in the community around the mine. The mine was first discovered in—or the resource was first discovered in the 70s. So the mine has essentially been there since the 80s. So that's a long history. So that's great to have that in place already. But we also have, I think, unprecedented provincial government support. And they're very supportive of responsible mining and of course, critical minerals. And zinc is a critical mineral. So at the Scotia mine, the key takeaway is vacation is an asset rather than a development problem. That's the key to the Scotia mine.

16:33 And Michael, the question is local jurisdictional advantages. Yeah, I mean, similarly, we're on the North shore of Lake Superior, Trans-Canada Highway, grid power, local workforce. I think those are all great things. Excess mill capacity with 5 mills and 5 mines in the area, I think that's really important. But one of the real advantages we're seeing is that there are some really great mining companies there with West Dome Gold Mines and Alamos Gold and Hemlo Mining Company. A lot of these companies have really broke trail for us there, established the permits for these operations, completed community relations, First Nations agreements.

17:22 I mean, they really broke trail. They've proven that they can work in these areas and do it safely and working with the communities. And we're just following that blueprint that they laid out for us. So, I mean, having that history in front of us has really made the path a lot easier for us. So, that's really helped a lot. And Graham, how's the Yukon evolving in terms of infrastructure? Yeah, so, you know, from all my work up in the Yukon, I've only worked on a few projects that are road accessible, so we're very fortunate. I mean, Yukon is a big place and some projects have infrastructure, some don't. We're just very fortunate that this project has been around a long time and it's road accessible. You can get anything in here. And then obviously just like Minto to the north of us, we're 10 kilometers from grid power as well.

18:15 So very good situation there. It's also the area that we work in is kind of a brownfield type area, just because of the long history of the Carmex project and the Minto mine up to the North. On top of that, you've got the Selkirk First Nation. They purchased that Minto mine with the Frank Joostra Group. That's how that's working out up there with them as a meaningful owner in that project. We're building a great relationship with Little Salmon Carmex First Nation, whose traditional territory we work in along with Selkirk. So feeling really good about building those relationships and working towards MOUs and seeing how we can get Little Sam CarMax and the First Nations involved there as well.

19:01 It's just, you know, We're an hour and a half from Whitehorse as well to Carmax and then a drive in. The infrastructure is great for us. It wasn't a mine before, but the infrastructure is already there. They actually cleared a huge area for the leach pad back in about 10-15 years ago. It's completely grown back. We're not looking to do a heap leach out there, but it's definitely a brownfield area. Great. And over to you, Daniel. Well, we're like I said before, we're right in the heart of the, you know, the gold mining area of Quebec. We have the Casabirardi Fault right north of us and south of us. We have the Dester-Porcupine-Cadillac Faults.

19:50 Every senior gold miner who operates in Quebec operates in that area. I mean, you know, most of the large gold deposits that you know of just historically in Quebec are in that area. And that trend goes into Ontario. But so the advantage for us is, like I said, there's 5 mills in the area. But as well, you know, all the technical expertise in the area, all the infrastructures in the area, you know, whatever work we would need done, there's plenty of people in the area who know how to do it well. So that's definitely an advantage.

20:25 And the advantage as well is, you know, it's not necessarily infrastructure, but you know, the rock is very well known. We have free Gold and the rock mechanics are very well known. The metallurgy is very well known. There are little surprises and there are lots of people who know how to operate in that area. I think all of those make it a huge advantage.

21:00 I'll have a little pause there and we'll see how much information we can get out of you guys. But I will direct it to you first question, Daniel. For today's metal price environment, how is it shaping the way investors are valuing open pit projects at your stage of development? How's the what? Sorry, I missed the specific. The metal price environment. Yeah. What about it? How is it shaping the way investors are valuing? How people view an open pit projects right now at your stage of development? Well, it's interesting because, you know, when gold was at $2,500 an ounce, people were saying, well, your open pit's not going to work. So, you know, do you have any high grade on the ground? And we went and started drilling for high grade on the ground and we found high grade. But then gold was $5,000. And I was like, why are you drilling underground when you have an open pit that you can be drilling out there? What are you doing? We don't care about the underground.

21:51 You're not going to be able to do that. You need to show us that you have an open pit. So that's definitely had an impact. But, you know, and I'm sure a lot of the open pit development companies have had some really good revaluations because of that. For us, it's a little bit of an opportunity because our re-rating, once we took the project and once we started working on it, was really based on us getting that initial financing and starting to drill underground. We had a significant re-rating based off of that, but we haven't had the re-rating based on having an economic open pit. So we did our 1st resource at $2,200 an ounce. That was what the third party, 43-101 company gave us. That was the forward curve at the time. And so we've already done our math at 3000, forget 4000, forget 5000 that we were at 6 months ago. But if, you know, we did our own math based on the metrics that they gave us, because we know what the general metrics are for open pits in the area, because there's been so many open pits in the area. And at $3,000 an ounce, we actually work quite well, even at the amount of resource that we have right now.

22:57 But the market still, I think, thinks that we should have a little bit more. And so I think that's going to be a major driver for our valuation in terms of how they look at us. But I think that once we get to that, which we believe can, like I said, I already believe we have the economics at 3000 dollars gold, but at 4000 dollars gold, it's even better. But for us to show that larger resource

23:21 and then start to move towards economics, I think that's going to be a huge catalyst for us. And that's going to reshape how people value us right now. Like I said, you know, in our area, you know, depending on where they're at, further companies that are further developed can trade up to $200 an ounce in our area, some of the more popular developers. But generally, if you just have a PEA, not just because we don't have 1 yet, but if you have just a PEA and you're moving forward in our area, you're trading between $30, $50, $55 an ounce. We're trading at $12 an ounce. So there's a massive revaluation to happen for us. So if we can show the market that we have more ounces and they believe these are ounces that make us economic, then even if we go to the bottom of the pack of $30 an ounce and we grew the ounces, that's a multiple to our share price of where we are right now, even with dilution to get us there to fund all of that. So I know I spoke about us specifically, but I think that, you know, companies are, you know, investors are looking for, you know, open pit companies that have leverage and they're looking for who can actually move their project forward.

24:33 And that's a major thing we're seeing out there. Great. Anyone have anything further to add? That was pretty well said, Daniel. I'll just add a few things that obviously the strong prices improve project economics, but investors

24:50 increasingly care about the time to production as well as the capital intensity, how much it's going to cost. We all know that new discoveries take years to become mines and our mine already has, the Scottish mine already has a zinc-lead gypsum mineral resource and we have silver and gold credits in the concentrate and existing infrastructure and the past production also de-risked the operation. So you combine that with advanced permitting and that one major permit to go the Fisheries Act authorization. All this added together, because we're a zinc producer, we'll be. That zinc is an increasingly important,

25:36 I guess, critical mineral to secure Western supply chains. So that's where we see the low capital cost projects, which are capable of going into production sooner. That's where it becomes really the valuable

25:57 insight into metal. So metal in the ground of course is valuable, but metal that realistically can reach the market relatively quickly is much more valuable. Anything else? Or maybe I'll add to this conversation and point it to you, Graham, because I know you were talking about potentially underground operations as well. What do you think generalist investors most often misunderstand about open pit projects compared to underground operations?

26:32 That's a good question. I don't know. It's a tough one. I don't really know what the challenges would be or the misinterpretations. I think for us, we're fortunate in that

27:00 our pricing environment just bodes so well. For us, it just really is more focused on kind of what it means for the underground because when we've got over 1% Copper equivalent, it really changes where you go from an open pit to an underground. And that's what we're going to be doing crossover studies this year. One of the things too, and the others might be better up to answer this, but our wall rock that we have is just pure granite, granite diorites. The geotech on that is you come through, you drill through that and then you hit the mineralization and the contact is like less than a meter from solid granodiorite to your mineralization. Then you come out. So I think pit walls and steepness is something that a lot of work actually has to go into. You have to do a lot of geotech work.

27:55 For us, the pricing environment and with our project, the orientation and geometry, We're in a fortunate position where we can probably go deeper on the open pits if we wanted to, but really it's going to come down to economics. But with over 1% Copper equivalent, those pits are going to be pretty juicy to go after.

28:18 I think I'll leave it there. Great. Michael, I haven't given you an opportunity to touch on anything. Before we move into the company-specific questions, if you have anything further to add? Yeah, you know, just on the pits, I would say, especially for a generalist investor, not all the pits are created equally. I think where we started with a resource several years ago, we had a 1.8Moz open pit feeding a very large, expensive mill. But with additional drilling and analysis of that data, it showed that starting with a phased pit of over 3g per tonne and then proceeding with an underground phase was a better approach to mining that deposit with the current conditions than maybe that large pit.

29:12 I think sometimes A deposit is perfect if it's shaped nicely for a big open pit and that's the way to go, but there's always an opportunity, especially with phasing or some other mining approach, that processing scenario that might be a little better. Maybe you don't get that right at the very initial stage because you just don't have the information. So I think as you continue to work these projects, they can turn out to be quite a bit better. And that's, you know, something that I think maybe gets missed at the, at the very beginning and that stage, and of course, you know, impacts, maybe your ability to get started. Maybe you start with a smaller CapEx project, maybe you start with something that's easier to permit and something that's just smaller overall, so it reduces your timing to get started in your CapEx. So, I guess that would be, you know, my comment is sometimes you have to follow along these projects and kind of see how, you know, the company works to improve upon what they already have from the initial resource and initial pit optimization.

30:15 Great. So gentlemen, let's get into some company specific questions here. I will give a reminder to the audience that you can submit questions. I see some people submitted questions here, so I will ask some of them. Mark, I'll start with you and I'm just going to do a few questions for each company at a time. I just like to stick on the theme and move on to the next. Mark, you're lucky number 1 here. From the audience question, how reliant is the project on gypsum? Gypsum, we have a mineral resource which is measured and it is also inferred. And that's from actual drilling on the deposit, which is on the mineral or the mining lease.

31:01 And we also have the analysis on that, which has converted that mineral resource into a mineral reserve. And so we're quite confident on that analysis. That was done in 2020 and 2021, and that's what we're updating. So I think it would be, we'd be pretty confident about the previous number and potentially expanding that number. But that's part of the 2027 Pre-Feasibility study update. The good thing is we've had a lot of drilling that was analyzed before. And so that's improved our confidence. And of course, part of the de-risking of the project is to have that measured and catered in third resource

31:48 actually being going into the reserve. So that's about the confidence. Now my research is correct here. I'm going to throw out some numbers. Your recent XRF ore sorting test work rejected roughly 25% of the feed while retaining more than 94% of the zinc and 95% of the lead. So what could that mean for the processing setup at the Scotia mine? So that ore sorting produced very encouraging test results. So potentially rejecting a quarter of the feed before the main processing circuit is basically a very good result because we also retained over 94% of the zinc and 95% of the lead. So excellent recoveries.

32:40 So we know that when you increase the recovery, you increase the feed head grade of the material entering into the plant, into the grinding flotation circuits. That has significant benefits. Lower energy use, lower processing costs, increased effective plant capacity because you're replacing that waste with now ore or mineralised material. That ultimately makes more concentrate as being produced at the mine at a lower cash cost. So that together will improve the overall economics of the project. So those all results we're expecting to incorporate into the updated pre-feasibility study and the policy evaluation of the processing strength.

33:29 So our objective was simple for the ore sorting is basically don't spend money processing rock that doesn't contain metal. That's the best way to upgrade your economics. No, definitely. Well said. I'm going to try and limit it to 2 questions each. Well, maybe we can make it 3. There's another question for you here, Mark, before we move on. EDM's ore grade in the resource is way lower than the one used in the ore sorting. What difference do you expect for the Rio or the remaining resource? So if we talk about the zinc equivalent in the previous 21, 21 pre-feasibility study, the reserve was about on average grade about 2.5% zinc.

34:20 And that contained of course, over the 14 year mine line, high grade, low grade, but we blend it to get an average going into the mill. So what ore sorting potentially does, when you're feeding ore into the mill, into the crushing circuit, and if we can remove 25% of the waste from the crushing circuit before it goes into the downstream circuits, then you're actually increasing the feed head grate because you're replacing waste with mineralised material. So what does that mean in terms of increasing that 2.5%? That's the purpose of the pre-feasibility study, is to look at what all sorting can accomplish on the whole mine life of the material.

35:10 And if it's that kind of level, increasing the feed head grade by reducing the waste, that could be significant. So I don't want to put a number on it right yet until they've finished that work. But those all sorting results were, I think, very encouraging. I'm going to put a video out on our EDM morning Journal on some of the background behind that, probably next week. But I think there was a great opportunity, 1 that had been overlooked from the operation a long time ago because they didn't have technology. Now we have, I think it's XRT actually, Kyle, not XRF, but a different method, but basically it's X-ray and AI programming. So we're incorporating latest technology to remove waste before it goes into the processing stream.

36:04 So that has an exciting opportunity for the project economics. Thank you for that, Mark. Mike, over to you. Quite a few questions in the chat for you. So try and stick with some of them. We'll see if you can answer this one. When can we expect the toll mailing to complete? Will be closed this quarter?

36:25 0, that's certainly our goal. Now that, like I said, now that we have our metallurgical results back, We had 74 samples that we sent to SGS laboratories. The first batch came back over 90%. That's really good. Now we have the ability, for 2 reasons, because now we have the results that we can share with people. The other thing is that we have 74 reject samples that we can forward to any potential toll mill for their own bench scale analysis. I think that's really positive. Our plan to continue on with the pre-feasibility study with the completion near the middle of next year. It's important that we do get that tool milling complete, that agreement completed this quarter because we need those factors to really be able to plug in to the pit optimizations underground economics studies that we're going to be doing. The drilling is going to be finishing up at the end of this quarter, but then the resource estimate will continue through November and December. We'd be ready to start with having those parameters available come January. It's important for our timeline that, you know, we do, we do nail down that, that 12 million agreement, you know, before the end of the year.

37:47 Great. Another question here, after the raise in May, how much cash do you have on hands today and what's your monthly burn rate?

37:58 That's a very good question. Let's see, I mean, tomorrow. So that'll be given indication of that, of the monies that, you know, We have left at the end of the year, because we're at the fiscal year end, so at the end of July. We raised $14M in May and we've probably been burning in the order of US$1M a month or so. We've had 2 drills going. We've just reduced to 1 drill. As I said, the PFS drilling is going to continue in October. Then we can go to carry on with a limited amount, 3,000 to 4,000m of exploration drilling to test some really great targets that we found back in 2025. We haven't been back to yet because we've been really focused on the PFS drilling.

38:47 Right now, our current plans to go through with the permitting and the Prefeasibility Study, the corporate costs and what we have enough funds to continue through the other side of the Prefeasibility Study, which is expected at the end of June of next year.

39:06 Your latest drilling returned 1.87g per tonne Gold over 35.1m at the southern end of the Jubilee deposit, beyond the 2026 PEA mine plan and still open down plunge. So how might results like that reshape the balance between open pit and underground mining in the PFF? Well, I mean, certainly, you know, we believe that We're going to expand the starter pits that we have there before we make them go to the underground. The reason that's important is that the PEA did have 2 small pits separated by over 100m between the 2. We've been drilling that area throughout the year and we've had some really good results there. We want to update the resource in that area.

39:54 Ideally, we'll be able to expand those pits into one and become very close to that. What it does is, in the PA it called for 3-years of mining these small open pits where the margin is quite high compared to the underground. If we can extend those pits and get another year of production before we have to make that decision to go to the underground or to a larger open pit. That buys us more time, gives us an opportunity to pad our bank account, put more money in there before we have to reinvest that into the next phase, which is the underground, getting underground, part of the deposit started is expensive, but it also gives us more money to do more drilling so we better know what the next big phase of the project is. We believe in the exploration potential.

40:44 This first stage of open pit mining allows us the time and the funds to go in and drill off what we believe will be a much larger project and a much larger deposit. That's the goal that we see. Thank you, Michael. Over to you, Graham. You've probably answered this question quite a few times in the last 4 to 5 days, but for people not familiar with your story, Hole 2658 returned 75.55m of 2.18% Copper equivalent at the 2000S extension. That's right between 2 parts of the existing resource. What could that mean for the scale and design of a future mine at Carmacks? Yeah, no, it is a great question.

41:32 We were looking to step out on that 2000S zone. For everyone, our deposit is made up of 3 zones, the 147 and the 2000S. They're about 300m to 400m apart. We just started stepping out towards 147 and we're hitting all the way. So could those 2 coalesce into one big open pit? That's really the question. We have a lot more drilling to do there because we've hit them on 1 kind of vertical piercement point. So we have to drill up dip and down dip. So we've hit mineralization over 350 metres outside of the previous resource shell. So we don't know, it's a good problem. We didn't expect to just keep hitting it hole after hole as we stepped out 50 metres and kept going towards 147.

42:19 So it just, Either way, if we can connect those 2 and if we can keep finding mineralization up-dip and down-dip, then it's the best place to find more mineralization in between 2 pits. It's pretty exciting. With camp upgrades already underway to support a scaled-up program in 2027, what will be your top priorities once the larger program gets going? Really it's just to keep drilling. Just what we found today, we have to put 2 drills on that all summer next year. We have the 1213 zone, which is a shallower zone. I think we only got 3 holes into that this year, so we need to keep building, hopefully expand mineralization around that at depth on all of the zones we can test. But then again, our project is 180 square kilometers. We have a zone A that was drilled in the 80s. We managed to get 3 holes into it. We don't have results, but that's 11km away. They had a couple of holes up there, 22m of over 2% Copper and around 2g Gold. We need to go figure out that. It's a bit more complicated and variable, but really it's going to be how many meters can we get done next year? How many of these studies can we get done this fall? We want to do a lot more network and we want to upgrade the camp to support 3 or 4 drills as well. It's just ramping up, getting more drilling done.

43:46 The entire Minto belt from Minto down to ourselves. You see these kind of satellite rafts and how many more deposits can we find on this project? It's really just about exploration and building that resource. Thank you for that, Graham. Over to you, Daniel. I did an update with you not too long ago and if I remember correctly, 8 out of 8 of your drill intercepts hit. Your recent deep drilling at Destiny returned consistent high grades, including 8.32 grams per tonne gold over 2.6 metres. So how does that deeper high grade potential fit alongside the open pit constrained resource story?

44:27 Well, the reality is that we have that classic story, except it's still quite early, the classic story where you have the open pit and then you can continue with a high grade on the ground. So I think they complement each other. I think they also show that there is a system going deeper and often in that part, the depth doesn't even get started until about 800 to 1000 meters. And, you know, our deepest hole went to 600 meters. And so we're seeing continual ore coming from surface. Again, it starts at about 5 to 10 meters of overburden, depending on where you are. And we know we have enough, you know, mineralization to make a pit 400 meters deep.

45:15 Not saying that's where it's going to end up but we have enough mineralization to go to that depth. But now we're showing

45:21 that under 400 meters there's a continued trend going. And so I think that that bodes really well for the overall project. But given where we're at right now, you asked before about the difference between how people look at our open pit versus on the ground. I think the market thinks that underground should be left to larger companies And if you want to do it yourself, then maybe you should get yourself larger. So I think the market's kind of spoken to us saying that they want us to focus on the open pit and get to a critical mass in the open pit before we really continue underground. So to come back to your question, does that change our open pit? No, but does it show that there is a system that runs deep into the ground? Yes. Does it also show that we're new on the project that we actually understand the geological model? Yes, because we drilled 8 holes. The first 8 holes we drilled into the deposit, we hit on every single one of them.

46:21 And so we do have a good understanding of the geological model. And we're going to use that, you know, and the more we drill, the smarter we get on it. We've done a lot of desktop work over the past year and we think we understand the model a lot more than we did before and those holes of depth add to our understanding. So the next 6 to 9 months will be really about flushing out the pit but it's all tied together right. Open pit versus on the ground is an engineering thing. It's about, you know, how do you pull it out of the ground? But geologically, there is none. There's no difference necessarily. Right. And for us, we're not seeing that much, Maybe a little bit more consistent dissemination near the top called the smoke.

47:08 And it gets more concentrated as you get deeper. But at the end of the day, it's still the same type of mineralization. Now, We talked a lot about the depth and just now you're touching about growing the pit. I have a question here regarding, you just got cashed up in June, you have money to work with. How is it going to put to work on the shallow drilling designed to expand the pit constrained resource specifically westward? So we drilled 3 holes this summer. It was just the beginning of us getting drilling into the open pit. The reality is that we're realizing that, It's a little swampy and we're best using the summer to drill the deep holes, because we go to a different part of the property that's a little bit higher up that doesn't necessarily, it's not wet, or at least it's not swampy.

47:57 And so I think from now on, we've kind of realized that we're gonna use the winter to drill for the open pit and the summer to drill for depth. That's going to be our drilling model. But we have drilled 3 holes which are in the pit and they're moving the pit westward. And so the market's going to get a flavor of our first 3 initial drill results in the pit. But we've already got 10 holes planned out very specifically. We have locations planned out for the winter, which will be pushing the mineralization to the west. And we're in the midst of planning 10 to 12 holes on the east side as well. So, this winter is gonna be really about expanding the pit to the west and to the east.

48:45 But in the short term, in the next 2, 3 weeks, we will be getting results from the open pit. Our first holes that we drilled in the open pit and showing that, again, that we can actually grow the mineralization to the West. Right now it's deemed as waste. And so not only do we want to show that some of that waste is actually ore, but we want to be able to move the boundary of the pit more to the West. And we're gonna start to get a flavor of that in the next few weeks. Great, gentlemen, thank you. Great stories, it was a great discussion and thank you people for asking questions in the chat. If you came in a little later during the intro, I did say that the replay will be available shortly after we conclude. And when I close the tab off here, there is a meet and request button. So if any of these gentlemen piqued your interest and you wanna learn more about their story, please select on 1 or more than one of their company names on there, and we'll make sure to rearrange a meeting for you. But gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for joining me.