Terreno Resources 2025 Wrap-Up

0:03 Hey, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're signing in from today. I saw at least a couple time zones represented, so I really appreciate you joining us so close to the holidays. And that's what this is. This is a wrap up for Toronto resources. I'm lucky enough to have with me CEO and director Rick Williams. Rick, how are you today? I'm well, thanks. How are you?

0:20 Good, good. And I always like with companies that I work with as we get close to the holidays to summarize the year and have people get excited about what we have to look forward to. So that's really the name of the game today. I've got a number of questions that I'm eager to go through. Feel free to ask questions in the chat if you'd like, only if you have something that you'd like some additional clarification on or if there's something about the company you'd like to know. You can also request a meeting with Rick at any time during today's event. You can throw that in that feedback button on the top right. We'll be sure to get you connected with them as quickly as possible. But Rick, enough out of me with housekeeping. Let's get to the good stuff. As we're closing out 2025, what would you say is the most significant milestone for Treno this year and how did it change the trajectory of the company? The most significant event was our decision after doing a strategic review to pivot from pure exploration to a project that has a straight line to production and cash flow.

1:20 That's, it was fortuitous. We picked a good commodity. Tantalum has exciting events taking place, both on the supply side and the demand side and Countrywise we seem to be also having some some good good events taking place. So it's been it's been a good year Awesome. I don't know just because there might be actually I know there are some people in the room new to this story. Can you just remind listeners what tantalum is used for? It's one of the less common critical minerals. So just give us a rundown of what its applications are. Sure. There are basically

1:57 3 fields that it's used in. The largest field is in capacitors, which are used in cell phones, cameras, televisions, all electronics. In a cell phone, there's about 730 capacitors. In a computer, there's about 1 million. So the demand for tantalum in this application is quite large and growing. And we've seen a big new surge of demand because it also applies to AI.

2:33 Okay, that's the main use. The secondary use would be in defense and aeronautics. Again, all the applications for electronics, but in addition, because of the properties of tantalum, it's one of the hardest metals and it can be mixed with carbide to get to almost the strength of diamonds. So it's used on the nozzles of every projectile and rockets. It's used in coatings. It's got all sorts of applications in the nuclear field, because again, because of its properties, high heat resistance. So it's all sorts of applications there. And the third field is in the medical area because it's one of the metals one of the metals and items that is not rejected by the human body. So all implants and dental implants, knee replacements, hip replacements and so on are coated with the tantalum powder so that the body doesn't reject it.

3:40 And it's got other applications. The last one that I came across, which I thought was interesting, was on sponges when they do operations. One of the nurses,

3:51 her job is to make sure that the 20 sponges that are used to sop up blood are removed from the body when they come out. If they can't find one, They can just use an x-ray and these tabs are tantalum based and they can then recover that. So all sorts of applications in medical, aeronautics, military, and the big one is electronics. Awesome. No, appreciate that. I find it interesting. I know the audience does too. I would love to know if you could walk us through what makes this project compelling. I know the few details I'm going to throw at you is, of course, as you know, the US Department of Defense or Department of War, rather, $100 million commitment and the global supply challenges from Congo and Rwanda. Just 0.1 step in the right direction for what this specific project is so compelling.

4:40 Well, what you just discussed isn't specific to the project, it's specific to the industry. So let's go on that. On the supply and demand side, there's been some positive elements for us. On the demand side, the US government has said they wanna buy $100 million of tantalum, which is about 20% of annual production. So that has helped to increase the price and the demand scarcity of it. On the other side, you

5:11 have the war in the Congo, which has raged for more than 20 years. Trump has said that he has solved that. Unfortunately, he didn't tell the rebels that they weren't signatories to that deal. So what you're finding is that about half of the production from the DRC has been shut down. A good chunk of it goes to China. The balance, a little bit goes to Dubai and then is cleansed. But for North America and Europe, they basically have said that these are conflict metals, and they won't touch them. They're looking for alternative sources. So the demand side has been curtailed, the supply side, Sorry, the supply side has been curtailed, the demand side is increasing.

6:05 And AI apparently this year, the number is that it's increased the demand by over 10%. So just in that area, and that's going to double and triple again next year. So both the dynamics on the supply and demand side are really good for this industry.

6:23 Okay, that's interesting. I know the Metal 46 project was your initial focus with the approximately 2850 hectare property near Ascension. What progress have you made on establishing resources there? And how does it relate to your broader Bolivian strategy now that you've got that big exploration license? Okay, well, when we took it on, it was 2,850 hectares. We added another 600 hectares to it because we've got a number of showings on the property that we're going to pursue. We haven't done the exploration because we just got our exploration license this last month. We've been waiting for that. We've been doing a lot of work on the area. We've identified a number of other showings. We've identified a number of deposits that are open to us that we can acquire.

7:15 The belt is about 120 kilometers long with a number of these pegmatites and a number of villages along the way are mining them on an artisanal level.

7:26 We can expand quite quickly. And we've identified a number of people that would be open to working with us. And our technology is more advanced than what the locals are using. So a lot of people would like to have us do custom milling because we'll get better recoveries for the same amount of work. We'll just get more tantalum out of the process. So people are excited to have us in the area. There's no other public company that I'm aware of that's on the belt. There are about 12 Canadian publicly listed companies working in Bolivia right now. That number is going to increase now that the government has changed and we'll get into that a little bit later I believe with some of your questions.

8:12 But I think we're well positioned to take this. Now, as I said, the project was taken on because we have a clear path to production and it won't take us very long to get there. Great. Yeah, I do wanna talk about the politics a little bit. So I know you've highlighted President Rodrigo Paz's inauguration and Bolivia's seemingly renewed commitment to capitalism and foreign investment, which is certainly interesting and great for projects in the country. But how has the political environment in Bolivia impacted operations in 2025?

8:46 And what so far has your experience been working with the government there? So far it's been good, a little slow. For example, we got our expiration license, We were told we have our expiration license a month ago. There's a fee to be paid. That fee had to be paid to a bank. Then you have to write to the Ministry of Mines to tell them that you made the payment. And then you have to get a receipt from the Ministry of Mines that they've received the payment. And then you have to get a publication in their gazette. So we had our license, and now it's official

9:24 because it's been gazetted. And the license itself is about 5 pages long. So it's a bureaucratic process. It's well-meaning but bureaucratic and it takes time. And I find that's not unusual in countries where temperature doesn't change that much, where they have sort of 1 climate. That's in Middle East and in South America. So par for the course, not unexpected. Yeah, no, things take their time. I don't know what France's excuse is for why things take so long, because they do have seasons. But I digress, I digress. One thing I want to talk about is with tantalum classified as a critical mineral by both Canada and the United States, and major funds announced nearly $3 billion in critical metals investments.

10:10 How is Trino positioned to capitalize on this kind of growing spotlight investor interest in the sector?

10:17 I've been in touch with the funds, and both were very interested to hear about... They have already invested in South and Central America, and both were very interested to hear about Bolivia, where they don't have investments. Obviously, for a billion-dollar fund, we're too small for them. But they did take our name, and we have relationships now established, and if we need greater capital, we have a relationship and they were very happy to hear from us. So they're following us and we're in touch with them. That's not going to be our source of capital in the near term. We're going to be more interested in retail and family offices and possibly small brokerage firms. We won't need that much capital to reach our production goals. And from there, it's a function of how quickly we want to expand.

11:13 Okay, great. No, appreciate that. I know after years of exploration work at Las Cuchadas in Mexico with some impressive results including values up to 22.8 grams per tonne Gold, 1056 grams per tonne Silver. How difficult was the decision to terminate that property option? And almost more importantly, is there any possibility of revisiting Mexican opportunities in the future?

11:35 We can revisit it. The decision was made. That was an expiration program. There were some issues with security. There were some issues with back taxes. So it's a function of getting the funding, which obviously for silver and gold and copper now is more readily available. But if we can get to production and revisit it, I think that's the way we'll go. Okay, great, thank you. What has your approach been to financing the company's pivot to Tantalum Exploration Bolivia and what are the funding requirements you're looking at to advance the exploration programs right now? The funding for the last year has been done on the basis of shareholders and the vendors of the property put in some money.

12:23 They believe in the project very much. So they provided us with some funds. The game plan was to get our expiration license, and mainly our title, okay, title to the property. So we have title, we have the expiration rights. Now there's a clear path as to what our purpose of proceeds is. We want to do an expiration program, systematic work, because the property hasn't been drilled. There's no, it hasn't delineated a deposit as such, but we have a high degree of confidence based on the fact that It is on a belt, the same structure as our neighbors who are mining at the local level. There was a bulk sample taken, the results were positive.

13:10 So we wanna do some trenching, drilling, 43-101 compliant with a QP signing off that it that will allow us to do a production decision and that we can do I think in the first half of this year.

13:28 Okay great. There's actually a couple questions that came in over email that I want to address before I go to a wrap up question. One person asked, do you currently have an ongoing financing? We do not. We will be doing a financing in January. We're getting quite a bit of interest. There's a group, 2 groups from South America that would like to get involved and 1 group from South Africa. They're related to our consultant who's involved in a lot of the African operations, which is something we're going to be looking at in the future. So in January, we will be doing a financing and it'll be done in the context of the market. Okay, great. And one person wanted to know, how much tantalum is currently produced in Canada in the United States? And is there a risk in the future economy of it being exclusively domestically produced?

14:22 There's no, as far as I'm aware, there's no production in North America. I was, one of my mentors, I mentioned this in a prior broadcast, was Peter Howe, who's credited with the discovery of the Burnick Lake deposit in Manitoba. And that created a company called Tantalum. That's now owned by a Chinese group, but they're not processing any tantalum. They don't have any. They're processing some lithium and I believe some cesium at the moment. But there's no tantalum production in North America. That's one of the opportunities that we have obviously. Great. I appreciate that. And as we look forward to 2026, what are the key objectives and milestones shareholders should be watching for? What's really, what's your vision for where Toronto is going to be by this time next year, if I'm talking to you again?

15:17 By this time next year, well, the next, the first phase we'll be doing our funding, I guess, we'll need the funds to do the exploration program. The next, the second phase will be do the exploration program. The third phase will be assembling the equipment, which is already near the site in a warehouse, and then getting into small scale production, then doing additional exploration on our property and development of the property. And as I said, we've got a lot of interest from the neighbors to them deliver material to us so that we can process it and get better recoveries. So all of that will be done next year. We're also looking at a lot of technologies because a lot of people don't realize there's 2 elements to the critical minerals.

16:10 One is finding them, and the second is processing them. And in this case, as in many other critical minerals, the processing has been done in China, and they control the processing. So the technologies have fallen. We haven't done a lot of work on the technologies on the recoveries, and that's going forward now. And there's lots of opportunities to get involved in there. So it's not only finding the metals, but it's processing them and making them into value-added materials. And that's quite exciting. For example, tantalum pentoxide commands a 70% premium. And we're looking, we've got the designs on a lab, and Peter Cox in South Africa has control of a smelter.

16:59 And So the refining costs are something that we're looking at and getting into refining, which would allow us to again, upscale in Bolivia. There's a lot of opportunity to acquire additional properties along the belt. We're talking to the largest producer there, who's an elderly gentleman who would like to dispose of his interests. We can expand there. We've got a number of submissions from Africa through Peter Cox. He's got a couple of deposits that he would like to see put into a public company. So we'll see what transpires. It's a function of people, time and money. Awesome. Well, Rick, Thanks so much for answering questions and wrapping up the year with me here. For those watching this recording or in the room right now, if you'd like to set a meeting with Rick, please do let me know. I'd be eager to get you guys connected. But otherwise, Rick, thanks so much for sharing the Toronto story with our audience today, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

18:00 Thank you. Merry Christmas to all, and thanks for listening.