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35:39 Let's move on and speak a bit about infrastructure. I know it's a big topic in the Northwest Territories. What are some positive practices that you see that are in place to help with infrastructure? But then I also want to know what are some of the challenges that you each face in regards to infrastructure as well? So, David, let's start with you. OK, I'm going to start by painting with the broader strokes and maybe my esteemed colleagues can sort of drill down on some more details. Look, Canada has a history of being a country that is built on infrastructure.
36:25 This is a country that is vast with tremendous resources, not a very dense population historically. And so infrastructure is the backbone of establishing industry and commerce and communities. And if I look at Northwest territories in the city of Yellowknife, which now is a city that if I got into an Uber in Vancouver, I could take it all the way to almost to our drill site. But that's a thing that takes time to establish, to develop roads and power and all that goes with ultimately building a mine, as Kayvan mentioned, the diamond mines that have been built in the Northwest Territories, they weren't built overnight and the infrastructure that exists to have built those needs to continue to improve.
37:25 So, you know, there are initiatives and efforts by, you know, right at the community level, all the way through the territory and up to the federal government, to continue to expand that infrastructure. Power is something that, you know, is certainly challenging for, I think, both the community, I don't want to speak for people who live in Yellowknife because I don't live there, but those of our partners in Yellowknife are challenged with that. And certainly for the future, for our country to continue to develop, I think, you know, it's these are big ticket items, they're expensive. So it doesn't happen overnight.
38:10 And it requires the will, the political will of not just the local communities, but also the support of our nation broadly. And we're seeing that support, you know, come to the table and we're very happy for that. So. Very good. Keevan, can you speak to that a little bit? Some of the positive practices that you see in place here and maybe some of the biggest challenges that you still see out there? I think David covers it really well. The only thing I would add, and I just want to support it, specific to Nighthawk as an example, I mean, If you look at our properties, we're located about 200km north of Yellowknife, which has been a major mining hub for the past several decades. If you look at infrastructure, the key to ingredients to developing a mine down the road is generally all year round road access and power.
39:05 And even though our site's about 200 kilometers away from Yellowknife, there is currently a all year road under construction, which I believe is gonna be completed either this year or early next year. That gets, you know, it provides access to the local communities in the area, but it kind of gets us halfway to our properties. And of course, in terms of power as well, there's a power line that gets, that's roughly about 100 kilometers to the south of our properties. So to David's point, even though we're not there yet, as a CEO of Nighthawk and a junior exploration company that's looking to ultimately down the road build a project, I couldn't be more excited about the possibility of having some of that infrastructure further extended.
39:51 Now, again, David mentioned that it's not going to happen overnight, and that has to be supported by further success and capital from companies like Nighthawk and exploration and additional resources to actually show economic viability for our projects going forward. Right. Geoff, do you have anything to add on this? I do, and I guess for me, it's been a bit of a learning curve coming from Australia going into the Northwest Territories. Our project is a little over 100 kilometers away from Yellowknife. There are no roads, there is no power going to the site and if I was anywhere else in the world, the Natural Archive project would be very difficult to develop.
40:41 The reason why we are able to develop it is primarily because we're located in the Northwest Territories and we're located on the Great Slave Lake, which is fundamentally a great highway. It means that in winter, we have the opportunities of ice roads, and in summer we have barge access. Now what that means from a mining project is that when you look at mining projects, they're 0.5 to do with the actual deposit itself and they're 0.5 to do with infrastructure. And the success of a project is largely driven by how the percentage of capital which you have to spend actually on the mining project compared to associated infrastructure.
41:30 Now because we're located on the Great Slave Lake, it means that for us, that percentage of spend on the processing and the mining is extremely high. We have very minimal costs to actually build enabling infrastructure. In winter, it is a very simple case of putting an ice road on the Great Slope Lake. We did that last year, we're doing that again this year and in summer it's barge access with direct landing at the site. So that really is a unique benefit. And as I say, if it wasn't for the fact that we were located in the Northwest Territories, being located 100 kilometres from the nearest town without any infrastructure going out to the site, it wouldn't be possible.
42:22 Certainly not in the way that we're looking at developing the project. Very good. We touched a little bit on it already, but let's, I just want, you know, like a brief perspective on the geographical potential that, you know, you all see from your different perspectives. As I stated at the beginning of the talk here, you know, Northwest Territories is the second largest of the 3 territories and it's vastly unexplored. So if we can speak a little bit more on the geological potential, David. Okay, thank you. That's a great setup. We think that the geological potential of the district is absolutely world class.
43:15 There are really only a handful, I think, of prospective large-scale areas for gold discovery. And Again, as my colleagues mentioned earlier, there hasn't been any real discovery in the gold sector in quite some time. So for us to find ourselves sitting on the doorstep of historic, highly prolific gold mining in what we view as a very untapped and underexplored, even call it unexplored, region is a tremendous opportunity. I mean, these are truly world-class projects that you see presented before you here today.
44:08 So I think that's just the best place to leave it. It's all about potential, and it's all about access to that potential. And I think we have, you know, the right mix. Awesome. Kivan, what is your perspective on this? Sure. I'll be specific to Nighthawk and our land position. I mean, I touched on it briefly earlier, but again, we also, as David said, we are sitting on a land position that's highly prospective with very little work that's been done over the past several years. We've identified 2Moz of resources in our core asset, which is a core macro project. In addition to that, we've identified numerous highly potential and highly prospective targets that sit on our properties. We call them satellite deposits.
45:01 I think that really sets the company up going forward as a potentially multimillion ounce resource developer. We truly believe that we have the land position that's capable of delivering such a resource. There are a lot of similarities in terms of geology and structure and style of mineralization to another Gold Camp, the Timmins Gold Camp, which I again touched on briefly earlier, which has produced in the excess of 50Moz over the past several decades. I agree with David, there's a lot of potential and there's a lot of ground that still has to be tested. Personally, I couldn't be more excited about our prospects going forward.
45:50 That's great. Jeff, what's your perspective on this geological potential here? Well, I guess from my perspective, the fact that we're looking at a different sort of project to what Keyvan and David are. So we're dealing in critical minerals rather than in gold and diamond, which is I guess the more traditional mining project in the Northwest Territory. So from our perspective, we're looking at real, what is the next big thing in terms of minerals? And from that perspective, if you look at what's happening in the world around energy efficiency, renewable energies, and also some geopolitical issues going on at the moment where you have governments talking with each other about critical mineral strategies and particularly with there's a huge push for establishing infrastructure supply chains and supply chains for these critical minerals in North America.
46:58 That means that there's a lot of competition of who's going to really take advantage of that. That's where I think Northwest Territories has a huge potential because there aren't many jurisdictions which have quality rare earth projects or other critical minerals like lithium, niobium, those types of minerals. And there's a lot of prospective sites around the Northwest Territories in those critical minerals. And that really, I think, provides a huge opportunity for the Northwest Territories, not only from a mining industry perspective, but actually its importance to overall critical mineral strategies for Canada and North America.
47:47 So that's a great perspective. I want to remind everyone that's watching if you have any questions to please send them in while they're fresh in your mind and they'll get queued up for our live question and answer that we'll be doing after we're done the fireside chat. Okay, let's move on to ESG. Obviously it was one of the hottest topics in 2020. How does the Northwest Territory exploration and mining and any processes within your company address investors growing concerns on seeing metrics in this area? So let's start with you, Dan. Thanks, Jessica. I think it's high time that these issues have really sort of come to the fore.
48:38 Certainly in the investing world, these are now hot topics. And I think I can only speak for Gold Terra when I say that for a junior exploration company, a tremendous amount of effort has gone into, effort and money spent, has gone into, you know, making sure, as I said earlier on, that we behave as guests. You know, we've, engagement is something that I was absolutely blown away by. When I was joining the project, I couldn't have imagined joining a team with limited bandwidth and limited financial resources that could have done a better job than was done by Joe Campbell and his team when they were putting this land package together.
49:43 The underlying theme here is that our property, our assets, our exploration, you know, they all occur on the traditional lands of the Yellowknife-Denning First Nation, you know, and also, you know, the project borders the city of Yellowknife and shares multiple land uses, hydro, road, airport, communications, recreational trails. So we're in a very sort of unique position as a junior company to have, you know, quite a complex and diverse engagement program. I think that, you know, while we're small, we try to think big and our values and goals and communications absolutely have to be aligned with the community.
50:40 So we're you know we're kind of glad almost in a way that investors you know institutional funds are all sort of asking all of our peers to rise up to the level because it's just important for the whole industry to look good. Great. Keevan, what are your thoughts on ESG from Nighthawk's perspective and working in the Northwest Territories in general? Sure. Thanks, Jessica. Well, certainly For me personally, I'm really glad to see that ESG is actually finally center stage when it comes as an investment theme. I think to add to what David said, I think just being a Canadian miner and the jurisdiction that we operate in, We are privileged to be working with what I would consider very high standards if you compare us globally to other countries. And I think Australia can, the same thing can be said about Australia.
51:39 So in that regard, we're very fortunate. Now that doesn't suggest that we have to stop there. And I think it's important to go above and beyond. In my past experience and all the companies that I've been involved with, the company has done a great job to go above and beyond what is the regulatory requirement. For Nighthawk specifically, we have great relationships and great engagement with all our local communities. And we've just actually, as the company's starting to grow and advance our projects even further with more activity on our grounds, we've just appointed someone who's gonna be basically our liaison between all her and she's going to be handling all the relationships in the local community. So we are actually accelerating our engagement within the local communities. That's excellent to hear.
52:29 Jeff, what is your perspective on this? Well, from our perspective, there's, being a developer of rare earth projects, we have one other aspect which we need to consider with regards to ESG. Obviously, I agree with David and Kivan with regards to our commitments to the local communities. I'll add to that as well, we're operating in an area which is pristine. So in terms of impact to the environment, we really need to ensure that our impact is minimised to the greatest extent possible. The other consideration from our perspective is, as I mentioned earlier, rare earths are used in renewable energy and energy efficiency and green technologies.
53:21 So that adds an additional requirement to produce those products and when you talk about electric vehicles you read quite a lot in the press around, well okay, electric vehicles might be a more green option, but the question is always, well how do you, what about the extraction of the minerals? And so therefore there is a real push, and from our customers, there is a very real push on ASG principles and how you can minimise environmental impact in terms of the production of these minerals. From our perspective, the approach which we're taking is, and this is one of the real benefits from a geological side of things as well, is on our mine site we don't have any process chemicals, we don't have any process water with our demonstration plant. So we are going to be the first rare earth project which will primarily just use ore sorting to produce a concentrate product at our start-up operation.
54:24 Our plant is not located, doesn't have concrete foundations, so it's simply sitting on a compacted earth. So from an impact perspective, environmental impact perspective, we've really looked at how we can minimise those impacts. I think that's a very important consideration then when you're looking for the support of local communities as well, because you have to demonstrate these are the lands of the local communities. So actually addressing that and seeing how you can minimize that in all aspects of your operation is incredibly important. Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, we've touched on it a little bit and we've talked about community involvement, but Indigenous leadership and engagement is, you know, clearly a crucial part of any successful exploration in Canada.
55:19 Can you speak on your experiences in the Northwest Territories in that regard, David? Broadly, our experiences have been Excellent. As I said, we've been largely welcomed. We want to make sure that we always try to do better. We certainly would never say that we're perfect, but it's always a topic internally. Looking into our company, we continually consider ourselves to be very fortunate to be where we are because our engagement with the local Indigenous communities, with which we partner on a variety of levels, initiatives, have been always engaged with us. That's the first thing. I mean, you can't have a conversation if the other party doesn't want to talk.
56:24 And so I would say that, you know, you're not always going to agree on everything you talk about. That would be boring. And, you know, we are just very thankful for the fact that the local communities surrounding Yellowknife and our project have always been open to a conversation. And for that, you know, we're thankful and we'll always try to be as respectful as we can in that conversation and open-minded. And from an employment perspective? From an employment perspective, we've done a decent job of trying to make sure that, you know, we're providing opportunities. We are currently in the midst of, you know, building a team that's proprietary to us, you know, from people who are local to the community. We've made 2 local hires and of course we would extend those opportunities, you know, equally to anyone within the community.
57:34 So of course, you know, we look forward to advancing on that on that sort of tangent, if you will. Excellent. Keevan, what is NIHOC's stance on this? So look, for me, in terms of general comment on, you know, our commitment and engagement with local communities, I think every community in Canada has unique characteristics. And for all companies and developers that wanna operate within the industry, it's really important to identify, acknowledge, and respect those unique characteristics and the needs that come along with that, right? So how do you do that? It's by effective early engagement with the local communities. And essentially making sure that the dialogue is continuous to ensure long lasting relationships.
58:24 And for us, Nighthawk, that's certainly gonna be our approach. We already have great relationships with all the local communities. And as I said before, we've appointed someone who's going to be basically in charge of this and we're accelerating that program even faster as we grow our projects and, you know, increase our visibility and activity in the region. That's great to hear. Geoff, what are your thoughts on some of the Indigenous leadership and engagement within the Northwest Territories? Look, I think the simplest way to answer that is, as I mentioned before, in 18 months, we've gone from finalizing the purchase of an asset through regulatory approvals, land use permits, water licences, having those in place and being in a position to mobilise our fleet.
59:16 There is no chance of being able to achieve that without the support of the Indigenous communities. They were and they have been instrumental in us being able to achieve that and for that I have to thank them. The way that all the communities have operated and communicated with us has just been first class. As David said, we're not going to do everything right. And I think when we talk about one of the impacts of COVID for myself and my senior management team to not be able to travel to Yellowknife. That's one area which is really, I think, has been a challenge for us and we've had to learn a new way of how we can communicate and how we can engage at that senior management level.
1:00:10 But I think the approach which has been taken by the communities has just been first class. And as David mentioned earlier as well, you can't have a conversation if the other party doesn't want to talk. Right. And it's just been, it's been a really good experience for us. It's my first time working up in Canada and yet I can only speak positively of the experience. Oh, that's awesome. This actually leads on to our next question, which is partnerships. So the Invest in Canada's North initiative that launched last year has been a big highlighter to the North. Can you speak about the value in that and maybe touch on some other partnerships and experiences working in the Northwest Territories, David?
1:01:02 Well, we have had a great experience. Jessica, as you alluded, we've been involved with this initiative in the past year and for us, creating partnerships is everything. There's no way that a junior Gold exploration company in our position can move a project forward without continually making new partnerships. We value this initiative. We've seen very positive results. You know, we've received largely positive feedback and we look forward to building further partnerships through this initiative.
1:01:47 Absolutely. Well, it brought us together today. So, Ivan, can you speak on this a little bit? I know, like I said, you're a bit new to Nighthawk, but the Invest in Canada's North initiative was launched last year and has been a tremendous highlight to the North. Is there any other experiences that you can even pull on with partnerships in the North? Look, just to add to what David was saying, I think this platform itself or any other partnership that essentially increases visibility and brings more exposure to the natural resources industry in the north is going to be a positive move towards more activity in the industry in the region. So that's all I would say.
1:02:35 I can't really speak specifically about previous partnerships, but yeah, anything that can increase exposure is a good step forward. Jeff, what are your thoughts? Oh, look, I don't really have too much more to add than what Kevan and David mentioned. The only thing, other thing which I would add is in terms of the partnerships, and this is an extension to the previous conversation around how we found from working with the local communities. At last year's conference we signed an MOU with Nahanni Daton Sho for our mining contract. So over the last 12 months we've worked very closely with them to finalise that contract.
1:03:23 And to think that that's been a 12-month process, and yet it's been... The way that we've been able to work together with Nahanni and Datun Shoe has been, it makes the project and bringing the project into operations far more, far easier. And actually, to be honest, a far more pleasant experience as well. So, you know, that's been that's been fantastic. And we're looking forward to actually having an indigenous mining contractor operating on their own land. Well, that's excellent. OK, we're moving on now to our final question of the chat, fireside chat, but then we'll be going into our live question and answer after.
1:04:10 We're right at the start of 2021. What is some of your perspectives on a commodities outlook for the remainder of the year. We have gold and rare earth elements to touch on. So David, let's start with you from your perspective on the outlook here. Well, as I said earlier, I think we're entering a massive bull run in gold. And the challenge with predicting commodity prices is typically timing. And that will always remain a challenge. So I'm not an economist, I'm not David Rosenberg, I'm David Suda and just a lowly equity capital markets guy who sat on a desk and traded stocks for a long enough time to think that, you know, given the economic backdrop and what's been happening in the world, We certainly are entering a higher Gold price environment. Is it going to go straight up? I don't think so.
1:05:24 I'm not going to predict price, but I think that for a project like ours and a project like Kayvan's, even at these prices, we're entering some very heady times and we're very thankful for that. Hopefully this is just the start of a long cycle to the upside. Excellent. Keevan? Sure. I believe that we are in early innings of what could be even a bigger run for the price of Gold going forward in the next couple of years, especially when you look at all the government spending in the form of stimulus, not just in the US, but all governments. And I think we're not out of the woods on that yet, especially when you see the COVID numbers where they are today. And before we're done, I think you're going to see a lot more government spending. And that's really the primary reason why I think gold is going to continue to perform well.
1:06:22 I mean, look at the rising debt levels in the US. And if you take the US debt, I think by the time the US government is done printing money, it's going to be well in excess of 30 trillion. And when you compare that to their GDP of 20 trillion, that ratio has essentially doubled over the past 10 years. And I think there's a historical precedence for it. I mean, if you go back to the last major crisis we had back in 08, 09, Gold along with all other equities initially sold off aggressively as people were panic selling and fleeing to cash. But over the next 3 years, it nearly tripled from around 700, if I'm not mistaken. So I think today what we're seeing with COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis of last year, I think you're seeing the same thing and I think that trend could repeat itself and that's why I'm personally optimistic about the price of gold.
1:07:16 And yeah, I'll leave it there. OK, it's a good place to leave it. OK, so, Jeff, what's your perspective from a rare earth standpoint? Well, rare earths and other critical minerals are really heading into an interesting time, I think. Not just from a consumer perspective, but I think the recent US election will also have a very big impact on rare earths and other critical minerals. I touched on it before in terms of the reasons why. When you look at the key trends in the world today, we're moving into an area where we're going down the path of electrification of vehicles And that's a massive, massive change.
1:08:03 We're moving into an era of increased renewables, and particularly around wind turbines and solar. We're also moving into an era of miniaturisation and robotisation, artificial intelligence. And those are the big 3 changes in the world. And the World Economic Forum classifies that as the fourth industrial revolution. And in every single one of those areas, rare earths are critical. So to achieve that and with all of these trends, rare earths are absolutely critical. The final thing then is you add in to it the geopolitical situation and you have a situation where currently you have these critical minerals controlled fundamentally by 1 country, with China producing the vast majority of the world's rare earths, and not just from a raw material supply, but particularly down the supply chain through the production of magnets and metals.
1:09:08 So you add changes in demand, you add into it geopolitical issues, and you basically have a perfect storm for rare earths and critical minerals. You also have a situation where the projects themselves are very difficult to develop typically. So it's very difficult for companies to react quickly to these changes in demand. So all of those things added in together means that we're in for a pretty wild ride, I think, in terms of rare earths and other critical minerals. Now, how that will play out, nobody can really predict that as the rare earth market typically hasn't been the most transparent in the world when you look at how it's behaved over the last 10 to 15 years.
1:10:04 But fundamentally we are heading into an area where the supply and demand dynamic is really moving to a supply deficit and that provides a huge opportunity And from our perspective and the approach which we're taking to be the next producer of rare earths in the world and developing a strategy which enables us to react quickly to market changes. Certainly makes us very excited about what the future holds. Right. Well, thank you so much for that, Jeff. I think this is a great point to end the fireside chat with our panellists as we kick off the Invest Northwest Territory Session 1. Again, you can find us at hashtag remote roundup.
1:10:52 We're going to do a quick thank you to our sponsors and then we're going to jump straight in to the live question and answer period with our attendees. So don't go anywhere. We have a lot of questions lined up already. So let's just jump right into it. We have about 20 minutes here. Our first question is for everybody. Given the scarcity of skilled trades in the Northwest Territory and the multiple projects that we've been talking about here today. Where is everybody sourcing their workers from? So that's a great question to kick off here from Michael. So let's start with David.
1:11:42 Okay, thanks. That's a good question. And it gives us an opportunity to, again, sort of fly the gold tariff flag. We're so happy to be next to a city and the city and the local community is a source of skilled trade. There's definitely a rich history in mining in the Northwest territories that has extended to the current operation of mines and Yellowknife is the hub for those mines. So as I said earlier, we've also made a deliberate move to, you know, hire a team, a proprietary team to us from the local community.
1:12:33 Obviously, there are some or certain limitations to, you know, who's available and when they're available from within the community. And So in those situations, we do bring people from the outside and also some of the contractors that we use. You know, we also can't necessarily control who they're using. But again, the local community for us is a significant source of skilled labor and trade. Excellent. Kayvon, what is your perspective on this? The same goes for us. Although we're considered a remote operation, we're pretty close to Yellowknife, So we're a short haul flight away from Milan, which is a major hub.
1:13:19 And there's actually on the other side, I think there's a lot of technical expertise and resources as Milan is a major hub. With That said, we are an exploration company, so we use an agent contractor to do a lot of the work for us on site. And although we have people coming in from all over the country, we also look at hiring local community contractors. So, potentially David probably would agree with that, and I agree with most of the stuff that you said. Great, thank you. Sorry, you just cut out a little bit there at the end. Geoff, where are you mostly sourcing your skilled workers from? So our situation is a little bit different to David and Keevan's in that our workforce that we're looking for at the moment is actually an operational workforce rather than an exploration one. However similarly our focus is on maximising the level of local employment and at this stage we are wherever possible we will employ locally.
1:14:24 There may be some specialist positions which do require us to bring people in from outside of the Northwest Territories, but our focus is on maximizing the levels of local employment. That's excellent. I actually have another question just directed right to you, Jeff. This is from Bud, and He asks, how are you set up for infrastructure? I know we did talk a little bit about it, but he wants a bit more specifics on roads, power, camp, milling and crushing, et cetera. Okay, so from a road perspective, we're currently in the process of building an ice road out over to the site and that will be used to mobilise our mining fleets or sorter etc and that will occur over the next few months.
1:15:11 From a power perspective, we actually have a very low power demand. We do not have grinding circuits or things like that which really tend to draw major amounts of power. So we're able to generate power just through on-site generators and it's only a very small amount. From the camp, we're fortunate that we do have an existing camp at the site which was previously constructed by Avalon and we are upgrading that as we speak as well. So from an infrastructure perspective, we really don't need a lot. As I say, it's a single generator, which comes in a container. It's a nice road. We're not gonna be building new roads out to the site.
1:16:02 Excellent. This next question is for all the panelists and it's from what sources of energy are you using in your operations? Are there opportunities or possibly plans to introduce renewable energy sources? I can start and just continue with the order that we've been going. For us, we are an exploration company, so we don't have a large draw on energy yet. We hope to need a lot of energy soon. But for now, again, being in town, Our partners, our staff, live in the community. Our core shack is in the community.
1:16:52 So we're on local power. And then when we're in the field, we're using the traditional forms of power to power drills and any of our other tools. We are always looking towards more sustainable and renewable energies. Currently what's available to us as an exploration company is pretty limited. So we look to the technology providers to lead the way and certainly when possible, we'll be making moves to minimize our carbon footprint. Great, thank you. Let's move on to you, Kavan. Sure, yeah, same goes for us. We are an exploration company. We are a remote operation as well, so right now, based on the technology that's available to us, Our only option really is using generators on site. With that said, as we start thinking about advancing our projects and getting to a PEA and eventually building a mine down the road with additional resources, certainly a sustainable energy and how we look at the way we would power a potential mining site down the road is something that's on our mind. And for sure, we'll be looking at the economics of that as well. And hopefully technology, whether it's solar, wind, whatever it's going to be, which is an alternative to the traditional ways of energy or providing power to any
1:18:24 mine site, will be there with us as well as we advance our projects forward. Excellent. Jeff, let's move on to you for this. Yes, so we actually did quite an in-depth study on the viability of using solar with batteries for our startup operation. In this instance, For our startup operation, we weren't able to use that. And instead of just going with a traditional generator, however, the technology itself is something which we are very interested in and seeing how we are going to be able to use it and maximise the use of renewables in the future. As mentioned before, rare earths are a product which is used in renewable energy, and therefore there is a real desire from us to to maximize the use of renewables as we move forward, particularly when we start getting into larger and more into larger operations. To larger and more, yeah, into larger operations.
1:19:20 Great. This question is from Tony. She says, good morning, or he says, good morning, everyone. With the metal commodity markets increasing, How can a recycler of the recycling industry help with producing revenue to subsidize your business? It's an interesting question. We'll start with you, David. Sorry, you broke up, Jessica. I'm so sorry. It's a live event. So this question is, how can a recycler or the recycling industry help with producing revenue to subsidize your business? That's a good question and not 1 that I can really answer intelligently, not something that we've spent obviously enough time thinking about, But given the stage of our operations, offhand, I can't think of how a recycler would be able to help us locally.
1:20:27 But certainly if somebody has an idea, our door is open and we're always happy to listen to any ideas that we could get on that front. Thank you. Keevan? Yeah, that's a good point. Do you have an idea on this? Yeah, it's got me thinking. I can't really answer that well either. To David's point, if somebody has an idea as to how we can actually, whether it's generating revenue or finding ways of saving costs for operations, I'd certainly be happy to hear about it, but I can't really comment on it. But it is an interesting question. Definitely got me thinking. Thank you. Jeff.
1:21:14 Yeah, as with David and Keevan, it's not something which I've really come across in the past in the ability for recyclers to add revenue to the business. With Rare Earths itself, recycling is a hot topic and how Rare Earth products can be recycled from existing products, but from an operational perspective, yeah, I'd have to really, if anybody has any ideas of how that might work, we'd certainly be open to listening. Excellent. We have about 5 minutes left for the question and answer. I'm going to go on to a question from Hart. Are there opportunities for Indigenous-owned service companies from outside of the Northwest Territories to provide support in the areas of community engagement and environmental services?
1:22:06 If so, who can we connect with to discuss this? It's a bit of a loaded question, but let's start with you, David. It's a good question. And I think it's 1 worth asking because we want to be able to state that we want to offer opportunity equally to anybody who wants to contribute to our project and partner with us. And so I'm the right person to connect with or, you know, by any of the, via any of the contact information that's available on our website.
1:22:51 Our door is always open and we often hear from service providers from the local community, both Indigenous and we've also heard from Indigenous-owned service companies from outside the Northwest Territories in the past. So please reach out and we'd love to communicate with you. That's great. Kvan? Yeah, same for us. We're always looking for partnerships from all over the place. As long as look, there's value added for us as a company and our shareholders. We consider all opportunities and I would be the right guy to actually contact with respect to this. And anybody who's got any ideas in terms of services or technologies that can help our operations, we're always more than happy to hear it when our doors are open.
1:23:45 Jeff, We would always encourage any cooperation with any group moving forward. And that's something which we would certainly encourage. In terms of contacts, that would either be myself or in Canada, David Connolly in our Yellowknife office. That's great. And you can certainly reach out to me as well and I can forward it off to anyone. I'm just jessica at b-tv.com. Okay, so we're just about at the end for our first live question and answer. I'm just gonna throw it out to the team if you guys had any clothing thoughts to leave with investors out there on some nuggets that are gonna be coming up for your companies.
1:24:34 Let's start with you, David. Well, first of all, I would like to thank you, Jessica, for moderating. You've done a tremendous job, as always. I said that we've been involved with this initiative for a period of time now and we've seen nothing but positive feedback and you've helped grow our partnerships. So thank you for that. And I'd like to also thank the Northwest territories, the community of Yellowknife, the Indigenous communities that we engage with. Also, I think this is an excellent context for a discussion about what the opportunity is, not just for our shareholders, but for the community as well. And so invest NWT has been a great experience.
1:25:21 And, you know, Gold Terra is currently drilling our flagship target just next to the historic con mine. And we have a tremendous amount of pent up excitement. The drill is turning and we'll be generating results for the market to absorb and get excited about as we continue in this global market. So thank you very much. Thank you. Keevan. Sure, Jessica, thank you. It's been great. And although the rest of the panel, also the rest of the panel, David and Jeff, it's been great being on with you guys and I've had a lot of fun. For us, we are a new team. I've been in the role for a couple of weeks and we have a couple of other new additions. It's going to be a very exciting year for us at Nighthawk, as I said in my earlier comments.
1:26:13 We are doing a lot of planning over the next few weeks before we open up our exploration camp. We're looking at being very aggressive in the region and increasing our activity and our efforts towards a really exciting and robust project over the next couple of years. And yeah, I think it's going to be a transformational year for us. We've had some meetings so far this year, as early as it's been, and we're actually getting a lot of excitement, positive feedback from our key relationships, whether it's the investment community or all local and regional stakeholders. And it's something that nobody... The one comment that's come back to us is that nobody really doubted the quality of our assets. It's just the aggressive style and approach that we're undertaking right now is something that everybody's getting excited about. So yeah, stay tuned, there's going to be lots of news flow and I'm looking forward to this year, it should be very exciting for Nighthawk.
1:27:06 Very good. Geoff, some final thoughts? Yeah, look, firstly and first and foremost, thanks very much for the invitation and having me on and to the other panellists today. Big news for us really is as we move into operations, as we, coming over the next couple of months will be the mobilisation of the mining fleet, commencement of mining operations, and the first product being produced later on this year. And I think one final comment is from the number of messages I've had, it's good to see that Shirley the cat has proved popular to this panel. And she certainly believes that she is the star of the show. Absolutely.
1:27:51 Well, thank you so much again, the 3 of you, for joining us this morning. It's been a pleasure. And everyone who's watching, don't go anywhere because we are going to now jump into our second panel discussion of the day. Welcome back to the Invest Northwest Territories Remote Roundup Session 2, sponsored by the Government of the Northwest Territories and Invest Canada North. I'm Jessica Katrczyk from VTV Business Television. The Northwest Territories is known globally for its wealth of diamonds. Further, it's filled with mining potential that includes gold, zinc, silver, lead, cobalt, rare earth, just to name a few. And we're joined by another 3 pivotal resource companies in the territory for today's second discussion. Fortune Minerals, Norzinc, and Osisko Metals.
1:28:55 Thank you to those of you who are joining us as part of AMABC. You can find us under the hashtag hashtag remote roundup virtual event this year. We invite everyone to let us know where they're tuning in from and join us in the chat feature during the session. Our panelists and their teams can connect with you throughout the fireside chat and be sure to submit your questions for the live question and answer to follow. Welcome again to our panelists. Robin, please give us a brief description of Fortune Minerals and what makes your company stand out. Thanks Jessica and thank you for inviting me to speak at this virtual workshop as well as to the Northwest Territories. My name is Robin Goad. I'm the President and CEO of Fortune Minerals Limited. We trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol FT, that's Foxtrot Tango, as well as FTDMF on the bulletin board in the United States.
1:29:55 Our company is a company that's been essentially incorporated initially to work in the Northwest territories. We've been there for 32 years and we have a very exciting project called the Nyko project, which means Cobalt, Gold, Bismuth and Copper. The project is situated about 160km northwest of the city of Yellowknife, 50 kilometers north of the community of Waukee, and it will be comprised of a mine and a concentrator situated there, as well as a refinery in southern Canada. And we're very excited about the opportunity to participate in critical minerals. This is new terminology, which refers to minerals which are being used for technology, typically new technologies as well as eco metals.
1:30:45 And Our project will be producing Cobalt Sulphate, which is consumed in Lithium ion batteries primarily, but also Cobalt is used in aerospace alloys. We have a little over 1 million ounces of Gold in our mineral reserves, which will contribute a co-product. And we have 12% of the global Bismuth reserves, which is a relatively small by-product for the project, but we will be the largest producer in the world. And this project is very advanced. We spent $135M to date. We've already been assessed in a bankable feasibility study. We've completed the environmental assessment for the development of the project in the Northwest territories.
1:31:32 We had the major mine permits. We've test mined the project. And even though it's an open pit, primarily deposit, we've also driven a decline ramp underground and collected large samples for pilot plant testing, verifying the process flow sheet, the commodities which we're going to produce, the recoveries. So it's a very advanced project. The refinery is also a great opportunity because our material will provide the base load for this facility. But then the business plan going forward is to be able to also process materials from other similar projects around North America as well as waste residues and scrap metals and also to participate in recycling. So this is a very interesting project and enabled by infrastructure, which we're gonna talk about a little more later in the conversation, but there's a new access road being constructed by the government of the Northwest Territories, partially funded by the federal government. And this is a key enabler, which is under construction, nearing completion and allows our project to proceed.
1:32:41 Thank you very much, Robin. Don, NorZinc also has a very long history in the Northwest Territories. Can you give us a little bit more on its project background? Sure. Thanks very much, Jessica. My name is Don McDonald. I'm the CEO of Norzinc. We're trading on Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol NZC. And our project originally is, our major project is the Prairie Creek mine. It was originally built in the 1980s as a silver mine, but when the silver prices dropped down, it was mothballed. And in the last number of years, We've been focusing really on the Zinc and the Lead as well as the Silver at the project. It is a project with a Feasibility Study that was completed just over 3 years ago. I've been with the company for just over a couple of years myself.
1:33:28 And the Feasibility Study had a reserve of 8Mt of 23% Zinc equivalent and 27Mt of 27% Zinc equivalent. The focus of revenue from that was, the silver really was not large. It's about 15 or 16% silver at the time the feasibility study was done. But based upon current prices, we're looking at a revenue from silver of almost 30%. So silver is an important factor in the project. It's located in the southwestern corner of the Northwest Territories, close to the BC border and the Yukon border. But it's located about 150 kilometers inland from the Highway 7.
1:34:15 So we need to build a road out to the sites and that represents about 25% of our capital. So support for infrastructure is really important for our project developing it. But what we're focusing on right now is increasing the reserves. We have a plan to carry out an exploration program with targeting an increase of 50% in our reserves, basically adding it in from those 7 million tonnes of inferred resources that we have. And also looking at an increased throughput, we believe that we can increase the throughput by about 50% from the feasibility level with a relatively modest amount of extra capital. Those obviously will make this mine into a continue the long life of it. It will still be a 15-year mine life, but it'll produce about 50% more silver, zinc and lead than the original feasibility study. The original feasibility study had a production about 2 million ounces of silver and just under 200 million pounds of zinc and lead and obviously we're looking at 50% increase in those which will make it more significant to silver producer.
1:35:17 And we're hoping to make our exploration this year to add extra reserves in, but also focus on the high-grade silver. The reserves are running at about 4oz per tonne and the resources are running at 5oz per tonne silver. So it's a pretty good price. Well, that's great. When you had mentioned that a lot had changed since the last time you and I had spoke a couple years ago, you were absolutely right. So congratulations on that. Jeff, you know, we interviewed Osisko Metals on our BTV Investing Canada's North episode on BNN last year, the initiative first launched. So it's a pleasure to have you joining us again today. Can you tell us a bit more about Osisko Metals and what stage of development your operations are at in the Northwest Territories.
1:36:07 Thank you, Jessica. Yeah, I'm Jeff Hussey, President, COO of Osisko Metals. We incorporated the company in 2017 and started looking for projects. And in 2018, we acquired Pine Point. In the last 3 years, we aggressively explored and drilled the project off, that's in the period we met. And we took the 2019 mineral resource base, which was 50 million tons of inferred resources at a equivalent lead plus zinc combined grade of about 6%. So Pine Point produced 64 million tons between the 60s and 1988, but they were producing at about a 10% Lead Zinc equivalent. Different from 90% of the projects globally that are underground, Pine Point is near-surface open pittable mineralization.
1:37:00 We took that resource base and we started at the beginning, the first half of 2020, and we completed the PEA, very positive PEA in mid-year. We had an NPV of $500 million, an after-tax internal rate of return of 28.6, which is an excellent rate for a basement project. And we're looking at this year in 2021, continuing to define resources, bringing them more resources that are drilled, but can be quickly brought into the indicated category for the feasibility study in the future. And also we're going to be looking at some of the capital expenditures, 1 including the watering plan and management, a lot of dollars in the PEA, we're looking to reduce that. So we'll be doing a hydrogeological model this year, further de-risking the project.
1:37:55 Looking again at the zinc prices this year, because they're on the rise since the trench of COVID, we're somewhere between 125 and 130. Our study was done at 115. So if this trend continues as we think it will, we would look at incorporating the work we do this year and bringing it into a PEA that we would update and release in the first half of 2022. We think through the zinc price changes, the reduction in capital expenditures, including the dewatering and further indicated drilling that we should be able to reduce costs, leading to even stronger financial metrics. Very good. Thank you, Jeff.
1:38:41 Okay, let's move on to the fireside chat portion of this. So I'm going to ask a few questions and we can take turns answering. I'll just go in the same order that we did our intros in. Let's start with doing a look back at 2020. Now, earlier today, we spoke with the other panelists really about gold and rare earths. So I'm excited to get your perspective on gold tech metals, base metals and zinc, you know, is going to is going to be a big one, obviously, for this session. So how did the year come together for you for your company? In 2020? You know, there was obviously some challenges there with COVID. How did you overcome that? And just working in the in the region, the Northwest Territories in general. So Robin, we're going to start with you.
1:39:31 Sure. Thanks, Jessica. So obviously 2020 was a year of great uncertainty. We started the year with relatively normal conditions and then unfortunately this pandemic arose and obviously that threw a bit of a monkey wrench into a lot of our plans. Fortunately for our company, most of the site work has already been done. The focus of our work in 2020 was devoted primarily towards project optimization. The focus of that optimization towards project optimization. So we were, the focus of that optimization really fell into 3 different avenues. The first was mine scheduling. Our project is vertically integrated, comprised of activities that we'll do in the Northwest territories, including mining and concentrating, and then a refinery. And quite frankly, the mining is very simple, low cost.
1:40:28 The refining is where the money is spent. So the focus of scheduling higher quality material was part of the plan for this year, as well as reducing capital costs and also working on an alternative refinery site because we're looking at a Brownfield site where we hope to be able to leverage existing facilities to dramatically reduce capital costs. We did do a little bit of exploration. We applied for and were awarded a grant from the mineral incentive program in the Northwest territories. We were a little concerned about halfway through the year, whether we'd be able to actually conduct the field work to do this work, but we were able to do that. And we did a program of geophysics because we have a very exciting opportunity in an IOCG or Olympic dam style mineralization.
1:41:22 And we looked at some, we did some geophysical surveying to test for potential expansions of that resource. Don, how did 2020 shake out for North Inc? It was a mixed year. I mean, we were planning some site work to be done in 2020. We have water treatment that we have to carry out each year. We were delayed by about 2 months in getting into site because of the COVID protocol that we had to work with the NWT on and the local indigenous people. Very important to keep the local community safe. But as this was going on we were focusing as well on the potential for the project to increase its throughput and to increase its reserves. We had hoped to do a drilling program starting as early as September, an underground drill program, that proved just impossible.
1:42:15 So we carried out a surface drill program late in the year. And we have a deposit, which is 1.3 kilometers long. It's 400 meters deep and it's in depth. And it's about 2 to 7 meters in width. And that's just the reserve. The reserve is another kilometre down, a dip from that. We carried out some drilling. We drilled just outside of the reserve envelope and we hit more than 4m of over 50% zinc equivalent with some excellent silver grades, well over 5-6 ounces per ton. And we hit a brand new zone which had 4 intercepts, which averaged about, totaled about 5 meters at over 40% zinc equivalent. So we're very excited by that program.
1:43:05 But that got shut down because weather it got really cold on the side. So we had to shut it down early. We're hoping to restart that next year. Very good. Jeff, how about what's, what's 2020 like for Osisko Metals? Like everyone, we were drilling in the beginning of the year. Once COVID started, we had shut down prior. We returned in the middle of the summer. We were on care and maintenance, but we came back, we had protocols. We had 1 drill turning for a fall program. We got excellent results. We were drilling some of the deposits. We pulled a hole of 29 meters of over close to 24%. So some of the prismatic mineralization that we're drilling, we want to get back and do more of that.
1:43:56 But as I mentioned at the beginning, it was largely a Zoom conference period between March and mid-year, whereby we were working with consultants and doing a lot of conference calls to get the project advanced. So in that aspect, it worked okay. The camp was on care and maintenance. We started up again end of the summer. And then as I said, we continued drilling till October, November, and we've continued to plan on the project for the second half of the year. So we've done a lot of remote work, but we were active on the ground. That's good to hear. Okay, we've all chosen to explore and advance projects in the Northwest Territories.
1:44:43 What makes it, in your opinion, an attractive area for mining and exploration? Robin. Well, the first thing I should probably say is just how important mining is to the economy of the Northwest Territories. Thank you, yeah. And so above 25% of Northwest Territories GDP is derived directly from mining and roughly 45% with the indirect expenditures through service providers. So you have a jurisdiction where we have almost a symbiotic relationship. We really, They need to be supporting mining because it is essentially the most important private sector component of the economy. Then I would probably go on to talk about the mineral endowment of the Northwest Territories.
1:45:31 It's relatively unexplored and we're talking about world-class mineral potential and mineral deposits that can still be found largely on the ground. For example, our company is exploring a unique mineral resource type called Olympic Dam or IOCG. Some of these deposits, global analogues, including the Olympic Dam mine in Australia, is 8.3Bt. The Carajás deposits in Brazil are well over 1Bt. The Candelaria deposits in Chile have clusters of deposits which are well over 1 billion tonnes. That's the kind of potential that we're looking for. Whether it be an IOCG that I'm exploring or Lead Zinc deposits like Jeff and Don are exploring, there is world-class mineral potential here. We've seen that with the diamonds.
1:46:27 We're the second largest producer of diamonds, I believe, in the world. But the diamond story, unfortunately, is coming to a bit of an end and we have to develop new projects. So very important that the projects that we're talking about here today get developed to be able to sustain the operations. And I would just also have to point out that we have a very broad buy-in from the indigenous communities on mining in the Northwest Territories as well. For the same reason that the Northwest Territories government supported, because we have to have mining. Thank you, Robbie. The geological potential in Northwest Territories is huge. I mean, it's the second of the largest of the 3 territories. And it's, you know, as you had mentioned, vastly unexplored. So lots more potential there for sure.
1:47:22 Don, what in your opinion makes the Northwest Territories an attractive area for mining? Well, it's because as Robin said, it's got a lot of history of mining, particularly around in and around the knife, particularly on the gold and then obviously more recently on the diamond side. But the potential, I think, really is on the base metals and on the strategic metal side, as Robin, Jeff and us and myself have. There are more deposits available to develop of those high-grade, whether they be cobalt, bismuth, or they be like Jeff and myself with those zinc and silver and lead in them. The difference though, is the economics for those are quite different from silver, actually from gold and diamonds.
1:48:13 We had a lot of costs of transportation and therefore, and our margins tend to be, I'm afraid, lower than they are for the diamond mines and for the gold mine. So infrastructure support is really critical. So it's great to do business in the NWT, but the infrastructure is a hold back for the potential development for many of the projects in the territories. Thank you for that. Jeff, what is your perspective on what makes the Northwest Territories an attractive area for mining exploration? We were looking at the supply-demand fundamentals of Zanke and looking for good projects. With base metal projects, as has been mentioned, infrastructure is key.
1:49:00 We looked at many projects and 3 filters, 1 was infrastructure, 1 was metallurgy and exploration upside. We found all 3 at Pine Point. When we speak of infrastructure, Pine Point is part of the mining history of the Northwest Territories. It produced 25 years, as I mentioned, over 64 million tons. So they built a railway from Edmonton to Hay River and inward to the project. Part of that railway was removed since it closed down in 88. But we have a railhead in Hay River, paved highway access all the way to the project and an electrical substation that's located where Kameko's former concentrator was located and where we plan in the PEA and probably where we'll end up right next to that substation.
1:49:47 So with those 3 large cost components, we're mainly looking at building the project again. On infrastructure, we also benefit at the site, there's over 100 kilometers of 25 meter hall roads. All of this is open pitable, So the roads that connect all these deposits that were mined and most of the ones that we're looking at, there's already haul roads that are in good condition. We just got to put a blade down. So having that infrastructure in place is key. Secondly, as I mentioned, Pine Point is a world-class deposit in itself. Having produced 64Mt, we have a mineral resource estimate with 50Mt. That's a world-class thing. Is there any advantages that stick out in your mind to having a project in the Northwest Territories compared to other places in North America? I'll start, I know you have something to say, Jeff.
1:50:41 I'll start with Robin and then get his perspective there. Well, I think we've really hit on the major advantages, the geological endowment and the necessity for having mining in the Northwest Territories. I mean, you can't have fishing or agriculture or manufacturing up there. It's really dependent on the mining community for jobs, for tax base and wealth. I think it's been pointed out that by both Jeff and Don, the importance of infrastructure. Our project also very critically involves infrastructure.
1:51:30 We went through a similar process to what Jeff talked about. If you're looking for base metal deposits that the concentrate has to be shipped out to a process facility, then you have to have a mechanism for getting that material out, whether it be navigable water, whether it be railroads or trucks. And the government of the Northwest territories, together with the government of Canada are funding an all season road to the community of Wati. And that, as I mentioned earlier, is a key enabler for our project. So we've been working with governments to get the support we need to develop our project. And we've been getting that kind of support, which we're very pleased with the acknowledgement of the importance of the project and we've been working with governments to try and put together the critical components that need to go into a producing operation.
1:52:30 Thank you, Don, what advantages do you see, you know, based on your experience, you know, in the mining community for quite a long time, compared to working in the Northwest Territories rather than other maybe projects in North America? Well, I think, I mean, 1 needs to look globally. I think looking in our area of zinc mines, they are located all around the world in some of the most difficult locations in the world. Our deposit based upon reserves, so it doesn't bring in Jeff's deposit into that analysis, is the third highest grade zinc lead mine, undeveloped zinc lead mine in the world. The other 2 are in DRC and in Indonesia.
1:53:16 And if you look at the top 7 in terms of size, most of them are in more remote countries than in less stable countries in Canada. So I think the Canadian side is important to us. NWT is really good. The people we are involved with on the permanent side and the regular side are super supportive of mining and that's really good. I think the downside of doing business in NWT is just the cost and it's the problem of being in the north of Canada in general is the cost of doing business is so high. But still we have to be blessed with high-grade projects in order to compensate for that cost which we all 3 of us are in this call. Jeff, what is your perspective on this?
1:54:03 We've talked about this before on other panels and Northwest Territories is a safe jurisdiction to be in, we're in Canada. The permitting process is known for investors, that's important. And so one of the points that I brought up on another panel was the accessibility of the government. If you're in Ontario or Quebec with large governments, it can take a long while to communicate with the upper level of the Department of Natural Resources, et cetera, et cetera, or some of the ministers or deputy ministers, but in the Northwest territories, I think everyone on the panel would agree that we have good access to speak with the government, the Chamber of Mines were involved on the Chamber of Mines, all 3 of us. And it's a very well-connected network of people that are interested in the mining industry because of the points that Robin and Don have brought up. It's a huge wealth potential.
1:55:04 When we look at exploration and development and why Canada is such a large mining strength, mineral potential is somewhat based on surface area and the territory it's having in spades. There's lots of area. It's a lot of untested potential, world-class potential. I think that's the advantage of going to the Northwest Territories and developing. Sure, the costs are a little higher, but that's where you have to select your projects. Well, let's talk about, I mean, we've already touched on infrastructure, you know, quite a few times, and some of the positives, but let's talk about some of the negatives that need to be addressed in the Northwest Territories, and maybe some ways that ideas that you might have to help fix that. I know you talked about high costs. I know electricity is quite high, I read, for costs in the Northwest Territory. So let's go through and maybe talk about some of the biggest challenges you see there and some ways that you feel like they can be improved. So we'll start with you, Robin.
1:56:03 Sure. Good topic because as Don has already mentioned, the Northwest Territories is a high cost jurisdiction. And we have an infrastructure deficit that is, a study was done by the mining association of Canada and the PDAC, which indicates that capital costs for a project are commonly 2.5 times greater than similar projects that are located in the South. Operating costs are commonly significantly more, and that's because most mineral projects that are developed in the territories have to supply their own infrastructure. All 3 of the projects that you're hearing about in this session are located in the southern part of the Northwest Territories.
1:56:52 And generally speaking, we've got pretty good infrastructure, particularly Jeff's project, which is a past producer. And Don's and our project is also close to highways. Power is expensive. You're probably looking at power costs of sort of between 20, 25 cents a kilowatt hour in the Northwest territories versus, you know, somewhere between, well, 4.5 cents in Manitoba, 6 cents in, 6.9 cents, I believe, in Alberta, 7.2 in Saskatchewan. And Power is a very significant component to our cost structure, obviously labor. If you're operating a remote camp facility, you've got to bring in some of, particularly some of your skilled positions from the South.
1:57:45 There's transportation costs involved with that, accommodation costs. So I think we kind of beat the cost thing a little bit. Also regulatory issues, and access to land is certainly an issue. You've got land claims, which are make land tenure a little bit more complicated in the Northwest territories, as well as conflicting and overlapping regulatory authorities. But generally speaking, we like to sort of, we're all working in the Northwest Territories because we think the mineral potential exceeds some of the negatives that are associated with high costs and regulatory issues.
1:58:34 Don, do you have anything to add to this? Yes, a couple of points here. You mentioned the cost increase, the higher levels of cost and the power side here. For our project here, we are going to be producing primarily from LNG. So that is going to be a more environmentally friendly source of power. We would be really good if our power costs were lower so that we could electrify our underground equipment and get to reduce greenhouse gases as a result of that. We have a very small footprint, environmental footprint, which is also good just because of the way our project is designed with 100% backfill. It means that we don't have any big tailings dams. But in terms of the infrastructure access, yeah, the government, there are funds available. There's a thing called National Trade Corridors Fund, which is providing funds to support communities.
1:59:30 And there's no question that mining, in 2 factors, in our project and other projects, they will provide significant GDP to the country. We're looking in our feasibility study about $3.5 billion of revenue. And obviously, we're looking at something 50% higher than that in terms of and that is exported primarily, 50% higher than that if we're successful with our expansion designs and also we support the communities by employment, We have good relationships with our communities. I know there's gonna be a question about that later on, but Rob did mention that I think community relationships are critical, but right now we feel very happy with those. But we would like some support with the infrastructure because our road is more than 25% of the capital cost to build our mine is based upon the road and having some support for that because of the tremendous benefits to communities would be very helpful for us.
2:00:32 Thank you so much, John. Jeff. Yeah, the main one I would touch on the electricity, the Touleston Dam, there is room for some expansion and optimization that we're talking with West Territories Power Corporation to see what we can do there. But there's also been discussions of a much larger ramp up at the Tulleston Dam, and that would benefit the Northwest Territories very much so because it's planned to bring it over to Yellowknife, reduce diesel power, then go up the access road they're building through the Great Slave Geological Province and help to generate more projects. So the challenge for the territories would be to get more cheap green hydroelectric power. I think that would be a benefit to all the residents and for proponents coming into development.
2:01:28 I'd like to add as well, with regard to the communities, all of them are welcoming. They want to see the economic development, especially on the south side of the slate because the diamond mines were mainly located on the north side of the slate, Great Slate Lake. And so I think that with the community support, with the territorial government support, I think we all have opportunities here to create value and move forward. That's the advantages, the power, the more green power you could get. We'll be doing some trade-off studies to see if we can further that. But as in Don's case, we included natural gas as a component to reduce emissions. And we, you know, continuously look for ways to either reduce consumption of electricity or find green alternatives as much as is possible.
2:02:21 That actually leads into my next question, which is ESG. So it was one of the hottest topics, you know, of 2020 and continues to be very relevant and will obviously for years to come. Can you explain to me the processes within your companies to address investors' growing concerns and interest in seeing metrics met on ESG. So we're gonna start with you, Robin. Yeah, we could talk a lot of things about ESG. So first- We have about 10 minutes left, full disclosure. So, I mean, the first thing I've just pointed out is the commodities we're gonna produce are very important for new technologies, but also eco metals too, for a greener planet.
2:03:13 Bismuth, for example, is used as a environmentally safe and non-toxic replacement for lead. But I want to leave that because I think we should be concentrating more on the community benefits and the interaction we have with, particularly with the indigenous communities and governments. So our project's been discovered in 96. As mentioned earlier, we spent a lot of money and we've always been working with the local Tlecho indigenous people and made them part of the project. When you go through an environmental assessment, you're also essentially balancing the important ESG sort of parameters, including the economic benefits and balancing those with the environmental impacts, as well as the social impacts.
2:04:07 And we've gone through an environmental assessment, and that assessment was approved not only by the federal government, the territorial government, but also the Tleil-Cho indigenous government, because we are in a settled land claim where there is a self-government and land claims already completed between the Tleil-Cho, the Northwest Territories and federal governments. And so we've, you know, we have, our company has completed an access agreement with the Tleilcho. We've got a cooperation agreement. We're working on impact and benefit agreement, and we have a socioeconomic agreement also completed with the Northwest Territories governments, which has certain targets for Northern and Indigenous employment training, social programs, all kinds of things. And when you're developing and building and operating mines and in all over the world these days, the local communities have to benefit.
2:05:13 It's part of our social license. And we go through a very lengthy process to make sure that that's going to happen, whether through the exploration, through the permitting and the engineering permitting operations and also through mine closure. Thank you, Robin. Don, what are your perspectives on some plans that Norris Inc has in place on the ESG side, as well as what your involvement is with the Indigenous community? Yeah, well, as Robin said, mining nowadays, we take a tremendous amount of care to make sure that we are environmentally friendly. The rules in Northwest Territories are some of the most stringent in the world. Anybody who's involved in building a mine in Canada, but particularly in the Northwest Territories, can be rest assured that we are meeting the most stringent standards.
2:06:04 So that's very great for the environment. In terms of the Indigenous communications and communities, as with Robin's project, we have a socio-economic agreement with a dozen different communities, 9 different First Nations. And we have a range of them on a first name basis with the 3, the leaders of the 3 most important nations in our community here. We take it at the highest level. The chiefs like to talk to the senior people. And again, as a CEO, I directly interact with them on all of the leading, all of the negotiations with the communities, which like others here, has been very positive. So I think it's really important that we have that social license. And I think we in Canada in general do that in quite a good way. I think mining in particular does it in an excellent way with communities.
2:06:57 The one area that we do, and dealing with the NWT and the government has been very good. We do have one area that I think some of us are suffering from, and that is the regulations with regards to mine development permits, which is where all of us are in. We're in the mine development. We're not in the exploration side here. We have a water license that gives you up to 25 years, which is essentially life of mine. But we have a land use permit, which gives you 5 years and then another 2 years beyond it. And there's a movement to discuss that we need to align once you're going to get your permit for a mine, but you need to get it for the life of the mine and not just for 5 or 7 years. We already got our permits to be able to operate the mine in 2013. And we have now gone through a renewal process, which really, you know, isn't like what happens in the rest of the world. So that's an area that needs to be improved.
2:07:50 Awesome. Thank you so much, Don, for that perspective. Jeff, let's move on to you on this topic. Yeah, sure. Well, Safety, environmental stewardship, social responsibility, these are core values. In all angles, we've all been in the industry for a long time and we've been developing this approach along with everyone in the industry. And as Don said, we have very stringent regulations. So we follow all 3 pillars of ESG. With regard to agreements, early on, I'm a little earlier phase than both Don and Robin, trying to move fast to catch up. But yeah we have agreements with the Deninikwe First Nation and Fort Resolution and a collaboration agreement that was announced last year, I'm sorry in 2019.
2:08:48 And so with the collaboration agreement with the Denen-Nikwe First Nation, and also another one with the Northwest Territory, Metis Nation, we were able to advance and expand some, our ground to incorporate more resources. And that was rolled into the PA we mentioned at the beginning of the call. So you can see there's quite a lot of collaboration to try and get this project going. And with the Catalodice First Nation and Hay River, We've had an expiration agreement since 2017. There's a little less work in that area, but we're constantly communicating with all 3 communities and trying to develop what was mentioned by my co-panelists, opportunities for employment, opportunities for training. We're looking at that right now as well and other benefits that will come. But we have to get through the development and permitting phase in order to really generate the lion's share of the benefits that will come during production.
2:09:48 So at this stage of resource development, we're not a cashflow company and we do what we can. We get out there, we meet with all the people we can, we talk about the permitting stages and the impact benefit agreements that will come, those discussions will be increasing. Now that we have our PEA in hand, we'll be talking about these benefits and benefit agreements as we go towards our permitting. Thank you so much. Okay, we have about 2 minutes left before we need to jump into our question and answer live session. So make sure I'm hoping that everyone's getting their questions in, keep them coming and we'll get to them really quickly here. But before we jump into that, I just want to get everyone's perspective outlook for commodities for 2021.
2:10:41 We mentioned a little bit earlier, you know, some positives that came out of 2020. So how do we see, we're at the beginning of 2021, how do we see the rest of the year kind of shaken out, you know, for zinc and cobalt and base metals? Let's start with you, Robin. Okay, again, I'll try to be brief because this is so our primary commodity is Cobalt, and we are one of the most advanced development projects for Cobalt in the world. Cobalt is a critical mineral, critical mineral. The US has a list, the European Union has a list, and these are minerals that have essential use in manufacturing or defense industries and new technologies. They can't be easily substituted and their supply chains are at risk.
2:11:34 Why the cobalt supply chains are at risk is because 70% of the global mine production comes from the not-so-democratic Republic of the Congo. About 50% of that production is controlled by China. 65% of refinery production is controlled by China. And about 80% of cobalt chemical supply is controlled by China. So there's been a recognition broadly speaking in governments, particularly in the European Union and the United States, about the the dangers in having geographic concentration of supply and supplies that can be influenced by policy risks as well as in political instability.
2:12:20 So both cobalt and bismuth are critical minerals. We think the outlook is extremely good, particularly for cobalt because of electric cars. With growing adoption of electric vehicles, we expect that the Cobalt market will exceed its historical growth of 8% CGF, C, Compounded Annual Growth Rate. And We're expecting the market to double or triple over the next 10-years, primarily on the back of electric cars and stationary storage. Bismuth is a little bit similar. We have 75% of the production controlled by China, Very important metal with critical physical properties that can't be easily duplicated.
2:13:08 And then we have over 1 million oz of Gold. And Gold, we hope will continue its upward trajectory. We've had a bit of a down day today, but we personally expect Gold to be in excess of $2,000 an ounce US. And we're also expecting the Cobalt price to recover to its historical average of around $25 per pound. Very good. Don, what is your perspective on the zinc outlook for 2021? It's very positive. We have seen it was in a kind of a doldrum over the last few years here It did peak at a dollar 60 a pound in February of 2018 Our feasibility study was done at a dollar 10 a pound. We're now at about a dollar 26 27 today Which is good because it was languishing below it around a dollar and I think below a dollar for a period of time.
2:14:05 Long-term, it is great for the environment. It's clearly, as Jeff, I'm sure will tell you, it's got lots of usages beyond just simply galvanizing, but it's a great commodity. For us, silver is also important. Silver has really broken out. It's down a little bit today, but certainly if it's in the $25, $26 or above per ounce level, that's very critical and important for us. And we've got a long life projects as well here. So with 15 years of life, that's right now, that you're able to hit the cycles. And that's really important in our in our industry, not just what it is today, but what it's going to be over the next 15 years. That's excellent. Jeff, what is your perspective on this? For 2021 and beyond, we're very bullish on zinc.
2:14:51 COVID obviously, the production is reeling a little bit, having a hard time catching up with that constraint. But in the past several years, there's been large zinc mines that have shut down worldwide. Supply is diminishing. We're at critically low levels, 200,000t a day, 300,000t or about 10 days supply. That's when you get out of critical. And what we're seeing now is that the uncertainty that we're just getting through, which has benefited mainly the Gold price, which is a typical mining cycle, Gold comes in strong when uncertainty is high. And now that we have a vaccine and the election's completed, basically we're going to see huge stimulus globally to get the economic development that people want to see in the global economy.
2:15:42 There's not huge numbers out of China that are stated what they would like to build out. The Americans also have old infrastructure. Here in Montreal, we just spent a lot of money on infrastructure because after 50-years, at Expo 67 here, the Steel rusts. China right now is putting out huge amounts of steel, producing 60% of global steel as usual. Iron ore prices are very high, so half of that steel has to get galvanized and on critically low inventories, we think it's looking very bullish for Zinc going forward and also for Lead. That's excellent news. I think this is a great point to end the fireside chat portion with our panelists here as we second session for Invest Northwest territories.
2:16:31 Again, you can find us at hashtag remote roundup. We're going to do a quick thank you to our sponsors, so please don't go anywhere and then we're going to jump right into the live question and answer period with our attendees. What are the sources of energy currently? What are the opportunities and plans for using renewables? We've done a lot of sensitivities in working our project forward. We've looked at, we're only 22 kilometers from the snare hydroelectric facility. However, there is a, unfortunately, there's not a surplus amount of power that we can utilize.
2:17:17 So connecting to the grid is something that is a future opportunity. So we've looked at compressed gas, we've looked at green energy alternatives, including wind and solar. And what we're settling on right now is building a turnkey natural gas LNG fired system where you're not only getting the energy from, produced from natural gas generation, but also the heat recovery with glycol heat recovery systems, which is also very important in the energy component to operating in Northern jurisdictions. Very good. Thanks so much for that. Let's move on to you, Don. Yeah, the old mine, the old Cadillac silver mine was built with diesel power on site.
2:18:09 We've been using diesel power since we took over the project in the 1990s. But our plans for development of the project, our consumption from the feasibility study was a maximum of 11 megawatts with a 50% increase in throughput. That will go up. And our plan is to do a co-production that is primarily focused on energy, But when there are occasions when the energy may be down, you've got the capacity to switch to diesel. So that's our plan. And definitely, it's a great improvement environmentally over the original design for the project with diesel. The other factor that we would hope to have, maybe we will have, and that is the ability to mine underground as an underground operation using electric equipment. But that's in early days right now.
2:18:58 That's just in the feasibility studies, So it's something we're considering right now. It brings us to the forefront because that's where the business is going. Underground mining with electrification is the way to go. And Canada is leading that from the world. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Jeff, let's get your thoughts on this. Yeah, well, Pine Point benefits from the Tulleston Hydro Dam being built and connected to our site. So we have the substation already where the former Kaminko concentrator was. Currently on the grid, there's about 5 to 8 megawatts depending on the season. There's a potential to increase that by potentially 4 megawatts in the shorter term.
2:19:45 And we will be working with the Northwest Territory Power Corporation to see if we can at least crystallize that. We look forward to that further expansion discussed earlier during the panel, which would help all of us, I think, if the power dam could increase significantly. But to your question, we're using as much of the renewable hydroelectric power on the grid that will be available. And then we will combine it as my co-panelists have just said with natural gas to generate the power needed and try to reduce emissions that way in the upcoming PA that we're going to look at. The other thing we want to do is try to reduce consumption to start by reducing power requirements where we can.
2:20:32 Very good. My next question is just directed to Robin. Robin, can you talk a bit more about critical minerals and their importance in North America to the economy? Sure. So We talked a little bit about critical minerals before and how they're defined. Both the United States and the European Union have got critical minerals lists, but critical minerals are a little bit different than traditional base metal deposits and they can't be processed in conventional smelters. Typically, we need to build our own vertically integrated hydro metallurgical facilities, which does increase the capital costs for the development.
2:21:19 So we're looking at a transformation that's happening in the automotive industry right now, I've got a picture in my head of a 1913 image of New York City. And there's absolutely no automobiles in that picture. It's all horse and buggies. And then just a few years later, there's no horses left. It's all cars. And we're going through a transformation right now in the automotive industry into electric cars, which has not really been seen since that latter sort of transformation of the automobile industry. So we have to have the raw materials that are going to supply the key raw materials into the batteries for the drive trains, for the components that are in this automotive industry. And if we don't, we're not going to have a manufacturing sector.
2:22:22 So I think that has to be understood that raw materials are essential to sustain our manufacturing sector. And that really means that our high standard of living, which is dependent on the revenues generated from manufacturing and raw material production and the social programs that benefit from that, we need to get new projects built as soon as possible. And we have to have those materials produced in Canada. And when I say produced, it's not just mining them. We have to do the processing here in North America because if you simply export your raw material to another jurisdiction, you're not making those materials available to the manufacturing industry here in our domestic economy.
2:23:09 So we have been working with the federal government, we've been working with the territorial government, as well as provincial governments in trying to enable support for processing plants that will allow those materials to be produced domestically and to sustain our industry. Very good. Don, I actually have a question just directed to you now, and it's about weather. Does weather have an effect on your project? Bit of an interesting question there. Well, yes, I mean, we are in the Northern Canada and it gets very cold at night time and during the winter months so you have to build a project that will deal with cold temperatures which is a skill that Canadians have and a lot of firms, I worked for De Beers for a short period of time, and when I worked for them, they heard at that time, and that was 20 years ago, that they had very little knowledge of building in a cold climate. So we've got work to do to deal with the construction in cold climates.
2:24:13 We do have extraordinary benefit in the Northwest Territories for those that can build ice roads, that they are possible. Our road access to the mine as it's going to be built includes an ice bridge process that will be used during the winter, so public infrastructure will help us there. But you have to recognise that the weather will affect the way that you're going to carry on your activities. We are blessed, I'm not sure whether it's the same for Robin and Jeff. But we're blessed with an area which is, although it gets cold, it is dry and it has very low snow. So we do benefit from that in our location, but we don't have a lot of snow, and create a lot of problems with transportation.
2:25:09 Did anybody else have anything to add on for weather related? I would only just point out the fact that all 3 of these projects are situated in the southwest part of the territories. If you look at the diamond mines where they're operating right now in the tundra, They've been successfully conducting open pit operations for 20 years. Weather is not going to be an issue for mining in the Northwest Territories. We in Canada have proven our ability to to to operate successfully, not only in mining and concentration and the support facilities that are required. And we can do that in an open-pit mine virtually at temperatures as low as minus 50.
2:25:59 Did you have any other question, anything to add to this? Otherwise, I have a question directed towards you. Just, I concur with my colleagues here. We work and operate in the sub-Arctic and further north. The Polaris mine was much further north. On the south side of the Great Slave Lake, we benefit from, it's a lower snowfall, but there's nothing stopping you from operating in winter months. And at our project, there's no permafrost. Where I used to work at Raglan, the rock was frozen to 500 meters. So we don't have that to worry. Awesome, thank you. Okay, Jeff, I have a question that's directed towards you and then I have some more group questions too, to get to and keep them coming everybody.
2:26:45 What makes the Pine Point project unique, Jeff? Well, the Pine 0.1, having been in production before, it's a brownfield project. With all the infrastructure there, as we said, the railroad head is at Hay River, it was built for this project, the Taltston Power Dam with the substation on site, and about 100 kilometers of haul roads that exist from the Kaminko era. So on the infrastructure side, It's very beneficial. Could you just repeat the question again? What makes your Pine Point project unique? On the unique side, yes. The thing about it, it's like Polaris and some of the Mississippi Valley type projects down in the Southeast of the States. These are typically lead and zinc in limestone, contrary to some other deposits where VMS from the Bathurst mining camp, there's a lot more pyrite, iron, acid mine drainage, etc.
2:27:48 With the limestone presence, there's less of an environmental footprint. The difference in the geology also makes a difference in the processing where there's again, Lead, Zinc and Limestone, well the recoveries are exceptional. We get into the high 80s, low 90s for both Lead and Zinc. So our recoveries, which is one of the key variables of an economic formula is to get good recoveries. On top of that, we have an exceptionally clean concentrate, probably one of the cleanest concentrates in the world. Right now, many Zinc projects are delivering concentrates that have deleterious elements, and that's the name of the game with traders and smelters. They receive different profiles of different concentrates.
2:28:35 All of them are going to need a little bit of a fine point to dilute down the deleterious elements in their concentrates. What makes it unique as well is all of the mineralization is above 125m. We're mining open pit, 90% of the zinc projects are underground. Most of the infrastructure is there. And as I said, we just put out our PEA last year with exceptional results, 500MPV, US$500M MPV with a 26.8 internal rate of return. These are strong, fundamental economic metrics that we think we can improve on with the work of de-risking that we're going to do this year and put out our second updated PEA in the first half of 2021.
2:29:22 We should be able to reduce the cost and we think we'll be in a different price regime due to the government-backed stimulus packages that are on their way with this, what I consider an inflection point in the next couple of days during the change of the American election. Thank you for that, Jeff. Our next question was actually asked at our first panel question and answer as well. It's a really good one, comes from Hart. He wants to ask this group the same question. Are there opportunities for Indigenous-owned service companies from outside the Northwest Territories to provide support in the areas of Indigenous engagement and environmental services? If so, whom can we connect with to discuss? So we're gonna start with you, Robin. Sure.
2:30:08 I guess first we have to say that we've completed a socioeconomic agreement whose objective is to primarily maximize the business opportunities to Northern residents, but also indigenous communities. So having said that, it's virtually impossible to run a mining operation on 100% owned local employment and business providers. So absolutely there's going to be opportunities. We will go through a tendering process. That will be a scoring process, which we expect that obviously local businesses are going to have a certain advantage because we want to be able to have the benefits provided to local communities.
2:30:58 But mining involves a lot of different skill sets and knowledge and expertise and we will be counting on on these services also coming from outside of the Northwest Territories. Excellent, thank you. Over to you with that same question, Don. Yes, We're in a similar situation to Robin with a socioeconomic agreement with the GNWT, which has a hierarchy. Initially, at the top level, it's the directly local communities, and then it's a little bit wider community area, which covers, I think I misspoke here, I think it's 12 First Nations and 9 communities. 28% of the communities in the Northwest Territories are a part of our socioeconomic agreement.
2:31:44 But then it goes to the Northwest Territories and it goes to Canada. And just the same way as it applies with fortune minerals, we're no doubt gonna be using people from other parts in Canada. In our case, our transportation is likely to go through Fort St. John and perhaps down to Fort Nelson and perhaps down to Fort St. John. So there are indigenous groups there that definitely can benefit us. The question seemed to also talk about environment, particularly, and just want to mention with us, we have an environmental management agreement with our local communities in which they have representatives who monitor the environmental management on our road access. So that's an area where we have our direct communities directly involved in the monitoring process.
2:32:39 And I think that's critical for our project. But then finally, in terms of the businesses, we are encouraging through a series of different agreements, local businesses would have stimulation programs. We do them directly, we also do them with organizations like the Marine Training Society. We do that with Aurora College. They are part of what we call the regional committee. And we involve all of the local communities within that committee structure. Wonderful, thank you, Don. Jeff, over to you. Yeah, right now we're at an exploration stage on the site, we're doing our best to reach out to the communities, have some local, either through us or our service suppliers to work on the project, some training limited at this stage on the training. We're looking at developing more opportunities in training.
2:33:37 At this early stage, as I said earlier, the lion's share of the benefits and the service requirements are going to come when our projects are shoveled already and go into construction. And that's what we're all striving to do. At the earlier stages of expiration, it's a little bit more limited just due to the level of activity. But if any one of these projects continues on, gets the permits, that's where a lot of services will be required. And I think to the question where service suppliers outside of the territories would to reach out to us and we're open to listening to collaborations. But right now with the limited amount of activity, we're focused on our local communities.
2:34:25 It's a local, it's a level of work at this point in time. Okay, very good. And I think the question was asked there who to connect with to discuss this, but you can certainly email me. Hart, and I can forge your email off like we had mentioned in the earlier question and answer too, and I'm just jessica at b-tv.com. Easy. We have another question here for the group and has been asked a few times, so I'll just kind of paraphrase here. Would there be an interest in information on the anonymous mobile clean energy system? If you guys are familiar with that. So we'll start with you, Robin. You're going to have to rephrase the question because I'm, what exactly are you asking?
2:35:11 I think it's for autonomous. Autonomous. Yes, autonomous. Yes, thank you. Mobile cleaning energy system and autonomous mining on the horizon in general for any of your projects. Autonomous equipment generally, yeah, sure. It's certainly coming. It's actually a big threat to local employment because at some point you're probably going to be able to operate a scoop tram or a haul truck remotely. And it's The automotive industry is also heading that way as well. So it's inevitable and something that we're going to have to manage around and ensure that local businesses and also employees benefit from our projects.
2:36:05 In terms of energy production, I mean, it's constantly evolving. Energy is the second highest cost component in mining operations. We're hoping that we're actually going to go into renewable energy and I don't know how that's going to be autonomous, but there is a Runner River project about 50km south of our project, which we hope will get developed within the mine life of our asset and contribute energy from a green renewable source. In the meantime, we're using natural gas or LNG to start the mine up. I'm not sure if that answered the question because but in terms of autonomous equipment, it's inevitable.
2:36:59 I'm not sure about the energy. Okay, Don, over to you. Yeah, we're underground operation. A lot of these autonomous systems are used in open pits, particularly in Australia, where I mean, they will have people in Perth, you know, running trucks that are 1000 kilometres away. I mean, with underground, the kind of what we do have and we will have is there'll be a certain level of a remote underground. I mean I was an underground mine 20 years ago and the scoop tram was basically directed by from a control centre underground where the person could see where he was scooping the ore from and it was really a safety thing. The technologies advanced significantly here, but I think if it's kind of...
2:37:44 Our big area would be the potential for electrification underground and then ultimately, we don't have an open net, we never will have an open net on this project. So I think there's less scope for us in terms of it. So we will inevitably be requiring steel people to help us with the mining. And on the energy side here, the actual underground equipment doesn't consume a huge amount of energy. The most biggest energy consumer is generating power for the mill. Thank you so much, Don. Jeff, what's your perspective on this? Well, as was said, automation is here to stay. Everything from when I used to work in concentrators where there was people adjusting all the levels of the reagents, that's run by algorithms now. Double-checked and triple-checked.
2:38:42 They have a significant amount of automation within the mill. That reduces some walking around on the floor within a mill. We have very limited underground, but in a larger underground, automated trucks from distance, automated drills are coming more and more. Where we see a possibility that we did discuss within the project is we have 47 different pits that we're going to be mining the shallow mineralization from. So putting a drill, maybe the small drill, the drill and blast could be automated with a pattern, but once blasted, the rock to haul it out of the pit to get it to the road, it would be difficult because the pits are small. You see automation in large iron ore mine pits or other larger pits.
2:39:36 However, when we want to haul that truck all the way to the concentrator to dump a load, that could easily be automated. So in other words, one person at an open pit could be driving 3 trucks in and out of the pit and then just letting it getting off on a stage and letting that truck do the long haul, hop on a new truck, go back in the pit, et cetera. So that's where I see the potential in our project. We do see some automation in the concentrator as well that will be integrated, where as all concentrators are highly automated now. And you'll be able to do that. I think it's going on 15-20 years now. You can have your mill on an iPad.
2:40:23 You don't have to be sitting in the concentrator watching a monitor that's connected to the floor. You can look at it on an iPad from any distance and see what's going on in the mill, what are the reagent, whatever level of detail you would want, which is also an advantage for that kind of work. But all in all, it is coming and it is one of the significant ways to reduce costs in operations. And at the end of the day, that's one of the sets of rules we have to abide by. It has to be economic. So lowering costs is always an area we look at. Thank you so much for that. I think we have time left for a few more questions here. Robin, this one's directed to you. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Nikko deposit and what makes it unique?
2:41:11 Yeah, so I did touch on this earlier that it's an IOCG, which are a very large mineral class. Ours is a bit of an unusual deposit in that the economic metals are Gold and Cobalt, primarily, with a by-product Bismuth and Copper. We have a satellite project, Sudayan, which is a 10Mt deposit of 0.8% Copper. Being an IOCG, we think there is tremendous exploration opportunities. The deposit itself, our deposit is 33 million tons right now 33.1 million tons. We have another 10 million tons in Sudayan, but we expect that there will be significant exploration expansion. Both of these deposits are open along strike and at depth.
2:42:08 The geophysical anomalies that are associated with Nyko itself are 20 square kilometers in size. We have the largest and strongest hydrothermal potassium anomaly ever found by the Geological Survey of Canada associated with the deposit, and that's about 15 square kilometers in size. What this is more or less saying is we have an enormous hydrothermal system with a class of mineral deposit that is typically much larger than the ore reserves and mineral resources that we've already identified. We're expecting that there will be significant expansion of this asset in the future, which bodes well because you're investing money in infrastructure, investing money in a processing plant and the more tonnes you can put through that and amortize the costs that are associated with that infrastructure and those facilities, then you're getting a better bang for your buck. And it's also good for the ESG because mining is a temporary land use.
2:43:14 All mines closed down. We're seeing the impact of that with the threat of the diamond mines closing over the next few years. So to be able to have a long-term mineral deposit that's providing employment, providing tax base, providing economic opportunities for local businesses. It's good for everybody. Excellent. Don, this question is for you. Is Norazinc a zinc company or a silver company? The answer to that is yes. Historically, the project was built in the 1980s as a silver mine, a Cadillac silver mine.
2:44:02 It has a super high, good high grade silver, one of the highest in the world, but there are some that are spectacularly higher than us. And we have very good zinc and lead grades. I mean, our combined, Jess Project is a great zinc mine. We have great zinc and lead. Our combined zinc and lead is 16.7% on the reserve side. That's a diluted grade. And then we have a total of 23% zinc equivalent when you combine the silver into it, but we also have a resource, a reserve, sorry, that contains over 30 million ounces of silver at good grades, 4 ounces per ton diluted, And we have the potential for higher grades. Our resources are at the 5 plus ounces.
2:44:54 I'll put it in grams. We have 200 grams per ton of silver. And we've had intercepts that have gone up to 500 grams per tonne in the silver. So it has a good silver element to us. And it's still only about less than 30% of our revenue. The zinc is probably 40 to plus percent and the lead is the balance. Our lead silver concentrate will contain most of the revenue, but The silver is very important from a market viewpoint. The valuations that are given for base metals versus the valuations for precious metals are significantly different.
2:45:42 My previous company was a copper gold company. And you end up with a better valuation where you've got a byproduct that is a precious metal as Robin has. So, silver is critical. If we didn't have silver, this would not be a mine. If we didn't have zinc, it would not be a mine. But the biggest revenue comes from zinc. But from a market valuation viewpoint, probably the silver is more important. And that's why we're doing drilling last year and into this year, focusing as well as developing extra reserves, but also focusing on some silver-rich areas. Perfect. Thank you. Jeff, we have a question here. What is a key objective that you're most excited about for 2021?
2:46:33 Well, We just put out our outlook for 2021. Our drill is turning. On the back of last year, mid-year, having a PEA put out with very interesting economic metrics, Again, 500M NPV with a 26.8% rate of return. To us, we consider that a starting point. What we're doing this year is not as much drilling. There's going to be a drill turning. We're going to be testing the higher grade deposits on the site. There are 2 different types. Some of the intersections we've got there was about 30% combined lead Zinc over 20-30m. We want to go back in. Those deposits are drilled off, but we have no current drilling in them. So we need to drill those, at least get up 1 or 2 holes. So the holes are going to be multi-purpose holes. They're going to be to bring in some indicated high-grade significant resources.
2:47:33 We're also going to drill them to a diameter where we can do hydrogeological testing to enter that into our water model, which is one of the ways we want to reduce our costs. We'll be doing metallurgy on that material and all of that together will be rolled into a PEA at the end of the year. The hydrogeological data that we're going to get combined with the historical and everything we're combining, We'll bring that into the PEA to reevaluate what we consider will be needed to pump during the mine life. We think that our conservative estimates during the PEA, we have a lot of upside. With a more refined model, we'll be able to show that. So that'll reduce the costs. And I think very shortly here, we're going to be submitting our environmental assessment package, which is the beginning of permitting.
2:48:26 So we have been working on it, project description, we've consulted with the communities, and now we're just about ready to submit it to the government. That will start the permitting process. So that combined with everything rolled into the PA, the project is on track. We hope to push it as hard as we can in this context. And the beauty of it is for Don and I, as I said earlier, we're very bullish on Zinc. We think that the supply side is going to be under strain in the short term and even in the long term. There's not a lot of exploration and development that have gone on. The project has been around for decades, so is Pine Point. There's not a lot of work with new discoveries, new projects coming on. So that supply side is going to be constrained as all these government-backed infrastructure projects are going to come on, pulling on critical low levels of inventory, we think it's a perfect storm in the zinc space and we're getting ready to meet that opportunity, along with the stakeholders and the local community.
2:49:33 Excellent. Well, that went by so fast. We only have about 2 minutes left here, but I really want to give you guys the opportunity to leave investors that are watching with a final thought. So if we can just keep it brief, but Robin, let's start with you. Any final thoughts from today's session? Sure. I'll just focus in on our key milestones for this year, which are finalizing the refinery site. We're looking at brownfield sites with equipment already in place, permitting already in place to essentially accelerate the development, reduce capital costs, project optimizations, project financing is a key. One of the major challenges for this year is to bring in the money to develop the asset.
2:50:27 And we're also continuing to engage with governments to help enable critical minerals projects and help Fortune Minerals be a participant in the electric vehicle transformation that's taking place. Thank you, excellent. Don, your final thoughts from today? So Nilsink, you know, it's an extremely high-grade deposit. It has a lot of extra silver in it. It is very advanced in terms of the permitting process. We already have the permits in place for The initial design of the feasibility study is 1600 tonnes a day and we're going through a process of doing pre-screening to increase that to 2400 tonnes a day. As part of our activities this year and into next year, we are working on a major initial financing which will enable us to go on the ground to drill out the extra reserves that we need for part of our ultimate financing that we're planning for the middle of 2022.
2:51:25 Working on an updated feasibility study which will include that extra reserves, but it also will include our extra throughput and design work on that is underway. We are planning, even before we actually get the full permits, to potentially start to build the first phase of our winter road, Q1 of next year, so a year from now, if everything works out, we'll be starting construction with the full project financing in the middle of 2022 and being production by the end of 2024. A lot's got to line up with that. I mean, there's a possibility things won't quite line up and we'll be 55 years, it'll be 2025 production. But it's critical we have a 15-year mine life here, long-term production and certainly a company that will benefit from exactly what Jeff said, which is this improvement and need for infrastructure support around the world. And you're seeing that in the United States right now as I speak, where the metals companies are doing much better than the high-tech companies.
2:52:30 Excellent. Jeff, we have about 30 seconds left. Any final thoughts that you want to leave investors with? Well, what we all just stated and what we're reading in the media is we're going into a bull commodity cycle. And even the word super cycle is coming back from the early 2000s where China's demand outstrips supply on its own. And we're seeing that in the iron ore space with high prices there, Copper, etc. So I think with the potential of a super cycle with this government-backed stimulus, I think all of our projects will benefit and that'll lead to benefits all around. Excellent. Well, thank you all again for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure to sit down and speak with you. I know everyone's busy, but it was great to have everybody here throughout the morning.
2:53:21 And thanks everyone who was watching for joining us for this Northwest Territories Remote Roundup Session. And thanks, that was brought to you by the Government of the Northwest Territories and of course, Invest Canada North. I'm Jessica Kaczorczak from BTV and it was a pleasure. And thanks again. We will see you next time. Thanks, Jessica.
