Investing in the Permitting Process

0:08 So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're signing in from today and welcome to the panel discussion, investing during the permitting process. I'm going to do a bit of housekeeping first, just before we get started, so bear with me. This event will be recorded and the replay will be made available later this afternoon. I also want to impress this is an interactive event, so please do feel free to ask questions to the executives in the chat button on the bottom right of the screen. If you have questions really specific to the securities, I'll get you in touch with their team so that you can ask those directly. But any questions on the topic of today's panel,

0:39 please do feel free to pose and we'll try to get to them towards the end of the event. But enough out of me. I'd love to let today's panelists introduce themselves and the company they represent. I'm gonna start with Doug, who's able to join us for the first 40 minutes of today's event. Yeah, so I have to leave after 40 just before it gets juicy with your Q&A. I'm Doug Ramshaw, I'm the president of Monero Alamos. We're a gold developer in Mexico.

1:05 Let's throw it to you, Dan. I'm Dan Wilton, the CEO of First Mining Gold. First Mining is advancing 2 projects, our Springpole project in Ontario and our DuParquet project in Quebec.

1:20 And I'm Rick Howes and I'm President and CEO of Reunion Gold. We're an exploration development company active in the Guyana Shield and our flagship project is the Oko West project in Guyana. Perfect. With Those short introductions out of the way, I'm gonna get into the meat of today's conversation. So I'd like to start, just set the stage. So everybody who might not be aware of all the companies present today knows what stage your core projects are at. So if you could just share the current position of your core projects, and then I think we can get into the meat. Go for it, Doug. Sure, we have our first mine, Santana in Sonora, that's gone through permitting, gone through construction, is waiting on a permit amendment, but we're still pushing forward with advancing production there this year.

2:09 Second project, Cerro de Oro, which is a bit of a game changer, I think, for the company, is in permitting right now.

2:17 You know, expecting those permits at some point this year, hopefully right before the elections rather than after, but we'll see and that's going to be a topic of conversation today, so we can get into dive into that later. And then La Fortuna, a third project also fully permitted. But to me, it's always been more like an advanced exploration project that happens to have its permits in place because we'd want to make it bigger before we wanna build it the right way.

2:48 So it's kind of nice. We've got 2 out of our 3 projects permitted. The teams operated in Mexico for 14 years and permitted multiple operations through multiple administrations, including the AMLO administration, which gave us our permits at the beginning of that term for Santana.

3:09 Awesome. Thanks, Doug. Go for it, Dan. Sure. Our Spring Pool project is one of the biggest undeveloped Gold projects in Canada. And we are at an advanced stage there. So we always kind of like to say we're 6 years into a 7 and a half year permitting process. So we've seen a lot of it behind us at this point, but targeting, submitting a final environmental assessment on Spring Pool later this summer. And that would start, I think, you know, really the formal part of the federal and provincial EA process. So going through combined on that side. And then at our DuParcay project, really scoping what the opportunities are to look at size and how you might stage a development of that project and the interplay between the size of the development and what that permitting path might look like.

4:06 So we're right in the middle of the topic of discussion today. It has been

4:11 for a while. That's perfect. And finally, Rick, go for it. We have our Okowest project. It's a fairly high-quality, large-scale Gold project in Guyana. We might be surprised to know that we only discovered that first holes drilled in it in 2021. We're moving this along fairly fast, So the permitting is going to be a bit of an interesting topic for this project, but we're at pre-PEA stage. So we'll be releasing a PEA shortly in a couple of months.

4:48 But the interesting part of the story really is the permitting regime that we're working in and how that works and the ability to expedite the timeline. So we think this project will move from discovery to production in the order of 6 years. So it's a bit anomalous to the industry norm, which we're seeing around sort of 15, 16 years currently. Awesome, thank you. So I'll get into something I hear from retail investors, which is, and this is no secret, permitting isn't sexy to the market. It's obviously crucial, but it's not necessarily something that rank and file retail finds exciting or attractive. But Why could that, and I'll start with you, Dan, why could that lack of classic interest be an opportunity for a shrewd investor?

5:37 Well, you know, I think we were just chatting before we all started this event. I think what investors need to be looking at is risk adjusted returns, right? And I think if you pay attention and understand different permitting processes in different places, you understand how far advanced a company is through that process. I think, you know, generally, investors can take advantage of what is this classic traditional lack of interest as companies go through the development timeline and through that permitting timeline. It is essential. Every project in every jurisdiction is going to have to go through it.

6:23 So I think

6:25 it's often misunderstood. And I think investors often look at it as something that's binary, like you're going to get your permit or you're not. And often, the equities are priced in that binary fashion. In other words, it's trading like you're never going to get your permit until you get it, and then you see a massive re-rating. It doesn't always happen that way and it doesn't need to happen that way because these permitting processes have definite milestones along the way that a shrewd investor can look at and say, okay, well, You know, in our case, just as an example, we submitted a draft environmental assessment a couple of years ago. We're looking at submitting our final. But you have to understand, by the time you submit that final environmental assessment, we've had 2 years of government review on everything that they can look at in this project.

7:18 So you're at a very different place from a risk perspective when you get to that point, then where you were when you submitted the draft. So there are every, every story is different. Every jurisdiction is different. Every project is different. The risks in every project are different going through permitting. But I think there's the one thing that is always the same is that it's almost always misunderstood and almost always mispriced.

7:47 Throw it to Doug actually next, On your view on what a shrewd investor ought to do or what to look at during the permitting process? I mean, sometimes there's changes to the permitting process you have to be aware of. Mexico right now, there's a lot of misinformation about proposed changes that need constitutional reform and the votes just aren't there for it. So it's been a bit of a red herring But unfortunately it kind of clouds one's mind. So if there are changes to a permitting process, that's one thing. But ultimately, if the permitting process is as it always has been, You also have to look at changes of administration.

8:34 So the political can, which is what we're seeing in Mexico right now, can overplay things. I think, again, If you research and really understand the nature of things at the jurisdictional level, you can overcome a lot of the issues that someone just reading click-baity headlines might latch onto and that creates an opportunity.

9:08 There's no doubt that the permitting part of the Lausanne curve is seen and historically considered boring. What I like about it is if you've got a project that's got to that stage, you've immediately removed yourself from the excitement but disappointment that comes at the front end of the Lausanne curve And that disappointment comes far more commonly than the excitement. You've got something real if you're permitting. And to me, we should be looking to invest in things which are real. And sometimes Permitting can test one's patience. It doesn't necessarily test the balance sheet like expiration projects gone wrong or even bills that have gone wrong at the wrong time. Permitting is definitely a test of patience, less So in my opinion, a test of the balance sheet, which is important.

10:04 So I think it's multi-layered how you have to look at it, but you can definitely have an edge against the house. If you're a professional card counter, you've got a very slight edge against the house in blackjack, whereas most people coming in, sitting at the table, even at the game that has the best odds in the house, they're gonna lose to Vegas.

10:29 So it's really understanding jurisdiction, it's understanding process, it's understanding the noise that can impact people's perception of those 2 things, which could be incorrectly placed. I appreciate that. Next one, Rick, I'm going to throw this to you. Speaking of what a shrewd investor might look, I know we've already discussed jurisdiction. It's a bit of a layup for reunion gold, obviously, but what do you think an investor would look at specifically when it comes to jurisdiction to try and, as Doug said, beat the house?

11:04 Well, I think in addition to what Dan and Doug have said, I would say investors need to do a bit of homework. And that's particularly in relation to the track record or history of the jurisdiction, other projects and where there's been other mining projects in recent past, what has been their experience around permitting, because it tends to be the pattern, I think, in certain countries that permitting takes a certain timeline and yes, there's more complex projects and less complex projects but but generally speaking the way that governments respond the way that the I'll call it the social support is in the country for mining projects in general. I think that has to be weighed into your decision in terms of that and whether you're prepared to 1, invest and 2, ride that curve to the likelihood that permitting is gonna be a success or not. So, I mean, I've seen jurisdictions on all extremes in my own experience in the industry.

12:12 And so, yeah, we're fortunate in Guyana to see what appears to be a very supportive government and a supportive social environment, mining with a long history and track record of permitting that has been very fast for other mining companies that have permitted projects.

12:31 So we're just gonna try to ride that wave, but in the end, I think it's very jurisdiction specific. And do your homework is my advice to investors. I think definitely homework involved. I'll throw it to you, Dan. What homework do you do before, on jurisdiction specifically before looking into a company in the permitting process? You know, I think one of the best pieces of homework you can do is just look at what the jurisdiction has done previously, you know? What's the track record of permitting projects?

13:07 And that's, you know, for all that we wring our hands and, you know, in places like Ontario and Quebec, I will tell you that the permitting regime will tax the balance sheet. It is long, it takes a lot of money, the baseline studies that need to be done, the amount of engineering that needs to be done to get through that process is extensive. But I think you can look at, and I'd put Ontario up against most jurisdictions in the world in terms of the number of large projects that it's permitted in the last 20 years. Another one of which is getting purchased this morning, as it turns out. So I think there's nothing like the track record of the jurisdiction, and particularly, sort of as Doug was saying, look at the track record across a number of different political spectrums, right, where you've had changes in government. What's that done to policy?

14:13 Because I think, you know, you go back 20 years, there's still been permitting projects in Ontario all the way through, you know, through all of the governments that they've had. You know, where we're operating in Quebec

14:27 is a fantastic jurisdiction. And I think, you know, you look at places to permit projects, I put Quebec right up at the top. Again, extensive process. I think you have a reasonable level of certainty around if you've done the work, like if you've done good work, you have good fundamental science, it backs it up, you get good outcomes. I think that's nothing speaks louder than the track record of of the country. And that's why, you know, in a prior life, we were we were funding a mineral sands project that was going to be the first major mine in Kenya. It ended up getting up and running and it was fantastic. But there's lots of growing pains with new jurisdictions.

15:18 And, you know, often, particularly in the gold business, you're pushed to frontier jurisdictions often because that's where you get remarkable gold deposits that haven't been previously discovered. But for all the hand-wringing, you know, that Doug was talking about a little bit with Mexico, the reality is there's not many jurisdictions that have permitted more mines than Mexico. You look at how important mining is to the country. You look at the culture that's there, you know, people, Romeo, I think you and I had a conversation about this at PDAC about Brazil. You know, I think Brazil is a fantastic jurisdiction, just, you know, it can take some time, but you very rarely get surprised in the end. Because that's the other part of a permitting story is after you have your permits, do the rules change, right? There's the rule of permitting, and then there's what's it like to actually operate after you have your permit.

16:18 So, but I think all of that is, you know, the first step for me as an investor looking at these things, or as a company looking to advance a project, you really just have to look at what the jurisdiction's done before. And I think that answers 95% of what you need to know about a jurisdiction. That's the homework, I think. But I'll throw it to you, Doug, for any last thoughts on jurisdiction before we get into a kind of funny comment from the chat? Well, I mean, sometimes there are really clear examples of political issues that will short term trump a permitting process that's tried and tested and everything else to Dan's point. I mean, a good example is what we saw in early 2022 with like 5 outright denials at the EIA stage in Chile.

17:12 Now, obviously, 18 months later, friends of mine like Alec Black at Rio2 got the very thing that they should have got back then. It was caught up in political issues. It was nothing really to do with the changing permitting process. I think that's probably the political headwinds or perceived headwinds in Mexico right now will trump the historical aspects of it. But that being said, I think we should all be looking at responsible mineral development and As a result, hopefully you don't hear the dog barking. As a result, there are projects that shouldn't be built in Mexico. I'll say this right now. And they've never actually got denied. I think companies a lot of the time just realize they shouldn't push them through, because they will get denied and then that becomes a problem. So you get a number of these assets that sit on the books of larger companies and others. I mean, there's 1 I won't, out of respect to the company, I won't

18:13 mention the project, but it's a million ounce, you know, close to a gram grade oxide deposit that's an absolute beauty. And it sits in a valley that you could probably get, maybe you could get the community on side too, to have the agreements in place to start the permitting process of it, but it will never get built, not because it's an open pit, but because up on the hillside that looks over that valley is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that indigenous people pilgrimage to every year. I don't think we need those mines. I think we do want to respect culture and environment and everything else. Now, there are other parts of Mexico where you can dig, you know, a big hole in the ground and be an incredibly beneficial

19:04 owner of a mine that is rewarding local stakeholders, state stakeholders, and the federal government there with responsible mineral development. So It's a very nuanced topic we're talking about, but there will be examples of projects that probably will never get permits, not because they're an open pitch, or just because of location, or water management. I mean, a few years back, I said the biggest challenges facing our industry are permitting challenges, especially with NGOs backing lots of these groups that can really delay things, and water management. Water management is a global issue. Mexico has raised it recently and I think it's an absolutely appropriate thing to raise.

19:53 But I mean, it should be Canada's very lucky on the water side, but there's lots of jurisdictions where water management is going to be very, very crucial. And we as local partners of the government, of the communities we're working in, should be looking at our projects in a very responsible manner with regard to all the resources of the region we're located in, not the resources we're trying to extract out of the ground. No, definitely. There was a funny comment in the chat that leads into the next question. RDJ Farms says, I don't think investor timelines match up with reality, which is somebody who lives in the comment section of mining companies for better or for worse, I certainly notice. And that leads me to my next question, because it can certainly feel frustrating to watch a stock price drop after the excitement of a discovery, even though people know the project is being de-risked via that permitting process.

20:49 So I'll start with you, Dan, here. How do you manage shareholder concerns during this period? Well, listen, I think all you can do is be open and transparent, set out realistic timelines. There's always a temptation to try and be very optimistic on timeframes. And it's not always necessarily the company's fault. Sometimes you have permitting advisors or people who do this all the time that lay out an aggressive timeframe that you might be able to match if you are, you know, Ken Ross moving a big project forward with unlimited capital that you can throw at it. As a project developer that may not have another source of cash flow, you know, sometimes these timeframes are dictated by the capital that you have to put to them. Right?

21:46 And so it's trying to make sure that you're funding those those stages of that permitting process and the work that goes behind it appropriately. But I think all you can do is is, you know, be open and transparent about the time frame that it's going to take. And then at some point, I think investors need to understand and realize what the what the value of the permits that you are receiving is, right? Like there is an undeniable value to a project having the ability to be moved forward versus a project that is at the outset of that stage.

22:33 And I think part of the frustration part, and we've seen it with first mining, with a few of our assets, it's that transition from, it's a great discovery, look, we're drilling all these holes, maybe we haven't put a resource on it yet, or we've just put a resource on it, and we haven't really wrapped economics around it yet, or maybe we're at a PEA stage and we're about to embark on this long journey through the valley of death in the Lassonde curve.

23:17 I think everyone needs to recognise that pretty much every project is going to go through this if it's going to become a mine. And that's a little bit about investor expectation. It can be really difficult to match when you've pre-resource got a billion dollar market cap. Because the reality is, a lot of the projects that are sitting today trading at $5 to $10 an ounce, and we have a few projects in that camp. A lot of them at one point were 6 and 700 million market cap companies, right? On their own. And we've got a few of those inside first mining. So, you know, that again comes down to the, how do you take advantage of that as an investor, right? Where do you look for the opportunities in that? Where is that market dislocation?

24:09 Where are investors pricing in you will never get your permits into something that you might have the critical de-risking elements of your permitting path 12 to 18 months away, which is sort of where we are right now. So yeah, but all you can do from the company's perspective, I think is be open and transparent about those timeframes and recognize that you're going to lose some investors along the way, right? There are different investors who are looking for, you know, this

24:42 5 million ounce deposit might become a 10 million ounce deposit. You know, you need to keep drilling, you need to keep the news flow coming, it needs to keep getting better as you go through. It's very different investors than okay, we've scoped a project. Yes, we think that there's some exploration upside. But now it's about taking these $5 an ounce ounces and turning them into $100 an ounce ounces. And that's the crazy part and the opportunity that most people don't see when they're looking at companies sitting where we are sitting right now in this sort of advancing stage of the bottom of the Lassonde curve. Like, you know, there's 10 bagger type returns just sitting out there if you can find the right projects and the right teams that are moving them forward.

25:33 Rick, I'll throw it to you for how you manage shareholder expectations during this period.

25:40 Yeah, I think obviously it's important to keep in touch with shareholders and news flow and even though they may not be interested sometimes to meet with you, I think you've got to make the extra effort to get out there and keep them informed. And again, people will interpret things with absent any information, they can reach their own conclusions that might not be correct. So the idea of keeping them informed is obviously openly and transparently make sure that they understand where you're at, where you expect to be, what the steps are, how long we expect each of those steps to take. You know, and, and sort of, those milestone steps, obviously being the ones that, you want to particularly, keep everyone up to speed on through press releases and other things, but that's, yeah, I don't think there's any way around what Dan was saying that it's a period of time, unless you can afford to explore and add ounces while you're permitting

26:52 On a project if it's a single project, you know that you're probably are going to see that Market I'll say lagging response or market response that sort of no one's really interested in the story until something exciting happens, like you get a permit or you're starting construction or those types of things. So, Yeah. I am. Doug, I'll turn to you to wrap this one up. Yeah, I mean, the first thing to think about is, yeah, in many ways timelines, you know, they're always looking at the facts at a given point in time and trying to give a best guess to that. That's that's what they are. And unfortunately, they are fluid.

27:40 Sometimes you met. There's one thing I will say to investors is, you know, yes, a company should be as transparent as possible. There's always tons of stuff going on in the background that inform what you are hearing and what you don't hear. We took longer at Cerro de Oro on our surface rights agreements and it was a corporate decision to actually, we could have permitted it or created permit applications well in advance

28:19 of when we actually submitted them. But those permit applications would have only covered the base case of our project, 60,000 ounces a year for 8 years. So we spent, we actually did do a deal with an AEDO. And the moment you get into dealing with the AEDO, it's a back and forth and it's a long process. It was about a year of additional time. We consciously put into that because we knew and we wanted to make sure that our permit applications, when they were submitted, didn't just cover the base case presented in the PEA of 2022, covered this much bigger upside case, which we needed their land for. You know, we're permitting 120 million tons of heap leach pad. The current resource is only 60, so join the dots.

29:08 And so there's lots of stuff like that that goes on in the background. So yes, the company should be transparent. Yes, shareholders need to understand that we, in good faith, they're trying to give accurate best guesstimates, but they are fluid. And I think we all saw kind of during COVID and even post COVID, timelines that, you know, I know, I used to be incredibly proud in 2019 of every timeline we talked about. It was really, there was this promises made, promises kept type slide. And I'm dismayed at the fact that in the last few years, it's been far, far harder. Sometimes conscious corporate decisions like that, but in others, those best guesstimates have just been harder to nail down.

29:59 I almost don't wanna give timelines, but then shareholders demand them. So, do you want to just sandbag them with putting 12 months onto every possible thing? I mean, is that 12 months realistic? You're trying to give a realistic best guesstimate. And so that's one of the biggest challenges I think we've probably as a sector, you know, faced. And yes, if you're a bigger company, you can throw a lot of money at it. We're trying to do things in a very capital efficient manner. Sometimes that means things taking a little longer than if you had tens of millions of dollars to throw at something. So I guess those are my closing out thoughts on that question. No, that makes a lot of sense. One question from the chat that's just strictly better than one of my questions, so I'm gonna ask that instead. I imagine this is relatively jurisdiction dependent, but Adrian asks, what 1 or 2 things in the permitting process take a disproportionate amount of time, or do you think all issues are weighted roughly equally during that process.

31:03 I can start Rick with you actually, if you don't mind. Yeah, I know I've had lots of experience in different jurisdictions and I can tell you it's different in terms of the timelines and what holds up the timeline or what takes the longest. Generally speaking, I would have said, the initial approval of the environmental impact assessment or environmental approval is the longest timeline. But again, I wouldn't say that's not the same in Canada where there's many levels of government involved and different regulations and rules around what permits, affluent permits and these types of things. But in a simple jurisdiction that we're in, it is going to be the environmental approval will be the longest. And the governments generally allow you, at least in Guyana, allow you to kind of move things on in parallel with many of the things. So, although the key one is the environmental approvals, you can prepare a lot of the documents for the mining plan approval and submit those at the same time. And so you're not sequentially tied to the timelines that some jurisdictions put you in.

32:19 So you can speed those up that way. But I think the other thing is, is maybe just to mention that, you know, projects can get stuck. Sometimes my experience was reading the tea leaves of the political and social kind of environment. So sometimes these permit applications will sit on somebody's desk and they won't respond. And so the job is to decipher why that is. Why is there no response? And sometimes the answer is politically motivated, I'll say. In other words, somebody going into an election and doesn't want to make the decision and, you know, feels that there's going to hurt their political candidacy or political success.

33:16 I've seen that in a few jurisdictions. So it's being able to decipher sometimes when the permitting gets stuck and delayed as to how to understand the problem and perhaps how to unlock that problem is a challenge. That's where I call it the true, call it the talent is required to get in, involved in that social and political dynamic so that you can understand it and get the right information about what's happening politically, particularly politically. Let's tell you, When the problem itself is opaque at first, that's an extra wrinkle for sure. Dan, I'll throw it to you for 1 or 2 things that you've experienced, again, jurisdiction specific, that can be one of the more challenging parts of the process for investors to look out for.

34:17 Well, I mean, I think what you need to understand everything that sits behind the timeframes that governments talk about, right? And that's been one of the things as we started advancing these projects and brought on a team that, you know, had a real track record of doing this work. They brought, you know, a real sense of what the real investment is and what the real timeframes are and what you really need to have in your hand before you start a different phase of a permitting process. So the environmental assessment process in Canada, you know, it's a little bit different if you're looking across different provinces, because, you know, we're looking both understanding federal and provincial EA processes, and, you know, they have their nuances for sure.

35:13 But it really is just, you know, Understanding what's the level of baseline work that you need to have done, how long is that going to take before you can even really push go. Then from our standpoint, it was, do you dive directly into submitting a final environmental assessment cold into regulators, which is just our team had just been through 1. They knew the regulators don't really like, or do you commit to sort of a longer timeframe, which is giving them a draft so you get all of those comments first so that when you submit that final, you have a different expectation, a different level of risk in the outcome there because at that point, you've kind of received whatever it was in our case, it's Spring Poll, it's 1600 plus comments that we've received and responded to and been working collaboratively for a couple of years before you get to sort of submitting that final.

36:18 So that's one part of it. The other part of it, which is always changing, is really that part of social license and what is involved in securing your social license. For us in Canada, a lot of that is working with indigenous communities. And that's a timeframe that can be quite difficult to estimate because a lot of those communities have very different levels of capacity. They all have very different needs and desires and want to see different outcomes with the project particularly. And you go down a process as we have with Spring Pool about which communities are gonna work together, who wants to understand this project from their own perspective.

37:10 And that, I think, has become, as we progress these projects, that's become, I think, a real gating item in terms of timeframe. And it's one of those things that you just can't rush. And I think we have learned, certainly, I think, through experience and sometimes, you know, I think a little bit the hard way that trying to push those things, you know, particularly when you have communities that have a lot of other challenges and a lot of other struggles, it's around finding that alignment of interest. What are the things that the communities really wanna see? And then how is the development plan aligning with that?

38:03 And for us, the other part of it was, we've actually spent a lot of time and energy working with the communities and actually just providing the communities the capacity to figure out how they want to assess the project themselves. And so, you know, I think that's been an important element of it as well, but in general, whether it's Canada, whether it's, you know, anywhere in the world, I think the social license aspect and how you're working with local communities is something that can often be quite divorced from the formal timelines of environmental assessment and permitting as we all kind of think of permitting from a classic standpoint. Doug, I'm sensitive you got to go in a couple minutes. I'm going to ask you a really, really specific.

38:51 Dan's comments there. I mean, if we can't get to what I have, that you wanted to ask, feed into to what I'm going to sound like I'm a complete nut job, but Mexico actually has a really good permitting environment. I've always said it, I believe it, and it's gonna be the case moving forward. There are open pits now, there'll be open pits 10 years from now. One of the reasons I love the permitting environment in Mexico is you can't submit your permit applications without social license. You have to have community agreements, you have to have community support in place prior to even starting the permitting process. So the good news is once those permit applications go in, Then it's just a dual track of 2 major permits, the environmental assessment and the ETJ, which is the change of land use in this case from agriculture to a commercial use, oh a gold mine.

39:45 Those 2 run in parallel, not sequentially, because there's a lot of overlap between the 2. So typically when that ETJ drops, you know, in the case of Santana, we got the mere 45 days later. There was tremendous amount of overlap between them. So big believer that Mexico has actually a permitting environment and a rule that a lot of Latin America could take to heart, Peru in particular, where you see so many companies get into trouble because they haven't focused on social license, because the government gives permits, the communities give permission. And sometimes if you haven't approached, companies can be way too, and this is where I think important is also understanding about the teams and have they operated in these jurisdictions, have they done it before?

40:36 Because fresh teams going into Peru can think, well, this is a great environment with the government, we can get our permits and then haven't paid attention to the critical social license. So just to follow on from Dan's comments, and I say it might sound like a nut job, but Mexico does have a very good permitting process. It's just caught up in some of that political stuff we're talking about now and that will pass. That's a good line. I do, because I know you have to jet, I do want to give you 30 seconds just to pitch the stock to the investors in the audience. Well, I mean, the nice thing, I spent last year coming up with a funding package for Cerro Dorado. It's a $25 million CapEx. And I wanted to ensure that our shareholders weren't going to get caught with a nasty surprise of what should be a great news event. Oh, we got permits only to be rug pulled by what we didn't think about how we were going to fund this. And now there's a big dilutive equity race. So we have a funding package in place. So for that kind of asymmetrical kind of movement, you can get off permits.

41:39 To me, when we received permits for Cerro de Oro, the one thing you can be assured of is we're gonna be hitting the ground running because we have the 25 million to draw down to actually build that thing. And that's what I actually like about our permitting outlook for Cerro de Oro because we get those permits, we're building it in 6 to 7 months and it's up and running and there's no equity dilution associated with building Cerro de Oro that's gonna come as a nasty surprise. So it's a game changer for the company. Very excited, you know, the process I think has been going very well. We've got good support at the state level, community level, municipal level in Zakatekas, northern Zakatekas, which is about the view to have a game of family feud, family fortunes as we call it in the UK, and asked 100 people who knew Mexico where you'd most want to build a new big open pit mine in Mexico, Northern's architectures would absolutely be top answer on the board in my opinion.

42:42 Very supportive governor that's part of AMLO's party but has been very supportive. So super excited about the prospects for us this year. Gentlemen, I'm sorry I have to leave you because it's been a fascinating conversation and I apologize to the audience for cutting my timing short or For those people who hear me too often, you're welcome. Thank you very much, Doug. And for those in the chat who had questions specifically for Doug, I'll make sure the Monero team gets back to you soon. Dan and Rick, one question I've got, and I was having a conversation this morning. It's really interesting, the price of gold is reaching new heights. And I think, Dan, you said this earlier, companies in development and permitting are getting beat up still the hardest, possibly the hardest they've ever been, in recent memory. So I'm curious when you both think we'll start to see more alignment between market caps of these companies and the gold price? And Rick, I'll throw it to you first.

43:38 Yeah, certainly that recent move in the gold price should create an impetus to see people taking a look at least at opportunities in the equity space. You know, as you know, the junior developers have probably been hardest hit. And I think the self-inflicted somewhat from the problematic builds that have gone on, I'll say that haven't helped the credibility of some of our industry, but, but I think it's more of the macro environment now that's kind of driving the thinking around this, what I call the arbitrage that exists now between gold price and equities. And I think people are starting to see that as such an opportunity that I think they'll start to kind of pour in once they get some comfort about the sustainability of the gold price.

44:31 And the other is the interest rates. I think, I think people are obviously still sort of trying to understand what's going to happen with interest rates, in the U S particularly, but, but globally as well. And, I think that turning point probably hasn't been hit yet and it's probably still plateaued and, I think if you, if there were solid signs that it were to start to move in the other direction, I think that would really create the impetus that particularly generalists and some investors will see that as really a trigger to take advantage of this arbitrage that exists really in the mining space right now.

45:19 The gap is significant. Dan, I'll throw it to you. When will ounces in the ground meet up to where ounces are in the market? Yeah, it's a question, as you know, I've been posing for the 5 years that I've been the CEO here, because I've been doing this for 30 years, and we've never seen this gap bigger than it is now. I'll tell you, the movement in the gold price now, and literally, we're at the very, very beginning of what I think is public acknowledgement that the gold price is moving. There was an article in the Globe and Mail this morning for the first time since the gold price has been moving from like $1,300 and said, oh, and out of nowhere, look, commodities are at all time highs. It's like it's guys, it's not 5 years is not out of nowhere. It's been going up on a pretty straight trajectory.

46:11 It's starting to enter the consciousness. Where it's going to to get that trickle down, and we've seen this before, you know, it happened in 2020, it was about a 3 month gap between a big move in the Gold price, big move in the valuations of senior Golds. And then investors started saying, OK, well, where am I going to get my my leverage here. So there was kind of a 3 month gap. And I think we're, you know, call it a month or 2 into that in this last rise. But that's not what's going to change the story for developers. What's going to change the story for developers is that large gold companies are generating record levels of free cash flow. Their cost profiles, their cost inflation has plateaued largely. They're kind of out of the woods on the things that had everyone really concerned.

47:07 And by the way, they have not been able to find any other new projects. They've been spending money on exploration at increasing levels and just not finding large Gold projects, particularly if you're looking at Gold projects, you know, 5 million ounces and above, which is sort of where we look because that's sort of the realm of the projects that we have. So what's really gonna change is, and you've seen it again this morning, yet another one of the few opportunities that large gold companies had to buy multi-million ounce gold projects, and we focus in Canada. Same story for Rick, who's got a phenomenal deposit in Guyana. There are only a handful of these unique large ore bodies that are in advanced stages, right? We happen to own 2 of the 10 largest in Canada that are undeveloped.

48:03 All of that construction anxiety, basically all that's done now, you fast forward to the middle of 2025, there's going to be nothing to build in Canada, you know, with a couple of exceptions, but almost nothing to build for a 5 or 7 year time frame. At the same time that these companies are seeing their own production profiles rollover, you know, you don't have to look too far into a bunch of the mines built in the mid 2010s. Like with 10 year mine lives, you're seeing a couple of little extensions, but those are now coming to the end of their life, right? This happens to mines. Like there hasn't been the investment in it. So at a time when mining companies are generating record levels of free cash flow and have no ability to replace their own resources, you have developers trading at really all time lows on a valuation basis and particularly on a risk adjusted valuation basis when you're talking about companies in advanced stages going through these permitting processes.

49:12 It's really not much more complicated than that. You can buy first mining today at about $6 an ounce. And we all know that these projects with permits historically go back 30 years. They tend to sell at a hundred to $200 an ounce, right? What's the timeframe to get there? Is, you know, does the company have the capital to be able to get there? More and more, you're going to see the industry being the ones that provide the capital to do this. You're gonna see more strategic investments. You're gonna see more M&A activity. And I think we're seeing the pace of that starting to pick up now and again this morning with Alamos buying Argonaut. So there's more of that to come. Absolutely. That's going to be the first point. But the real opportunity for the investors on the call here today is basically to front run that trade because the institutional investors have been asleep at the switch on this because they've been burned by a lot of the development companies, coming into COVID in a cost inflation environment.

50:18 And so they, over the last, you know, 10 years, but particularly last 3 or 4 years, have really kind of abandoned the development sector. So that's the opportunity for the individual investor right now, is you have your first 2 to 5 times returns in getting in early on these advanced stage attractive development assets. And then we all know they'll sell for a billion dollars and the big companies are going to act super pro-cyclically because they always do. They're shrewd in their own way, for sure. Rick, I got a question specific to you, and this is really informational for the audience. With Rhean Gold's enviable current timeline, as you discussed at the beginning of the hour, from discovery to production, does your current license offer the potential to expand the resource with more drilling?

51:12 And importantly, and just in case people in the audience don't know, how does that impact the permitting timeline? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, there's no restriction on our ability to expand the resource and, and expand the, the scale of the project. We, you know, have still upside potential, on the property. So really it's early days. This is kind of one of those stories of maybe a little like Great Bear, where we're drilling it out and we're adding ounces quickly, but we've only tested a small portion of what the land package holds. And we've got a neighbor to the North who's similarly trying to do the same thing. And both of us are at early stages. And the picture I think is one that over time will grow the ounces.

52:01 So to pin the project itself at some point, which we're trying to do now with the PEA and ultimately move through the next stages of the studies. We think there's time to continue to drill the resource out. And if we have to make adjustments to reflect the right size of project and so on, that suits the resource, we can still do that. So, yeah, we're doing things in parallel here. There's some risk to doing that because once you pin things too tightly in scope, then you have to go back and do it again if it's a permitting process that's defined by the scope of the project. So we're well aware of that and trying to keep our options open as long as we can.

52:48 At some point we'll have to close it off and pin it. And then from there on in, obviously it's a set scale project. And given what Dan was saying about, you know, other interested parties that may look at this differently than we would as a junior developer. Others may say that we can turn this into a tier 1 project. We need more time to drill it out. We need more time to understand the prospectivity. And they may take a different tact than us. We are moving it down a fast timeline, there's no question. And yeah, that has some risks associated with it if you look at it that way, but yeah. All right, thanks. Dan, my question specifically to you, As we kind of alluded to earlier, Canada's kind of 13 jurisdictions in a trench coat and you're working heavily, you know, you're in the process in 2, in both Ontario and Quebec. Curious your perspective on the differences in the process between those 2 jurisdictions.

53:51 It's an interesting question. So we're further advanced in the process, you know, federally and provincially with Ontario than we are in Quebec. You know, the project's at a PEA stage and we're just kind of looking at what that next step would look like. So, you know, I don't think there's, I don't think there are really, really big differences between the 2 in terms of the actual requirements. Yeah, I think you have very well-educated, very good functioning people in the ministries in both. You know, I think you have a very pro-mining environment in both of those provinces.

54:46 Yeah, I think the, put it one way, I think if we were looking at a smaller project, I think a smaller project might be able to move a bit more quickly in Quebec than it might in Ontario. It's just, I think it's a little bit of the difference just in, you know, either running through a provincial environmental assessment process if it was strictly provincial in Quebec versus Ontario, without having to get into the federal process. But no, I think we're blessed on both sides by having a group of people who work in those ministries who understand mining, you have political support for mining projects to be advanced.

55:36 And yeah, I think they're both great places to have multi-million ounce projects that We aim to be moving forward. With our project specifically, it's a bit different just in the relative location. Springpole is relatively remote. It's only 100 kilometers from Red Lake, but you are in a very different environment in Springpole than you are beside a town with a highway going over top of it at DuParquet. There are advantages and challenges to both of those, but I think we have a very clear path and great support from ministries in both provinces to see these things become lines.

56:26 Okay, I wanted to go to 1 quite interesting question, I think from the audience. TK Ninenberg, apologies if I butchered your name, asks if consistent presence in stakeholder communities make a difference during the permitting process generally? Rick, I'll throw it to you first. Consistent presence of stakeholder communities? Consistent presence of the companies in stakeholder communities. Oh, sorry. Yeah, okay. Absolutely, you know, that's all about relationships and building trust, I would say. The longer you can, well, the longer, the more you can engage with your stakeholders and build a relationship that's based on a demonstration of trust, I think then your journey is a lot easier, first of all, and it enhances your social license.

57:20 For sure, that's been the advantage, I guess, your union's had as a company has been its long history in Guyana. So if you look at David Fennell, who's the chairman, he's actually been active in the country for more than 40 years. So I don't think there's a person he doesn't know now. It's only a small country. And anyone who knows his, everyone knows him for sure. I'm just not sure he knows everyone yet, but yeah, there's about 800,000 people. And whether it be the opposition politicians or the politicians in power, he pretty well knows everyone by first name and family relationship and that helps of course. And then in the communities we're operating, they're small communities, but again, it's 1 where people know the company from the history, involved in things like OMAI in the past and other mining projects.

58:12 So yeah, it helps a lot if you have that history. Coming in new, and I've been in a COG as a CEO running companies where you're kind of new in the jurisdiction, it takes you quite a while to build that trust. And Yeah, so you're going to have a much slower process on permitting, particularly, and social license. I'll throw that one to you too, Dan. Yeah, I think there's no substitute for it. It's certainly something that we've recognized when we acquired the balance of DuParcay in 2022, it was very important for us to establish a full-time presence. And part of it is that, you know, the community that we're working in, in the town of DuParquet, was built around the mines that were built in the 1930s.

59:07 This is a quintessential mining town. And there is no substitute for having a door that someone can come and knock on, right? And whether that's in supporting things that are important for the local community, whether it's addressing concerns, whether it's just being responsive, it doesn't matter whether it's a community in a remote part of Guyana or a community in the middle of the Abitibi, people want the same thing. They wanna know that there's someone to talk to when they have concerns and that they're going to be listened to. Similar thing in and around Springpool. We actually just this year opened an office in Sioux Lookout. And it's amazing the difference in just recognition that you have in town when people know that you're there and you are supporting activities in the communities and you have a place that when, Sioux Lookout's an amazing community that people pass through all the time, but knowing they can stop in and that's just another thing they can do when they're in Sioux Lookout is having yet another touchpoint with the company. It's really important.

1:00:21 It's more difficult for us having those touchpoints directly in some of the more remote indigenous communities that we're working in. But there's different ways that we can continue to be present in those communities and supporting the communities in a number of different fronts. But yeah, I think there's no substitute for being there. Awesome. And I know there's some great questions left in the chat, but unfortunately, we're almost out of time. So I did want to give both speakers here a chance to let the folks in the room know why they should take a look at your stock. I'll start with you, Rick. Yeah, thank you. I think timing-wise, if anyone's really looking at opportunities, this is the time.

1:01:12 We're trading, you know, like many of the other junior developers, at quite a discount to our NAV, or the consensus NAV that the analysts have on us now. It's still a window that's good for investment. We haven't entered so much into the stopping of adding ounces phase of the project. We're busy adding ounces. We got about a 4.6Moz indicated resource at good grades over 2.05g and a third resource of 1.6Moz at 2.6g. That has grown about 40% from our last update. We're still drilling, we've got 8 drills on the ground.

1:01:58 I'm continuing to drill the open areas of the deposit, down deep and below the bottom of the smaller pits that we have. There's 3 pits. We expect to continue to grow the ounces. And While we're doing that, of course, advancing and de-risking the project at the same time. I think the expedited timeline for investors offers the opportunity to realize fairly quickly the opportunity that might translate this into a cash-flowing business at some point. We anticipate that by 2027, we should be in production, everything going as the current plan shows.

1:02:45 That's only 3 years away. It's a very exciting time for us and for, I think, investors in the company. Thank you, Rick. Dan, go ahead. The floor is yours. All Right. Well, 2 of the 10 largest undeveloped Gold projects in Canada, 1 in advanced stages of permitting at Springpole, which we think really is going to be one of the next 2 or 3 projects in Canada to get environmental assessment approval. And district scale exploration potential around both of our projects as well. Ongoing exploration that's going to see them grow, but fundamentally underpinned by large, large scale resources in Tier 1 jurisdictions in advanced stages of feasibility and permitting. So I think, you know, on a risk adjusted basis and that people are tuned in here today to understand risk and reward, But on a risk adjusted basis, I think developers generally and first mining specifically represent right now unbelievable opportunities for capital appreciation.

1:03:57 Awesome. Well, Dan, Rick and Doug and the hundreds of people who joined us today, Thank you