Promising Initial Results from Aldebarans Altar Project 2022 Drill Campaign

0:08 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Aldebaran Resources Live Summit today. I'm pleased to introduce our speakers. We have CEO and Director John E. Black and Chief Geological Officer and Director Dr. Kevin B. Heather. We're going to go through a quiver presentation and then after we will be accepting questions live. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions at any time on the right-hand side of your screen, and we'll try to get to them after the presentation is over. And as always, the summit is being recorded and will be available to watch afterwards on six.com. Without any further ado, I'm gonna hand it over to you, Dr. Kevin, to take us through the presentation. Great, thanks, Tasha. Well, welcome everybody for taking time out of your day to see what the new exciting results at our Altar Project in Argentina.

0:56 We live in sort of concerning times these days, So really what I'm going to talk about pales on things that are happening in the world as everybody knows, but hopefully there's some interesting things here. I will be making some forward-looking statements, so just a typical disclaimer. For those that are new to the story, the project is located in Argentina and in San Juan province, which is here in the northwestern part of Argentina. It's probably the most mining-friendly province within Argentina. And it's host to several producing mines and also several large copper and copper gold porphyry systems.

1:42 Existing mines there are Barracks, Valadero Gold Mine, and the Guatemala Gold Project. And just across the border, literally from Argentina into Chile, is Antofagasta's very large Los Palomres copper deposit. There's also, as many of you will know, the Jose Maria and Filo del Sol projects up in the northern part that have made quite a bit of news in recent times. And also the Altar project sits very close to the El Pachon project of Glencore and also McEwen Copper's Los Osullis deposit. The access into the project is from our office and warehouse complex located here in the capital of the province in San Juan.

2:33 It's roughly about a 7 hour drive into the project. This is the historical route in, in the red path. And this was a road that required crossing several high elevation, 5,000 meter elevation passes. And so that severely limited the field window when which we were able to operate the Altar project. I now just want to show you a quick blow up of that area. And you can see this is the old road here in blue coming into the project and the camp. There's a new road now that comes in that was built by Glencore and we assisted with some of the costs of maintaining the road. And then you can see there's about a 14 kilometer bypass that that we have rehabilitated.

3:24 You can see some photos of some of the work we did earlier in the field season back in October, November of last year. And that road now allows us to cut off close to an hour and a half of travel time between San Juan and the Altar Project. But more importantly, it eliminates having to go over some of these high mountain passes. So what that means is the highest point on the road from San Juan to the project now is the camp area where the, where the project's located. So it means that it allows us to greatly extend the field season in this area to roughly, we hope, 8-months and we might be able to even push it beyond that.

4:12 Many people look at the Altar project and think that it's a porphyry deposit, and it is a porphyry deposit with Copper and Gold, but really it's a large area, close to 7km in strike, and it's made up of multiple porphyry centres and deposits. The principal ones being Altar Central and Altar East and also the Radio QDM area and another centre up here to the north. There's ample indications that there could actually be several other porphyry centers that have yet to be explored. So this is just a long section now. You can see here that through the deposit, to show you the existing resource that we did in 2021, you can see the in-pit resource blocks here.

5:06 And the deposit currently sits at roughly a little over 11Billion pounds of Copper and 3.4Moz of Gold and close to 39Moz of Silver in the measured and indicated categories. And then an additional 1.8Bn of Copper and 0.4Moz of Gold in the inferred category. The importance of this slide is to show you that we have an area over here called the QDM and radio area. And you can see there are drill holes into this, but the drilling wasn't sufficient to generate a resource. This becomes a real focus and I'll touch on this in more detail in a minute.

5:55 We already have a very large Copper-Gold resource here. Currently, the status of drilling is we have 4 rigs on site. The focus right now is drilling in the radioporphyry area and I will report some of the initial results here in a few minutes. We've got 3 rigs actively drilling there and you can see the locations of those rigs. And then we have a fourth rig that's testing some extensions to known high-grade mineralization over here in the Altar Central area. We've had several challenges with the drilling as we started up in November. Rigs were late arriving. There were COVID issues in Argentina, which affected the ability to get personnel and drillers, but we finally look like we've overcome all of those issues. And now we're starting to drill in a pretty good pace and rhythm.

7:00 And as of yesterday, we had completed 6,000 meters of drilling of a plan somewhere between 20 and 25,000 meter plan. And this is highly dependent on obviously production rates, but also how long we can stay in before the cold snow winter weather comes to this area. So now what I want to show you is some exciting results from drill hole 43. This is the radio area and you can see, I'll show you a cross section here. Here you can see the location of drill hole 43. It was collared here and was drilled off to the Northwest. It's a significant step out from our last drill hole that we drilled last year, drill hole 42, almost 165 meters step out. It's also about a similar distance south of drill hole 34,283 meters from this drill hole and almost A0A kilometer from that drill hole. A significant step out from known mineralization.

8:13 This is just some of the results here. You can see the QDM Gold deposit sitting up high. And then you can see some of the deeper drilling here on the radio target. And this is drill hole 43. You can see the closest drill holes are roughly about 250m up where the main mineralization is. And as we get down deeper, some of the holes get to within sort of 150m distance. We've hit significant long intervals of mineralization that greatly increased the footprint of the deposit. We hit an upper zone here of 707 meters of A0A percent copper equivalent, starting at about 203 meters depth.

9:00 And then the whole bottom and in slightly lower grade mineralization, but indicating that the system is still persistent, even at depth. Within this sort of broad zone of moderate grade mineralization, There were 2 zones of higher grade mineralization, 123 meters of 0.61 copper equivalent, and then another zone of about 188 meters of 0.7. So this result has greatly increased the footprint and additional infill drilling to tighten this up, to get it to resource category is underway as we speak.

9:45 This is just a quick slide for some of the more technical geological people that might be in the audience to show the mineralization is associated here with very strong Potassic alteration, very typical of porphyry Copper Gold systems. Here we can see a very strong secondary Kefeld spar with biotite and magnetite. And if you look very closely here, you can see it's got boronite, which is a mineral that has roughly about 45% Copper in its crystal structure. So We like to see Boronite because that tells us that we're getting close to the heart of the system. We've also intersected a lot of quartz stock work, veining that's full of Chalcopyrite, another Copper-bearing Sulphide mineral.

10:33 Very encouraging and very extensive mineralization. I'd now like to jump to the new high-grade Gold discovery that we just announced. It's located here. The last hole we looked at was this hole here, 43. We're going to jump up to the Northwest and drill hole 45. We're going to again, look at a cross section that's roughly looking towards the Northeast. And we'll see, here's the cross section here. We can see in the red line is the conceptual pit outline for the QDM Gold deposit. I'll talk about that in a second. Here we can see the intercept that we reported. This is by far the highest grade Gold that we've encountered or anybody's encountered on this project.

11:25 The intercept returned 14.9m of almost 19g of Gold, 12g of Silver and 0.23% Copper, within which there were multiple multigram intercepts. That's why I've included this table. It's a bit small, but I wanted to stress that this is not a case of us taking this very high grade assay and smearing it out over 15 meters. You can see there are multiple multigram intervals here that make up this 14.9m interval. That's what's very encouraging. This is surrounded by an area of lower grade, 1g type material.

12:17 This clearly will require some follow-up drilling to understand the geometry and the extent of this higher-grade mineralization. We are planning to follow it up by the rig sitting here on the pad right now that intercepted that is still drilling the deeper Copper-Gold porphyry system. Once that drilling has been completed, we'll probably drill a couple of short, tightly, tight holes in on this intercept to get an idea on the potential geometry and strike extent and start to build on whether this intercept has some kind of volume.

13:05 This is another cross-section now looking perpendicular to the one that we just looked at. And what I want to try to show you here is where this intercept fits into the existing Gold resource at QDM Gold. Here you can see the resource table that we published in 2021. What you can see is we roughly in resource in pit here, and you can see the higher-grade material sitting here close to surface, roughly about A0A million ounces of Gold.

13:39 You can see that this is the intercept that we reported here, the 14.9m at 19g of Gold sitting out here. And another historical hole that's located roughly about 50m away that intercepted a long rung of 40m of 1.2g of Gold. We can see that there opens up the possibility that this drilling is kind of wide open and open to expansion. The other thing I want to mention here that I think is also very important, you can see is A lot of the old historical drilling here done prior to us taking over the project was vertical drilling. And when you do vertical drilling, you have a high probability that if this is a some kind of a vertical feeder structure, that you probably have a lower percentage chance of hitting it. We plan to go back and drill more inclined holes and we may end up finding more of these high-grade structures.

14:45 Just a quick view again for some of the more technical people out there just to look and see what the mineralization looks like. This is a sampling of samples taken from that 15m interval to show you what some of the rock looks like. You can see there's a lot of alteration. There's a lot of silicification, a lot of fine grain, calcidonic, sort of low temperature quartz, which is indicative of higher level epithermal systems. And we can see a large amount of pyrite, fine grain pyrite and slightly coarser grain pyrite here associated with chloride and locally areas with tourmaline as well. And you can see some of the grades from some of these intervals where these samples came from.

15:34 Now switching gears, as many of you who have been following us know, we started an induced polarization and magnetotolerant geophysical survey last year that we only managed to complete phase 1 and 2 over the radio area and over the Altar Central area. I'm happy to report today to you that we've now completed phases 3 and 5, and we're hoping by next week, we'll start to see some of the results of that as it's being integrated into the overall survey with phases 1 and 2. We hope that there are some exciting targets that we're interested in here that the geophysics is going to help with. We also can report today that the geophysical crews are actually actively laying out the geophysical lines over the South East Gold target here. And so we should be shooting that geophysics here within the next couple of weeks.

16:36 And that's becomes even more interesting now, since we've hit this high-grade Gold intercept up here at the radio deposit, that this might be another epithermal Gold system down here. We've demonstrated that the area can produce very high grades. Let's see what we get down here. Again, this is a work in progress. And then finally, we'll be filling in this area to the south towards the end of the field season. So the takeaway from this is, is that we will have new geophysical information here over a couple of areas that we're very encouraged by from both geologically and geochemically.

17:19 And so we will be in a position to start trying to drill test some of these areas, this field campaign. Switching now to the Taylor's Fine Geochemical survey. As many of you know, we're seeing some very interesting anomalies coming out of this, and I've documented this in some of our previous webinars and some of the information on our webpage. And so I encourage you to go there to view those videos and look at those presentations. But we've now expanded this survey to include the entire property position. To date, as of yesterday, we've now, with historic data that we've collected over the last 2 or 3 years, we've collected over 11,000 samples on a 100 meter grid spacing.

18:12 And we're continuing to expand that out into these far reach areas at a 200 meter spacing. And we now only have about 236

18:23 more samples to collect and then the entire property position will be covered. And those samples are currently in the lab, the ones that we've collected. And so we're still awaiting results, but once we get those results, we'll be able to see if we've worked up any new targets based on geochemistry. So what are the future drill targets? Again, this has been outlined in previous webinars. I again urge you to go back and look at some of those videos that we have links to on our webpage. But our priority number 1 remains the drill out of the radioporphyry. Obviously, we've had the exciting new intercept of high-grade Gold here.

19:09 We will be turning some attention to trying to see what kind of potential that has for expansion. We also are doing some resource extension drilling over here in the Altar East and Altar Central areas. And then we've got some exciting areas based on geochemistry that we now will have that new geophysical data. And so we hope to be drill testing some of these very shortly. So what are the next steps at Altar? Complete that current resource definition drilling at the radioporphyry. Clearly follow up drilling on that QDM high-grade Gold discovery, complete the 3D IPMT geophysical survey, complete the Talus fine geochem survey, which I showed you is almost done now.

20:07 Drill new targets that are defined by the integration of those geophysical and geochemical data. The new elevation, low elevation road will allow us to extend the field season for drilling. And so our plan is to keep pushing the drilling for as long as we can. We hope to complete a resource calculation for the radioporphyry area towards the Q4 of this year. We've also initiated water balance studies. As you can imagine, water is an issue worldwide. And here in San Juan is no different. There are a lot of big projects that are coming online or are being developed.

20:54 And so knowing water balance needs and where water will come from becomes critical.

21:01 And as a start to that, we have starting to mobilize a dedicated water well rig that will be drilling several water monitoring wells so that we can start on the road towards establishing a water balance and future water studies. Just who we are again, this is just the share structure. We're a company with roughly fully diluted 140 million shares out. It's a fairly tight share structure. We have 1 large shareholder, Route 1, with close to 46% of the ownership. They've been a solid backer of ours since our early days with our first junior company, Antares, that we sold to 1st Quantum Minerals.

21:49 Also big backers of our sister company, Regulus and our Anticori project in Peru. Sabanier Stillwater, who we're earning into the project to gain eventually an 80% interest, our 2019.9%, and then managers, directors and others. So it's a pretty tight share structure. So as an investment recap, we've got an aggressive drill program underway, already showing very good initial results, opening up a completely new target type with the high-grade Gold discovery. We will be also following up on other potential high-grade targets that we've identified.

22:35 We're in a very high profile location. I mean, currently in San Juan province, there's more than 60 drill rigs turning and lots of activity. I think that we're severely undervalued based on what our current in the ground resource that we can show is, let alone the upside potential. So I think this is a compelling valuation story. And as I mentioned, I strongly urge you to go to the webpage, review our video series, and also some of John Black's CEO interviews. And now I'll open it up for questions and answers. And here's for a free Ukraine.

23:23 Thanks. Great, thank you so much. So now we'll just go to the Q&A section. So if you do have a question, feel free to submit them now, but we have a bunch already. So there's been a pickup of M&A activity in San Juan recently. Can you comment on that? And do you think that the industry is seeing San Juan as more of an attractive jurisdiction? Yeah, I can answer that. Certainly, I think we're right on the leading edge of seeing a lot of M&A activity in the copper space and as well as the gold space. We've seen a little bit in gold over the last year, but it's really picking up. I'm just coming off the BMO conference in Florida, one of the first conferences we've had in person. And a lot of the buzz there was about copper and the need to have a large number of copper deposits over the next 15 or 20 years to meet the demand to address new styles of energy we have.

24:18 So the buzzwords were energy transition metals or forward-looking commodities, and a lot of talk about how the major mining companies will need to be acquiring projects like this. Also a big shift from discussion about, we've seen that the big companies have a lot of cash on their balance sheets right now with these metal prices, copper is 473 this morning. We'll probably soon see an all-time high on it. And they're building up cash, but initially the reaction was that cash should be returned to shareholders. But we've seen a notable shift now to discussions about perhaps we should look at CAPEX to being put towards growth, either expanding existing operations or acquiring new projects. And then specifically in San Juan, just in the last few months, we've seen Lundin Mining purchase Jose Maria, which was a nice take out, kind of an in-house Lundin company to a Lundin company. But Even more interesting this week was the announcement that BHP is putting a $100 million placement into Philo for only 5% of the company, which values that company at nearly $2 billion right now.

25:27 So we're seeing that start of people beginning to put their hands on copper projects around the world, and particularly in San Juan province in Argentina. So that's an endorsement for the projects. It's an endorsement for the copper space overall. And I really like it because it's an endorsement for Argentina. Argentina is doing their best now to take an opportunity that they have to become a more serious mining country. They have a lot of interesting deposits in San Juan province alone, let alone throughout the province. So we're seeing them dedicate efforts towards attracting major miners to pick up projects like these. So absolutely starting to see very serious M&A activity. Great. Thank you. How will you follow up with the Gold Zone discovery?

26:14 As I mentioned during the presentation, the idea there is that we have a rig that's on the pad that drilled that intercept. It's still drilling the deeper Copper-Gold porphyry target. The idea is that we will use the same pad and the same rig to drill some holes that are shorter holes that will be short step outs from that intercept to start to get the first idea on what potential geometry, strike and volume we might have and whether we can replicate some of those values. That's the plan. Eventually, if we have success with those holes, then we would start to develop a plan to drill from other potential pads, etc.

27:07 Great, thank you. We have a question here from Ken. He's asking, what kind of deposit is this going to be? Is it possible to estimate the metal percent ore body in terms of Copper, Silver, Gold? I'm not sure I fully follow the question. This is a porphyry Copper, Gold system, and There is an epithermal overprint on top of that for free Copper Gold system. We already have an existing resource that's close to 1.4 billion tonnes of 0.5 Copper. It's dominantly a Copper deposit. This new high-grade Gold intercept adds a new wrinkle to the story.

28:00 The radio porphyry area is slightly different from the main Altar area in that the porphyry system at radio tends to have very high Gold content and low arsenic content. So it's interesting. So we've got a bunch of different deposit styles, but they all kind of come under the umbrella of a Portree Epithermal system. Great. Thank you. That leads on to our next question from Mark. With the company now chasing Gold and not Copper as a priority, should we assume Aldebrand is a Gold play, a Copper play or both? If both, can we have an idea of the budget breakdown for the target metals? I'll answer the first part of that question, John.

28:46 Mark, you know well that this has always been a Copper-Gold project. That story has not changed from day 1. We continue to focus on delineating the full extent of Copper-Gold mineralization. There is a high-grade gold hit that we just announced that warrants follow-up and it will be followed up, but the story still remains that this is a very large copper gold system and that we will be delineating all aspects of this project. I think that covers it well, Kevin. The part 2, is there a budget breakdown for the target metals? Not really at this point. As Kevin mentioned, we're testing both targets at the same time, including in the current hole that we just announced, the top part of the hole for that golden intercept. It's still drilling for the principal target at depth of the copper gold for free mineralization.

29:45 It's a little hard to break those out. But the principal focus is understanding the entire system. And as Gavin mentioned in the last answer, as well as the previous answer on this, this is always will be a dominantly copper project. Great, thank you. A question about Argentina. Are you back working in a COVID free situation in Argentina? Not exactly COVID free, but like much of the worl post christmas we had due to increased social a the end of the year as well as the Omicron surge. We saw a lot of incidents in our camp and throughout our workforce. And it wasn't just us. It was all the camps around us in this part of the Andes. And so we did suffer some challenges there. We were able to keep things moving during that period of time, but our incidence has dropped down to almost 0 right now.

30:41 Many of our employees have had Omicron recently, so that we're kind of at herd immunity right now. But Omicron is not affecting us too much on site. It may be affecting the labs and some of the other service providers we have, but I think we're through the worst part of it right now. That's great to hear. Ricardo has a question for you, John. He's saying, you stated some majors are buying share positions in some juniors. This project was owned in the past by RTZ. Do you see chances that they might come back or any other majors looking for large copper resources? I can't speak specifically to a particular major in that sense, because our interaction with major companies is usually done under confidentiality agreements.

31:27 But it's fair to say all of the major companies now are monitoring projects like this, or should be. That's part of their job to be doing this. And we're under CA with a number of companies, which means we're hosting site visits as people begin to watch what we're doing. It is important to note that Sabani Stillwater, the company that we're earning into the project from, we're earning an 80% interest in the project, leaving them with a 20% direct interest in the project. And they also have a 19.9% equity position in the company. They're very closely monitoring what we're doing. And even though they're largely a PGM precious metals company, they have launched a battery metals initiative and are intentionally looking for exposure to copper, lithium, nickel, the Ford facing commodities is the buzzword is right now. And so they're very pleased to be watching. So we really already have the endorsement from 1 major mining company as a direct participant in the project.

32:25 And we'll certainly interact with all those that would like to learn more about what we're doing. Great, thank you. Next question is, what date do you anticipate as the end of the current drilling season? Well last year we were able to drill into May and our neighbours at Pachon drilled into June last year, knowing that the new lower elevation road was there as a way, it was still a rough road last year. It's notably improved this year. So it's very weather dependent. It depends if we get large storms that start to slow us down. We up in the northern part of the province at Filo Jose Maria, they're talking about going all year now. Our drilling company has approached us with ideas on how they could winterize rigs to go deep into the winter itself. So we, I think we can safely assume we'll make it to the end of May and, and then we'll extend it beyond that as much as we say for the camp. Yeah, and one of the other considerations that take into account, apart from the winterization of not only the rigs, but the camp has been winterized to a certain degree. The other issue is access to water. I mean, when you're working at 4,000 meters elevation and the temperatures are minus 20, minus 30, the water freezes. And I'm not just talking about the water that's at the rig, it's where we source the water.

33:46 So that also plays into the, and this part of the world is in the probably about the 10th or 15th year of a very bad drought. And so water has become, we don't have any issues right now with getting water for drilling, there's no issues there, but in general, in this part of the world, we are in drought condition. All right, So after the updated resource estimate, what will be the next company milestones that we can expect to see? Well, the resource estimate will be a snapshot of what we know at the end of this season. We'll be by no means done drilling out even the radio system. I anticipate there'll be additional drilling that'll be required to see the full size of the system there.

34:40 And as Kevin pointed out, we'll be testing several new targets that have potential to develop entirely new zones as we move forward. So there will always be an aspect over the next several years of continued drilling to fully show the dimension of the project. But once we know a little bit more about radio and what that looks like, the decision will be made on whether we're ready to move to a PEA or the first look at what the economic potential of the project is. We have plenty of information, as Kevin mentioned, we have a large deposit already to find. We could move to a PEA on that right now, but we want to be a little cautious because that 1st PEA is the first look at the project. It's often kind of the name, the first look that comes out on it. And we want to make sure we know as much about the project as possible. So when we do that PA, we put the best look forward at the first look. But we don't want to go several more years drilling forever to do that. So I think that a key decision will be at the end of the year once we complete that resource on whether we move into a PA and we'd be able to do that rather quickly. There's a lot of information on the project already.

35:45 Great, Thank you. We have a follow-up question here from Mark. He's asking, can you explain the rationale for possibly using the current rig, putting in short holes to chase the Gold Discovery rather than drilling long holes and testing both Gold and Copper at the location? The epithermal Gold target requires a completely different approach to drilling. It requires that we do very short step-outs because that's just the nature of epithermal mineralization. You don't do 200m step-outs or 100m step-outs. The idea would be to do very tight-end 25m step-outs to get an idea on geometry. You wouldn't want to drill those holes deeper because you would be drilling a lot of metres in the Copper system down below that would not necessarily be beneficial.

36:50 It would be way too close to existing holes. It might get you measured might add to measured resource but at this stage that's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to get an idea of what the size of the system is and what the grade is at least at the inferred category or the indicated category. So that's part of the reason why we wouldn't do that. And right now, Based on our previous work, we know that for the Porphyry Copper Gold system, that drill hole spacing of somewhere between 120m to 150m is sufficient to get us into that indicated inferred sort of area in terms of resource.

37:36 And so we wouldn't want to be drilling in much tighter than that. It's not a good use of drill meters. And I would add to that too, that the very top part of the hole is usually quite quick and it's cheap meterage on that. So we'll be doing a couple quick holes that won't really slow down the major part of the program at all, but it'll give us substantially more information about the new target. And it doesn't dramatically alter our budget because the top meters are the chief meters. Great, well, thank you so much. That is all the time we have for today. I just wanna thank everyone who joined us today and submitted questions. If you do think of another question following the summit, feel free to reach out directly to Aldebaran Resources and they'll be happy to answer your questions. There's also more information on their website, aldebaranresources.com.

38:26 And of course, thank you so much to Kevin and John, taking us through the presentation and the Q&A session. I'll pass it back to you, John, if you have any final remarks before we close out. Okay, thanks, Dasha. And we'd like to thank 6 for providing this forum. It's a way for us to get information out to people that they'd like to know more about what we're doing. We understand that there's a lot of information, a lot of desire to know exactly what we're doing and moving forward. And we're trying to seek different avenues to be able to do that. And I think 6 provides us with a very good one to do so. It's a pretty exciting time to be drilling on a major copper project like this. We've seen the copper prices today shooting to where we are. As I mentioned, almost all the major copper companies are cashed up and looking for these type projects. Copper is turning in many ways into a green metal, 1 that's even perhaps receiving more social recognition for a favorable medal to be going forward.

39:19 And very importantly, it's nice to be working in Argentina. Kevin and I have worked for more than 30 years in South America, and Argentina has often been a country that's a little bit challenging to work in for reasons, not so much safety reasons. It's been more just politically or financially how you operate in the country. And they're very much trying to change that image and particularly in the San Juan province. So they're helping us move these projects forward. They're encouraging us to go forward And it's an outstanding time. It's a fun place. It's really tough to get drillers, really tough to get drill rods and parts right now, but we'll move the project forward as quickly as we can and report to people as soon as we have information. I think The new buzzword we're hearing right now is Game On in San Juan. So it's a pretty active place to be and pretty fun area to be exploring in right now.

40:09 If anybody has any additional questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. There's a lot of information on the website. You