Whats Next for Base Metals? Markets & Metals in a Post-COVID World

0:09 Hi everyone, my name is Bianca Pachola. I'm the COO of 6 and welcome to today's panel, What's next for base metals, markets and metals in a post-COVID world?

0:19 I'd like to start today by introducing our moderator for today's panel, Stephan Uwano, Mining Analyst at Cormark Securities. Stephan, take it away. Thanks, Bianca. Before we get started, I just wanted to note that the panelists are going to be answering questions at the end of this call. So please submit any questions you have in advance on the right hand side of your screen in the Q&A section. Just in terms of a base metals backdrop, we started the year off with the signing of a phase 1 trade bill between the US and China, which helped to bolster base metal sentiment, you know, seeing copper sort of test the $2.90 per pound level. However, that narrative quickly changed as coronavirus concerns began to escalate. Important necessary efforts to address the pandemic has unfortunately also crippled the global economy through travel restrictions, supply chain disruptions, and government mandated closures, albeit temporary.

1:09 As a result, copper has dropped about $2.35 a pound right now, down about 15% year to date, and it's a move that's also been mimicked by the other base metals, largely on the back of demand concerns. With the COVID curve flattening around the world, we're starting to see the governments begin to shift focus to economic recovery. Just this week, the US Democrats proposed a $3 trillion release bill, which is on the back of a $2 trillion package that was approved in March. While that ripple effect of stimulus will take time to bolster everyday demand, I think an important point is that COVID-induced supply disruption recovery is going to take even longer, which does bode well for the medium to longer term pricing considerations. I think this is where things get really interesting for the base metal producers and developers.

1:57 Then looking even further ahead, we continue to expect that the industry's lack of timely new large-scale project advancement over the next, call it 5 years, will culminate in a significant supply deficit. Near-term supply growth, when we look at it, is dominated by brownfield expansions as opposed to new discoveries, and the industry's inventory of available development opportunities is low. And if anything, it's been now further delayed by COVID disruption. I think another point with regards to this that's important is to remain cognizant that eventual supply responses likely can entail development from lower-grade mines that are located in areas that are higher political risk and or face infrastructure hurdles. And that in itself is going to redefine the industry's cost curve and it's going to increase the minimum threshold or incentive pricing to justify new investment.

2:46 And it's really this widely held optimistic longer-term outlook that stands to dovetail well with profiles of many of the developers out there like the ones we're going to hear about today. You know, with regards to specific base metals, I think a few themes that are worth noting are, you know, first off, you know, COVID's impact originally centered on regions of base metal demand, so namely China and Europe, but it's quickly grown to encompass key regions of supply. You know, think about the Americas, North America and maybe even more importantly, South America. You know, If we look at copper, the metal is underpinned by a 24 million ton a year market. However, a myriad of temporary closures already suggested at least 5% of this year's forecast mine supply has been taken off the table. While low prices have prompted margin scrutiny, a really interesting dynamic in the wake of COVID has been the counter effect of weak FX rates and lower energy costs.

3:37 And again, looking at the copper specifically, a good example is the 2019 global all-in

3:42 sustaining cost curve, which last year was pegged, pegged at 90th centile cost at about $2.50 a pound. However, when we look to this year with depressed oil pricing and FX rates, that figure shifted down to about 2.25 a pound, which has provided some margin relief in the wake of COVID. A good example of this would be Aero Copper, who last week put out their Q1 financial results. They were headlined by a record C1 drop in cost. Costs were down at 71 cents a pound versus a sort of targeted level of about a dollar a pound. And again, that was on the back of a very weak Brazilian Riage exchange rate and low fuel costs. And I think the important thing here is this is a dynamic that's going to continue to be even more pronounced across the base metal sector through the remainder of this year. You know, looking to zinc, a number of the Tier 1 mine depletions over the last 5 years has not balanced new Tier 1 developments, and that's really prompted a drawdown of visible refined inventories which are now arguably at very critical levels.

4:40 Now reduced Chinese refining capacity coupled with high European smelter utilization has never less bottlenecked zinc's journey from mine to market. These are capacity considerations which have prompted a 12-year high benchmark treatment charge this year. That, in turn, is tarnished sentiment with regards to miners' profitability. However, I think there's a pretty firm argument that at 90 cent a pound zinc, upwards of about 25% of the world's mines are now uneconomic. So something will have to give. This is something that's becoming apparent by spot treatment charges that have already dropped well below the latest benchmark levels. And then finally looking at nickel, I think the metal is becoming more and more characterized by a bifurcating market.

5:27 Generally speaking, pig iron supply is used for steel versus sulfate supply related to growing battery market potential. The pig iron market is currently faced with export restrictions in Indonesia and COVID induced closure in the Philippines and a key here is to think laterite mining with regards to the side of the market. Whereas the emerging battery market requires sulfide and or all right concentrate feed, which can also be used to produce steel. But this is material that is not globally as abundant as laterites. In fact, to put it in context, one of the world's last major sulfide discoveries was Voigt's Day in the 1990s. There is technology out there to convert some laterite ores into nickel sulfate, however it's proven to be problematic and expensive, so really we are focused on the sulfide and the all-right producers. In the case of FPX Nickel, the company's large-scale Dakar project is centered around the production of an all-white concentrate that strategically offers applicability to both the steel and battery spectrums of the nickel market. So with that, I'll hand over to Martin Turin, FPX's CEO, to tell us more about the company's project.

6:34 Great. Thanks, Stephan. Thanks for the introduction and the overview on base metals. So, I'm Martin Turen, CEO of FPX Nickel. We're a Vancouver-based company. We're focused on the advancement of the Dekar Nickel project located in central BC. Caution everyone to look at our statement regarding forward-looking statements, which you can find on our website. So our Dekar project is, in our view, truly a Tier 1 asset. And there's kind of 3 factors that we look at to qualify that statement. The first would be scale. This is a very large resource base. There's around 6 billion pounds of nickel in the 43-101 resource.

7:25 And sorry, I just lost the screen there for a second. So that is a resource base that will support this to be one of the 10 largest nickel mines in the world in terms of annual production and to support a 35-year mine life. Secondly, from a Tier 1 standpoint, I think in most fundamentally is cost. We foresee the ability to produce nickel at around $3 US a

7:45 pound, which would place this in the bottom quartile of the cost curve. And thirdly, we think BC is a tier 1 jurisdiction, one of the best places to build a big mine of this scale, really anywhere in the world. Further to Stefan's points on the nickel market, we see that 2020 as the year began was scheduled to be the fifth consecutive year of supply deficit in the market. Our view is informed by sort of a consensus view among analysts right now that COVID is likely to lead to supply surplus this year in the market, given some degree of demand destruction, but that in ensuing years, we should return to nickel being in a deficit market and to return to its recent history as demonstrating that this is a market in a long-term period of structural deficit that requires the development of new projects such as ours.

8:43 This slide gives a bit of an overview over the last 4 plus years of how our share price has performed with respect to the nickel price. Our share price movement is shown by the black line and the yellow or gold line there represents the underlying nickel price. You can see a fairly close relationship there between increasing nickel price and an increase in our share price and conversely when the nickel price is in a period of decline. And we expect this relationship has the potential to maintain itself going forward and therefore for investors looking for exposure to Nickel, we think FPX is an interesting alternative for them to consider. The Descartes project, which we hold on a 100% basis, was a discovery that our team made in 2008 and 2009.

9:30 I think what you'll find in the nickel market is a lot of the projects that are out there are projects that might have been discovered in the 60s or 70s and kind of come back through the development curve every time there's a bull market in nickel. This is still a relatively new discovery. In 2009, we optioned the project to Cliffs Natural Resources. At that time, Cliffs was about a $10 billion company focused entirely in iron ore and looking to diversify into other commodities. Cliffs moved quite aggressively into the project. When they came in, there was no drilling done. And by within 3 to 4 years, they had defined one of the world's largest nickel deposits and delivered a PEA and earned a 60% project interest by spending 22 million US. In late 2015, we closed the deal to reacquire the asset from Cliffs and to reestablish 100% ownership.

10:21 This followed Cliffs falling into a near bankruptcy risk and their decision to divest all of their non-core assets and all of their exploration and development project portfolio. So we've held this project 100% since late 2015. Our objective in continued advancement that we've done in the project since then and going forward is ultimately we think this project is gonna sit in the hands of another major company. So all the work that we do is with that strategic objective in mind. The car sits right in the center of British Columbia, shown by the blue compass star here at the middle of the image. The dotted line just to the east of that compass star is rail, so we're less than 5 kilometers from rail, so very well situated to transport our project ultimately to the West Coast for delivery to Asian customers.

11:13 We also have very good accessibility to very low cost hydroelectric power, which is fundamental for making this a potentially low cost operator.

11:22 And the project is road accessible, so it makes drilling and site access very low cost. We're 80 kilometers west of Mount Milligan, which is a very similar scale operating copper gold mine, a large bulk tonnage open pit mine with a large concentrator, similar to what we have envisioned at Descartes. We also like to point to the Blackwater project at the southern end of the image, which is a project owned by New Gold at the feasibility stage. Again, a very similar project in scale to ours, and in terms of mine design and plan. And that project just recently received its federal and provincial environmental permits, demonstrating we think that BC is very much open to permitting projects of this scale. We have a very large land package at Descartes. It covers 245 square kilometers.

12:12 Almost all the work that we've done has been to date along with cliffs was has been on the Baptiste deposit at the southern end of the image here. This is one of the world's largest nickel deposits. It has a lateral footprint of around 2.5 square kilometers. Another target that we have identified in more recent years is the van target. The van target has never been drilled, but it has a lateral footprint of almost 3 square kilometers. So it's actually a larger target and target size than, than Baptiste as currently delineated. And the samples that surface are higher grade in nickel. So, going forward, our strategic plan is to demonstrate the robust economics of the Baptiste deposit and to expand and do more exploration at some of these other targets, specifically the Van target, to see if we have the potential to define more world-class scale deposits at Descartes.

13:11 This image presents a long section of the deposit. When CLIFS did the PEA in 2013, the PEA pit is nested in the global resource pit that you see here. After taking the project back from CLIFS, we were able to step out to the southeast and follow up on some of the best drill intercepts that cliffs had delineated in their drilling programs. That follow-on, that step-out drilling that we did in 2017 was very successful in expanding the size of the ore body and most importantly showing that that higher grade tonnage that exists near surface really pushes that pit shell out to the south and east. So the southeastern area of the deposit is really the centre of gravity if you will and it will form the kind of the important kind of higher grade starter pit that we envision in a new PEA that we're currently working on.

14:10 A solid mineralization at DECAR is rather unique. Mineralization is hosted in a mineral called or nickel is hosted in a mineral called a werewhite. Those are the small reflective grains you see in the image here. A werewhite is an alloy of nickel and iron. The chemical formula is Ni3Fe. The key property of a werewhite is it's very magnetic, And so it lends to very simple metallurgy, far more simple and straightforward than what you would find in typical sulfide or laterite deposits. So the metallurgical flow sheet is demonstrated here on this slide. Quite a simple process, a two-stage process, first of magnetic separation. So, after the first stage of magnetic separation, approximately 90% of the material of the host rock is rejected to tailings, and what remains is bulk concentrate comprised of the aware white nickel mineral, as well as magnetite and iron ore mineral.

15:06 The second stage of processing is then flotation to separate the aware white nickel from the magnetite to produce 2 products. The first is a very high grade nickel concentrate around 65% nickel. And the byproduct is an iron ore concentrate, which we believe is a potentially payable byproduct in the market that could reduce our nickel costs on a byproduct basis. The table at the bottom of this screen just shows the summary of the metallurgical improvements that we've made since taking the project back, since establishing this new flow sheet. We see much higher concentrate grade for the nickel concentrate, higher recoveries, as well as the production of a standalone iron ore by-product for the first time in the

15:49 project's history. The concentrate that we produce will have applicability, as Stefan mentioned, into either the stainless steel market or the battery market. The important things about a AeroLite is it is only formed in a low sulfur host rock environment, which allows us to produce a product that can go directly to stainless steel producers and not have to go through the smelting route first. And what that means is we can capture a lot more value for our product than what a typical nickel concentrate can by cutting out those smelters.

16:25 In terms of the EV battery market, we did testing with Sherat earlier this year to demonstrate that we can take this high-grade concentrate and produce it in a form that's suitable for the electric vehicle battery market. So what we have here with Descartes is a very long mine life asset, about a 35-year mine life, about 90 to 95 million pounds of annual nickel production and the ability to produce for the 2 major markets and markets for nickel consumption that is stainless or the EV market.

16:57 Quickly on this slide it just shows how our product ranks in terms of global nickel products. The point here is to demonstrate that we will have payabilities as shown in the blue bar that are significantly higher than a typical nickel sulfide concentrate. Sulfide concentrates typically only yield about 70% of the LME nickel price. We envision based on market feedback from end users that we could see payabilities well into the at least the mid 90% range for our product. Again, because it's being sold directly to stainless steel producers.

17:29 So, our product would have payables in range of what Ferrum Nickel and Nickel Peg Iron products do, which are valued for their free iron credits.

17:39 With respect to the production of nickel for the EV battery market, nickel in an EV battery is nickel sulfate or NiSO4. What we've shown with the testing with Sherritt earlier this year is that we can take our concentrate, shown at the top of the screen here, and produce nickel sulfate in a simple three-stage process versus the five-stage processes

18:02 that are required to produce nickel sulfate, either from sulfide or latterate deposits. So that testing with Sherrod was really a huge breakthrough for our project. It shows that we can produce nickel for the battery market and potentially do it in a way that's lower cost and has a lower technical risk than the other different nickel ore types.

18:21 Our main work programs this year are designed towards the completion of an updated PEA later this year, likely in September or October. The previous PEA that was done by Cliffs, we've worn it as a millstone, frankly, as a company. It suggested the project needs 9 or 10 dollar a pound nickel to be feasible. And we have high confidence that the updated study later this year will demonstrate that the project works at a much lower nickel price, based on the improvements that we've made to various aspects of the mine plan and product metallurgy and marketing in the ensuing years. One other aspect we'd like to highlight about the project is the ability of the tailings at our project to actually naturally sequester carbon dioxide.

19:10 This is based on research that we've been co-funding along with De Beers, the diamond company at UBC over the last few years. We think there's a strong potential that through the sequestration of carbon in our tailings

19:23 that Descartes or the Baptiste deposit could ultimately prove to be a carbon neutral mine, which is a significant step forward, I think for the mining industry. And something I'm happy to answer questions about later on. Finally, on our capital structure, our current market capitalization is in the range of $24-25 million. 163 million shares outstanding, no warrants out on the stock. When we do financings, we do not issue warrants. Management owns about 19% of the company, and we have just under 2 million in cash on hand. So enough to complete our PEA, and we envision ending this year with about 1 million dollars left in the treasury. With that, I'll pass it back to Stefan.

20:06 Great, thanks very much, Martin. No exciting project. With that, we'll maybe just shift gears up into the Yukon and we're gonna talk now with Brandon McDonald, who's the CEO of Fired Weed Zinc. And this is an advanced stage exploration project underpinned by 2 very advanced projects, Tom and Jason. And I think, to me, one of the interesting things here is that over the last year or few years, it's been really shown that there's a significant regional exploration potential beyond the sort of the core Tom and Jason deposits, which I really think stands to turn this from a, you know, 1 or 2 deposit sort of story into a district story. So with that, I'll hand it over to Brandon. Thank you very much for the intro. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, as suggested, we are Fireweed Zinc, TSXV FWZ.

20:56 We have a large project in Yukon Territory, Canada. Without getting into the guts of the cautionary statement, just a reminder that I will be making forward-looking statements.

21:07 You know, there's several important things to think about when you're looking at base metal projects, and specifically zinc. You know, what is the metal story? And I'm going to touch a little bit on the story of zinc. What is relevant or why is this project a good fit for the story with that metal? And what is the upside potential on there? And so I want to cover all those things. Without getting into too much detail for zinc, those of you who may not be too familiar with its usage, largely galvanization, alloys, brass, and bronze, with emerging usage in agriculture and battery technologies.

21:52 The major drivers for zinc usage going forward though are probably fundamentally gonna be infrastructure and vehicles. So when you see the impact of COVID potentially resulting in 10 trillion globally in stimulus, a lot of which will be focused on infrastructure. That is fundamentally very bullish for Zinc. You know, as I've told people, If you are an infrastructure bold, you are a zinc bold.

22:24 And so if you hear a toddler in the background, that's my son running around. And you know, for zinc, one of the interesting things about zinc is that the mine supply is very much dominated by small mines in China. So they had a real ramp up in mine supply from China up to 6 million of the about 13 million global tons produced by mines. And then it tapered off after that and has been down a little bit. And that's because so much of those came from small, unpermitted, fundamentally, environmentally destructive operations. And as the Chinese have become increasingly serious about managing the environmental liabilities of smelters and mines etc.

23:09 They have been shutting down a lot of these operations and that's bullish for

23:15 mines everywhere that aren't in China because you know as these mines are able to produce and produce without the burden of environmental regulations, of course they were cheap producers, however, as they get shut down And as they fundamentally run out of supply, or to mine, as they're simply, these small mines cannot go forever. They tend to be mining the top meters of the rock only. That means the Chinese supply is going to tail off and they're going to be increasingly hungry for supply of concentrate elsewhere. And so, you know, with all these things in mind, Fireweed was built as a company originally in 2016 and then went public in 2017.

24:02 It was purpose-built for this asset. It is our only asset. We're pretty proud of the roster of shareholders we've put in. Management still owns 15% of the company. Resource Capital Funds out of Colorado has invested quite a bit of money. Both Hudbay and Tech vended part of the property, but Tech has actually invested 2 million in the company as well. So this is a strong vote of confidence in the project and team.

24:30 And when we look at the project located in eastern Yukon in the north of Canada, the resource that we had there or announced in 2018 was substantially larger than what HUD Bay had thought they had sold to us. So 11.2 million tons indicated, 39.5 million tons inferred, both at around 10% equivalent, is a truly massive world-class zinc resource. To give you an idea of where that puts us in terms of global resources,

24:59 that puts us at about 4.5 million tonnes of contained zinc plus lead, which is about probably the 35th largest zinc project in the world. But we see it getting a lot bigger than that. And the PEA that we put out in 2018 as well, sort of hit all the high points that you need to hit for a big base metal asset, multi-cycle with a mine life of 18 years, healthy after-tax NPV and after-tax IRR. But what we've been telling people is to not be too anchored to the numbers in this PEA because the project has changed so much in the last 2 years, which is something that Stefan alluded to originally. And one of the announcements that we really just got in March during PDAC was that the Yukon and federal government are committing 71 million to infrastructure around our project. A lot of that going to improvement of the canal road, which is the road from the community of Ross River to our project.

26:02 In our PEA, we loaded our CAPEX,

26:06 of the 400 million CAPEX, 105 million of that was committed to improving that road to our project so that it could handle a dozen or more concentrate trucks a day. But with the government now committing 71 million to that, that significantly eroded that $105 million requirement. And they've also indicated a willingness to us to finance more of the road development as the project advances, which is not surprising because this is fundamentally a government project or a government road. We would expect that they would make it fit for purpose for us. And that's important. You know, in UConn, we have seen the willingness of the UConn government to work with the feds to get those infrastructure upgrades necessary to get these projects off the ground. You know, and

26:52 taking that and being able to shave 100 million off our CapEx, and then doing other optimizations, including optimizing the pit size, looking at other detailed optimization in terms of mine plans. Without even looking at the change in resource, we think that if we republish the PEA now, the numbers will be substantially different and much better.

27:13 But we of course have changed the resource. And although we haven't published a new resource update it's important to take a look at okay so what has changed since that 2018 resource update you know we've done drilling in 2019 and 2018 after the resource update in 2019 as well last summer And there's some key points there that I think are relevant people looking at where is this resource going, even with just in the scope of the Tom and Jason deposits, which are what we originally acquired off high bay, there's significant resource upside. So in the the

27:44 Tom West zone, there are areas where historically there was poor recovery that we've redrilled and seen substantial grade uplift. And then there was the Tom North exploration target which HUD Bay had drilled in the 50s but had very poor recovery and seemed to be underestimating the grade and widths, we drilled it and we see as an open pitable target with grades from sort of 5 to 8% zinc plus lead, which for an open pitable zinc project is very good. And one of the things that we've always felt is that improving the open pit life within the project dramatically changes the payback period and the value proposition in terms of development. And then at the Tom East zone, which is a high-grade zone located above the Tom West zone, we hit a step out on 2018, 16 meters intersected somewhere between 5 to 10 meters true width, 21% sank, 13.5% lead, 240 grams silver. So a truly stunningly high-grade intercept that suggests that there's more high-grade tons than perhaps have been delineated before.

28:50 So, you know, when you're able to drill off tons with that sort of grade, that is extremely high margin material, it makes a huge difference to economics. And adjacent, you know, adjacent is fundamentally divided into 2 different sections. The adjacent south, which is the lower bit on the left of that diagram you see here, and adjacent main on the right. It's always been believed these 2 are connected at depth and are opposite sides of a syncline. A syncline we see reflected in surficial mapping, but nobody's ever drilled the bottom there. And we do see remobilization of some sulfide minerals, you know, pressure solution during deformation events. And we do believe that the hinge of this fold could well be concentrated in sulfides, particularly sphalerite and galena, more so the galena which seems to be more prone to this remobilization.

29:43 And then at Jason South as well we see a fault offset that has not been drilled off and was not included in the resource. It did have 14 meters of 7% zinc, 5% lead, 120 grams silver that does need to be drilled again to add that to the resource. So within Tom and Jason, we see substantial ability to improve that resource, which would have an immediate knock on effect for economics. But that's perhaps not what the most exciting thing is for this project. So you look at the broader project. We initially started with about 54 square kilometers, which we bought from Hubei, the Tom and Jason deposits. We added another almost 500 square kilometers for 540 square kilometers total. And of note there includes the end zone, which is a smaller near surface zone, but very high grade. We hit some great intersections there in 2018.

30:33 And then most notably the NID property which includes the boundary zone and some other zones which I'll talk about where we hit. 230 meters true width, the 4 percent sink from surface last year where the first 100 meters of that was almost 8% thick. So that is a truly massive resource or a massive intersection I should say that suggests that there is a very substantial resource possible there. And we're thinking about that you know when we hit this we definitely tapped into a fluid conduit there, an initial growth fault that was likely the conduit for the mineralized fluids. So, you know, the 6 meters true width of one of the holes closest to that fault was 42.5% zinc. And there was a 1 meter intersection that was 62.5% zinc, so nearly pure stoichiometric

31:24 sphalerite for a meter. So there's clearly, although the broader intersection here is lower grade, there's clearly high grade potential here. And when we think about, okay, well, what type of deposit is this? You know, this is not a classic finely laminated SEDEC style deposit as we see in Tom and Jason. It's, you know, veining, stockworks, thick banded veins, matrix infill, that does not look

31:56 exactly like or anything like what we see at Tom and Jason. So what the analogy or analogous deposit seems to be here seems to be the lower parts of red dog.

32:10 So they said this vein horizon there that feeds into bear right caps And it's when it hits this bear right cap and the bear right becomes the chemical and physical trap, which produces the classic Red Dog style deposits. But it is the, the, you know, vein stock work underneath that, that seems to be an analog for what we're seeing at boundary zone. So that got us thinking about, okay, well, if we're seeing that a boundary zone, you could see here a conceptual indication of what boundary zone looks like. So what does that mean? Is there a horizon above this? Is that mineralized or fluid rich system plumbed into that? And is it producing the massive zinc-lead sulfides as you see at Tom and Jason and Red Dog? And that's what we've been looking for in this region. And it's not to say that the boundary zone style mineralization hosted in the volcanics and conglomerates and diamictites

33:02 isn't potentially highly viable. It's also that we want to look for the other style of mineralization too. So within the broader NID area, you know, we see the boundary zone which is highlighted in the middle there. We see a Western boundary zone where we are getting indications of barite. We see barite now crop. We see barite soil anomalies. But then we also have other zones, the volcanic zone, the bog zone, 11 Creek to the West, and a zinc moss showing up in the North, which suggests that there's a lot more going on here than just the boundary zone.

33:36 And so in terms of zinc anomalies, now zinc you have to be careful depending on the acidity of the water. It is can be quite mobilized but we do see a strong zinc anomaly right over boundary zone. We see 1 near the volcanic zone, bog zone, and over at 11 Creek. And barite as well, in particular if you're looking for those barite caps, we see a very strong barium anomaly to the west of boundary zone that suggests that that lower feeder style system may be plumbed into a barite cap

34:15 there. But this is the challenge to us. You know, much of this is, you look at the green there is glacial or glacial fluvial cover. So the challenge for us is to how do we look through that, what geochemical and geophysical methods are available to us to make sure that or to allow us to peer through it and find new deposits there. So we think there's immense potential here. We see you know in the boundary zone area a 2 kilometer lateral strike of mineralized drill holes, 11 Creek,

34:51 Cominco drilled 2 holes into that. The second hole terminated in zinc mineralization, which they didn't realize at the time. And then they never came back to redrill that. So we see an immense potential to grow a really truly massive resource in the western part of the property in the boundary zone area that could take, you know, when added to Tom and Jason, make this easily a top 10 zinc mine in the world.

35:18 And that's it. Thank you. Great, thanks very much, Brandon. Yeah, exciting times, especially with that red dog analog. It's quite intriguing. I guess we'll stay in the Yukon now but shift our focus over to copper and We're going to be talking with Paul Westels, who's the CEO of Western Copper and Gold. This is a very advanced stage, well-defined,

35:39 very large-scale copper porphyry project that's through feasibility, a lot of engineering. Having said that, though, some recent exploration actually suggested it could be even bigger. We'll hear about that from Paul. The one thing that really intrigues me about this one as well is that it's Western Copper, but don't forget the gold. This thing on paper will produce a lot of gold, hundreds of thousands of ounces of gold per year, if and when in production. And we're talking about a profile on the gold side that would rival that of many

36:09 mid-tier to larger scale gold producers out there. So base metals with a lot of gold along for the ride makes this one quite interesting from a both the margin perspective and just an overall attractiveness to both base metal majors and gold majors. So I'll leave it with that. All right well thank you very much Stephan and yeah with no further ado I'll kick off just quickly for those of you who haven't been up in the Yukon, this is what the top of our deposit looks like. I will be making forward-looking statements, so please review this before making any investment. To get some of the key things out of the way here, we're traded on both the TSX and the NYC American, so one of the things I tell investors if they're looking for our volume, Make sure you look at the U.S. We trade actually probably, well we definitely trade more in the U.S. Than we do in Canada.

37:08 We started the year, we raised some money, so a little over $3.5 million. We just announced last Friday a flow-through raise of $3.3 million, which we increased on Monday to $4.5 million. So we expect to close that in a couple of months. So we're well-funded. Share price, May 1st we were $0.91. Yesterday we were $1. So that gives us a market cap of around 100 million. Where are the shares? Management board has 8%. The bulk of that is with our chairman, Dale Corman, a group of private high net worth investors and there's really maybe half a dozen key people there represent the bulk of our shareholders.

37:57 There is a royalty in the project. Cisco has a 2.75% NSR and they've been a good partner and have contributed in a number of our financings as we go back. So this is a really great time to look at Western Copper and Gold and the casino story. We're starting off with a significant copper and gold project, feasibility study on it that suggests great economics. We're in the Yukon with a clear path permitting, and we've had some really good exploration success recently last year, which I'll be talking more about. Found a new gold zone and another porphyry to the north of us, and then we acquired a project next to us which has a bunch more exploration targets as well.

38:46 And so at this point we've got, you know, a nice path to move forward. Continue developing those projects, work to update the feasibility study, and then get back into permitting. So here's the headline numbers. The top row is the reserve, the bottom row is the inferred resource, but in total you're looking at 18 million ounces of gold and 10 billion pounds of copper. So this is a significant, as Stephan said at the beginning, it's a significant copper project but it's also a significant gold project. And of course in these times when you have gold at $1,700 and copper bouncing around sort of $225 to $235, we're actually western gold and copper, not western copper and gold. This graph here shows the projected revenue from the feasibility study from the mine initially.

39:37 As this shows, you're looking at 49% of the revenue from gold, 39% from copper, and then the balance from moly and silver. So it's truly a gold mine as well as a copper mine. Take a couple of seconds here and just really talk about the copper and gold space. And first of all I'm going to talk about the copper space And like the other 2 projects that you've heard today, the base metal space in general and the copper space in specific is a different space than when we're talking about gold space. If you look on the TSX and TSX venture and you look at development projects, so at least a PEA or better, that are listed.

40:24 And a bunch of different jurisdictions, issues with economics, There's only 15 projects out there. It's a small space and having control of a large project and as you'll see a very economic project in a great jurisdiction such as the Yukon is something that is a really good reason to invest in Western. So that's the copper space. Looking at the big gold space is another interesting one. The casino project is a top 10 undeveloped junior controlled gold project with just the gold. So I'm not doing a gold equivalent here. It's a top 10 with just the gold, with just the 18 million ounces. And again, you look at these other projects on here, and a lot of them have some permitting issues, they've got jurisdiction issues.

41:17 So again, you look at the casino, it sort of sits up there as one of the 1 or 2 on this page here that I think are really good investments. All right, let's talk about the project. So this shows the cross-section through our pit from the feasibility study. Working from the top, at the top, shown in yellow is the gold cap. That's 160 million tonnes at 0.3 g per tonne gold. That gets mined off first, goes on to a gold heap leach. Beneath that in orange and in the light orange and in the dark orange is the main copper gold porphyry. And so that's 965 million tons at 0.5% copper equivalent.

42:05 But importantly is actually what's shown in the light orange there. That's the first 4 years, that's 172 million tons at 0.7. And that's quite a, I mean it's a 40% higher grade, and as you see, that's a key driver in terms of the good economics on the project. And there they are. So again, this is, you know, at spot prices, so $1,700 gold, $225 copper. So actually copper is up from that, gold is pulled back a little bit, but essentially $1,700. You're looking at after-tax, 27% IRR, and a $3 billion net present value. This is a very robust project from an economics perspective.

42:55 One of the things that I like to point out to people is that your goal as an operating mine isn't to produce copper, isn't to produce gold, it's actually to produce money for your shareholders, and this is one that does that in spades. That might look aggressive, you might think, well, you know, what happens if copper goes down to 2 bucks and gold goes down to 1000 dollars, which I think is fairly unlikely, but even under that scenario you've got good economics. On the flip side, you know, you see gold hold at $1,700. And as Stephan was talking about, I mean, when we talk about what the recovery post-COVID looks like, we can certainly see base metals going up and you start to see us in the 5, you know, $6 billion net present value sort of ballpark when that happened.

43:42 And a couple of key reasons for that sort of in this table circled. One is that early high grade at 0.7, the other is the script ratio. The script ratio is really one of our key drivers for this. It's a big low grade, but it's all ore. You just dig it out and process it and create concentrate. So great project and capital cost here. So big great project and great projects unfortunately have big capital cost. 2.5 billion if you're coming from the gold space, that seems pretty big. But you know from the copper space, that's about an average capital cost. And this is showing capital intensity, and this is just showing that we have on average what you'd expect. It's not particularly cheap, not particularly expensive, it's just what you'd expect for a project of this magnitude.

44:37 So we had this project, good project, good feasibility study, and last year we started off the year and we said, let's do some infill drilling. The idea with the infill drilling is that we had some inferred material, which is shown in this figure as blue, in the pit, drill that out, it turns into ore. So we executed that drill program And we ended up with a couple of pleasant surprises. And the first one is shown here, and it's really the high-grade gold intercept. So last year, the intercept in the middle was the one that we hit, 55 grams per ton gold over 3 meters. And this was now the third time we'd hit this very, very high-grade gold. And it's one of these instances where, you know, you hit it once, it's an anomaly.

45:26 Hit it twice, it's interesting. You hit it 3 times and you really need to dig in and say, what's going on here? There must be a trend. And when we went back and we dug in, what did we see but a bunch of higher grade intercepts and these are the pink dots shown there, which is a greater than a 2 ground per ton intercept, all within the same sort of trend line, all associated with bismuth. And what our geologists think is happening here is that this is an event that happened after the porphyry was deposited and laid in this higher-grade gold. So we're pretty excited about that. And as I said, we've raised some flow through money here. And the goal is to go out and continue delineating this high grade zone this year.

46:15 Out to the west, we're seeing the same thing. Again, you're seeing an extension over here of this high-grade gold, 3.6 g per ton over 2 meters, and this is an extension of this high business zone that we're going to be continuing to look at as part of our exploration program this year. So that was sort of a pleasant surprise number 1. Pleasant surprise number 2 is what we found at the north. We were drilling up at the north of our deposit And what we were expecting to see is that the deposit was getting thinner and thinner and thinner, and we were expecting to see the edge of the deposit. What we actually got there was these thicker and thicker sections, all very thick, a number of them ending in mineralization, all sort of typical resource grade.

47:07 And so what we think we've hit here is now a second porphyry just north of the casino porphyry. We're calling it Casino North right now, and we've just sort of nicked the edge of this. So pretty straightforward what the program looks like this year. Go back in there and begin to sort of continue to define that northern porphyry. The other thing we did last year is we acquired this project to the direct west of us that borders us, called the Canadian Creek property. A whole bunch of targets on this, but really 2 that I want to draw your attention to. One is Casino B. Casino B, again, you're looking at higher grade gold intercepts, 0.7 g per tonne, and that's an extension of that high grade gold zone. And then second is Anna, and Anna is yet another porphyry target that really looks a lot like casino and hasn't been appropriately drilled.

48:05 And we're not done. We still have this is some geophysics and this shows a deep target that we have here as well. So really what we've gone, I mean, in a year's time, We've gone from having this great deposit with casino to having actually a district with 1 porphyry well established, nicking another porphyry and 2 other targets that haven't been drilled. And this is just showing the district in a broader term. And, you know, we've got a lot of big players up there. We've got Newmont as our next-door neighbours. A bunch of other guys are up there doing exploration. And this is turning into a really exciting gold district up in the Yukon. And just to add and talk a little bit about community First Nations.

48:53 You know, a lot of these big copper projects become controversial. Because they don't have good communities for it. We work really hard on that. We understand the importance of that. And we were very happy last year when, or a couple years ago, I guess now, and this is the same picture I think Brandon had in his presentation with the announcement of the infrastructure package that came from the Yukon government and that infrastructure package $130 million worth of funding that's come in. The good news is that they've actually have an agreement with the First Nations on the first section of the road and they expect to be breaking ground next year on that, or actually sorry, this year on that. So that sort of hits all the highlights. And with that, I guess I'll pass it back to Bianca.

49:46 Great, thank you so much, Paul. Everyone, come back online and we're going to start the Q&A side of things. So as a reminder, you can submit your questions in the Q&A panel on the right hand side of your screen. But to kick things off, we've got a question for the group. This comes from JetTinder Gulati, and he says, how has the base metals demand, supply, and prices been impacted since the start of COVID-19? And any sense to your future projections? I mean, I'll start. I mean, I think this was touched a little bit, I mean, at least in the copper space by Stefan.

50:35 But copper's been interesting in that the demand side has certainly been impacted, but the supply side now has really been impacted. And so if you look at what's happening in Peru, If you look at what's happening in Peru, if you look at what's happening in Chile, you've had a number of mines shut down. You've had a number of mines sort of reduce the amount of production that they have there. And so, I mean, I think this year, I just saw a headline earlier that they were projecting a 200,000 ton surplus, but that is in a 25 million ton market. So that's a pretty small surplus for this year. And moving forward from here, what's next for the world is going to be, I think, a lot of quantitative easing and a lot of infrastructure building. And that means copper.

51:30 Yeah, I'll go next. Yeah, you know, zinc particularly badly hit by COVID and one of the earlier base metals to be hit with the price earlier in the year being about 105,110 a pound and dropping all the way to I think almost 80 a pound before, coming back up almost to 90 now. Stefano had said that this, maybe as many as 25% of zinc mines are underwater at these levels. I actually think it's significantly worse than that. I think when it was closer to 80 cents and you actually bring in sustaining capital into the question, you know, the companies can push off sustaining capital for a year or 2, but only so long. You know, I think as much as 30 to even perhaps 40 percent of the zinc miners are underwater. So, you know, this is an unsustainable sort of situation.

52:22 And the question is, you know, the demand destruction that's happening for all base metals right now, how long does that last? Yeah, just quickly on nickel. I mean, I think the slide that I threw up during my presentation, I think, speaks to this. You've had a long term structural deficit in the nickel market. I think. The consensus view, this is sort of post COVID coming into play and sort of new demand and supply and leveling that we could be in for a supply surplus this year in nickel, but that we should be returning to that long term structural deficit in the coming years. Yeah, maybe just to add from the analyst side of things, sort of what Brandon said as well, I think one key thing to recognize with a lot of the sort of slowdowns we've seen on the back of COVID, you know, Some have been government mandated, others have just been mines having to shut down on their own accord for basic health and safety and also just broken supply chains.

53:26 The key thing with mining operations is you can't turn them on quickly. Once they're off, they're off. They don't turn back on overnight even if prices do start to rally. Without prices rallying, some of these mines which were just intrinsically higher cost to begin with may not be incentivized to. If you've got a mine that's producing copper at $2.35 a pound, even if the government says it's go time, you may not be in a rush to turn that thing on back just yet, or you may do it very slowly. So I think like Paul and the rest of the group said, the supply response probably stands to lag the increasing demand if and when metal prices improve. Another question about COVID-19 coming here from Trevor R. He asks, have potential investors asked you how COVID-19 will impact your field work this year? And if so, what is your response?

54:23 Yeah, I guess I'll go first. It definitely has impacted our thinking. You know both Paul and I are in the same situation that the Yukon currently has a 2 week mandatory quarantine upon arrival in the territory, as some of our field workers would come from outside the territory. That's obviously inconvenient. I am anticipating personally that that gets lifted before we get into any material exploration work this summer but it definitely does make a difference. And you do have to think about that. And when we raised capital earlier this year, there was a good question as to whether or not we were even gonna be able to get any field work done. So we declined to raise flow-through funds because we weren't sure we could spend it. We didn't feel like it made a lot of sense to raise money in the depths of a bear market if you don't know you can necessarily do work. So things are changing now and things are looking up.

55:21 So you know, it's entirely possible we do more work than I originally thought. Yeah, maybe I'll just jump in while we're staying in the Yukon. Yeah, I mean we're in the same boat. We, I mean, we took a look at our exploration program and about 90% of the people that worked on our exploration program were based in the Yukon last year when we did exploration. And so we sort of looked around and sort of figured that we could get that up pretty high and almost to 100%. I think right now we're contemplating maybe one person who will have to go into the Yukon and quarantine. And so, you know, And this is a result of really, I think, some of the past history of the Yukon is over the past few years there's been a lot of exploration, there's a lot of sort of local drillers and geologists and geological firms and the what not that are based there that allows you to sort of create a made in Yukon solution to do the drilling. So that's, you know, it certainly it's impacted our program a little bit, but not as much as you might think. And then, of course, the other thing is, is that, you know, to run an exploration program is going to be very different. There's quite a bit of additional policies and procedures that we're looking to put in place at the exploration site this summer to ensure the safety of everyone that's working out there.

56:45 Yeah, I would just make a quick point to say we don't have any drilling planned for the summer. We would like to do some work, some field test work on carbon sequestration to understand the ability of our mine waste to capture tails or to capture carbon and sequester CO2. And just a general point I would say that obviously I think Canadian economy is is suffering like like all global economies right now. And it would be I think the mining industry exploration and development and actual operating mines. I would hope to that regulators and government authorities would see the importance of continuing work in our space that can be done safely to continue to, you know, underpin our country's economy in these difficult times.

57:39 Another question here from Giano Danielli. He asked, do you think that COVID-19 will kickstart renewed demand for base metals as many turn to renewable energy and EVs, i.e. An increased need for battery metals to achieve a more sustainable future? Maybe I'll jump in there. So I think the potential, I think it's a yes. First, you're going to see infrastructure spending, I think, from governments to sort of stimulate their economies and that's going to drive demand for base metals and industrial commodities generally. And then I think you know one of the outcomes of this we're seeing in China already is the decline in the use of public transport, which I guess environmentally is unfortunate, but how that can be potentially balanced off is by regulatory push for greater subsidies and support the development of electric vehicle batteries or electric vehicles and the adoption thereof as a way to sort of counterbalance what could potentially be a decline in the use of public transport going forward, which ultimately would be positive for the base and battery metals.

58:53 Yeah, I think that certainly our individual metal consumption, if you want to track it on a per capita basis, is higher if we're all in cars instead of in a shared train. But I think, you know, you look at the US, Trump has called for 2 trillion in infrastructure investment on the basis of long-term debt rates being near 0. China surely will beat that with an even higher number. I'm sure the EU will have a very eye-watering amount of infrastructure investment there too. That is, As I said in my presentation, if you're an infrastructure bull, if you think this money is going to get spent on infrastructure, then you're a base metal bull. You think about what metals go into infrastructure, and it's the base metals primarily. And in terms of the renewable revolution, Copper gets used in every single renewable technology.

59:50 It's a great conductor. Nickel, absolutely critical to battery technologies and zinc everywhere you build a wind turbine or a solar farm, all your galvanized steel, that is more zinc. The green revolution is not bad for miners. The recent World Bank report showed pretty clearly that the Green Revolution was actually gonna mean less energy, so less energy extraction in terms of oil and gas and coal, but substantially more metal mining. This is bullish for all metal miners. Yeah, no, I mean, I won't add much. I mean, I'll just sort of say, I mean, if you look at the copper and, you know, before COVID, what you saw is you saw, you know, copper, you know, well, the beginnings of a breakout and part of the breakout on that was the trade agreement with China, but the other breakout on that was electrification.

1:00:53 And you know, if you look at just, you know, what electrification is going to mean, particularly in the transport sector, they were predicting that it's going to be 5 million more tons of copper required over the next 10-15 years. And for those of us that know that space, and I go back and you think of that slide I had with all the with the 15 copper projects. You know, where is that going to come from? And what are going to be the next mines? So as we move into recovery and start to see, and you know, I mean, Elon Musk is restarting his factory, as I saw yesterday, and these electric vehicles begin to go out.

1:01:39 An electric vehicle has 3 times the amount of copper as a regular vehicle. So huge demand on copper moving forward as we move into a more electrified future. Just a follow-up question on the battery stuff for Martin. Looking at Dakar specifically and some very encouraging metallurgy there over the last less than a year now. Just in terms of the CARS concentrate's ability to be transformed into a nickel sulfate, this is from an all-right concentrate. How are you finding just talking to potential markets about the fact that it's an all right concentrate versus say more of a sulfite concentrate, which they're probably more comfortable with and more used to. Is there a steep learning curve that's involved or has it been fairly well received so far? Is there a demand for a lot more sort of testing and whatnot? Like what does the outlook there look like?

1:02:32 Yeah, there's definitely a learning curve. It's a new product in the marketplace. So whether you're talking to stainless consumers or to battery market consumers, they want to understand more. You know, we've published a fairly comprehensive specification of that concentrate in terms of what the minor elements are in our press releases. So we've been very kind of fulsome in our disclosure about that. You know, at the end of the day, it's about the one thing that's in common for the production of nickel sulfate, depending on the ore type that you have, whether it's sulfide laterite or the awerowite that we have at Descartes, the next to last product you need to produce is nickel in a solution form. You need to get the atoms into a chemical form.

1:03:17 And that's what our testing demonstrated. And that chemical solution is very similar in its specification to what you would find as the next to last stage of production for either sulfide or laterites, as I'm showing on the screen right now. So if you can get something to that solution and you can do it in a cost effective way, then the steps thereafter to produce nickel sulfate are fairly straightforward. And so I'd say we've had good engagement on that. People, I think, get the cleanliness and the adaptability of this product to that use. Okay, great, great. An individual question here for Brandon. This comes from Hugh Stewart. He wants to hear a little bit more about your exploration work for this summer. So can you expand a little bit about that?

1:04:10 You know, as I mentioned earlier, when we raised capital this year, the decision was made not to take on a lot of flow through with intent to do exploration because we didn't know if we could do a lot of exploration. There is so much uncertainty still surrounding COVID. What we have budgeted for the summer is some geophysics and some geochemistry, particularly in the western part of the property around boundary zone and the prospects there, in addition to some mapping and prospecting, really to follow up on some of those prospects I talked about in my presentation and better define the drill targets. If markets are healthier between then and now, Maybe we dip our toe back in the market and raise some more capital or, you know, whether through an equity raise or another structure. But, you know, I think fundamentally we want to make sure that we're not, that we visit these prospects first and we give a lot of attention to them before we rush into drilling them.

1:05:08 Great. This one comes to Paul. Jim Beam wants to know which project is better, Casino or KSM, and which of these is likely to go into production first? How do you define better? I guess the one thing I would say, I mean, a lot of people ask me about KSM. It's a large, for those of you that aren't familiar, it's Seabridge Gold's project in northern British Columbia. I'll just draw some of the differences. One of the key differences between our project and the KSM project is that, you know, the KSM project is a very large and I'd say comparably more complicated project. It's in a fairly mountainous region of British Columbia, gets quite a bit of snowfall.

1:06:06 If you look at the access, you know, there's tunnels through mountains to get to it. And with that comes a price tag of 5 billion. And I guess the other thing that I would pause and say is, and I mentioned this during my presentation, the project needs to make money. And they've got a lot of gold, they've got a lot of copper, but I've yet to see economics that really add up on that project for the current commodity price, well, let's say a more long-term commodity price environment. And so I think that we'll see, I mean, gold at $1,700, If that holds here into the future for the foreseeable future and copper, you know, moves back up to 3 bucks. I think that both projects, are going to move forward. Maybe just, you know, you kind of touched briefly on it in your presentation, but you know one key thing with casino to is just the access road itself, which is, you know, sort of a real vote of confidence from the government in terms of support just not only for you guys, but for some of the neighboring, you know, bigger projects as well on the gold side. Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, you know, certainly. And, you know, as as I mean, and Brandon got this is, you know, part of this access road as well. And both of us, you know, it's like oh, this is a nice gift from the Yukon government. It's like, yeah, no, we lobbied pretty hard to get that

1:07:36 money in that road from the government. They didn't just show up 1 day and say, hey, do you need a road? But yeah, and again, this part of the Yukon, it's very simple to build and operate a mine. It's much more like central British Columbia. It's a very simple road, but it's a nice good 2 lane road that goes right up to our site. If you take the road and divide it in 0.5,100% of the first half of the road is going to be government project, and 30% of the second half is going to be funded by the government. You know, the first agreements with the First Nations are in and they are going to be breaking ground this year. So, huge vote of confidence.

1:08:27 You know, we've done all the hard work in terms of getting the First Nations and the community on side with that road. That's why the prime minister showed up and made his announcement. Question here for Martin from Doug Bebb. And he asks, will the new PEA include data on the iron ore byproduct and will the field program for CO2 capture go ahead this summer? Yeah, so we produce or we model to produce an iron ore byproduct to complement the main nickel product from our project, Descartes. We will have disclosures about what we think that iron ore by-product could yield for us. Our sense is that in sort of, let's say today's iron ore price environment, where iron ore is trading for $90 a ton, it would be potentially a very robust byproduct revenue stream for us. However, at $50 to $60 a pound, you may not get margin from the sale of that byproduct. That would be kind of how I would guide people to think about that.

1:09:35 In terms of carbon sequestration, yes, we'd like to do a field program this summer to demonstrate, to complement the work we've been doing in a lab within a field program to demonstrate that, but that would only proceed, you know, if the proper kind of health authorizations are in place to allow that work to go forward. Great. Question to Brandon. This is from our good friend Knox Henderson. He says, tell us more about Red Dog. Who, what, where, how does it compare? Yeah, I guess, you know, like I'm, when we decided or not decided, figured out that the boundary zone looked like the lower part of Red Dog. We were hesitant just to come out and say that because you will see a lot of over-promotional juniors pitch their zinc project as Red Dog 2.0 or their nickel project as Voisey's Bay 2.0 or, you know, whatever.

1:10:37 So it was kind of a measure twice and cut once. And we actually met with our shareholder tech to kind of bounce this idea off them. But, you know, for those who don't know, Red Dog is the preeminent zinc project in the world in terms of resource, in terms of production, in terms of basically in terms of cost. So to compare ourselves to them, we were mostly doing in terms of a genetic comparison in terms of what is the genesis of this deposit. We do see a lateral strike in boundary zone, the core of it being 400 meters, but the total mineralized width in terms of drill holes, you know, traced for over 2 kilometers, yet several other deposits, you know, could be potential there. And that's the thing, Red Dog is a district, and we think this is a district, and we don't, it's one thing to have a district-scale land package, that's just about staking enough ground.

1:11:30 But to actually have a district, as all 3 companies here probably do, it's about a repeatable thesis of finding more deposits, right? Tom and Jason are 2, boundary zone is 3, end zone is 4. If 11 Creek, the volcanic zone, you know, West Boundary, any of the other targets pan out, suddenly we've got 456 more deposits. Yeah, that's a district, right? So, you know, that's critical for us. We make no claim to the size of Red Dog. We just point that this is the same system that Stile generated, and that we also have a district with immense potential. Very good. Question here for Paul.

1:12:17 This is from TJ and he wants to know when the new resource is coming out. Yeah, so I mean, you know, we were, I mean, I'll be blunt, we were hoping to have the new resource out at the end of Q1, and a bunch of things happened at the end of Q1 in March, which I don't think anybody needs a refresher on, But specifically with our resource, the person working on it really was pulled aside to rerun a bunch of pit shells for a bunch of Arizona copper porphyries as copper went from close to 3 bucks to under 2 bucks. So we put that on pause really to go out and raise money. I mean, our share prices has done well and we need to have this money to do our exploration program starting hopefully in June because the exploration season in the Yukon obviously is impacted by winter, and so you need to get in there early for a program of our size so that you can get it done before it freezes up. So we've put that on pause.

1:13:31 We need to raise this money and then we expect it to come out sort of after that, after we close, so probably in June. Great. I know we're quite significantly into overtime, but we have a number of questions left. Are we cool to answer just a couple more? Sure, sure. All right. Cool. This one's from the for the group. And it's from David Middleditch. He says, given the challenges getting into the field is now the time to be looking at other project drivers such as metallurgy, engineering and study optimization? So I'll jump on that first. I mean, I think probably all 3 companies do that as a matter of course, 12 months of the year. We certainly that's been our focus for the last couple of years, in addition to field work is, is, you know, laboratory work on metallurgy and, you know, trade off studies on various project parameters, mine planning, tailings, design, etc.

1:14:32 Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, all 3 companies here have established deposits. I think we all have some degree of expiration upside. But I think what you find oftentimes is that in terms of the NAV or the net asset value, the biggest lever that you can pull oftentimes is what you can accomplish through those trade-off studies, through that desktop work and through some of that laboratory work as well. Yeah, we released last year some exciting or sorting results at Boundary Zone. And we took 2 tons worth of material out of the project this year, sitting in Whitehorse, waiting for an upgraded full-scale sorting study there. So it's in the hopper. We're not quite ready to pull the trigger on it yet. But it is something that you know, per your question and Martin's point, these are sometimes low cost, although they're not super low cost, they are comparatively deliver much more bang for your buck in terms of NPV and IRR than drilling more holes. So it is something along with some other engineering studies that we're working on.

1:15:39 Yeah. And, you know, I think that it's been covered pretty well. I mean, it's as a matter of course of business, we're always doing some engineering, we're always doing trade-offs and things like that at Western. You know, this year, in addition to our exploration program, which we're looking at doing, we also are looking at the heap leach and doing a bit more work on that, so some more met work on the heap leach. So, and this is a good time for that as well. Question here coming from Stephan Burke. He's asking, how has your marketing thesis changed due to COVID-19? I think you're witnessing it right now. Right? I mean, you know, in hindsight, PDAC was a dumb idea.

1:16:32 But you know, things really took off just after that and I think we all feel a bit foolish perhaps about going but you know it didn't turn out that bad but I've already missed 3 conferences that I've planned to attend. I've done a bunch of these things and some more interviews. I think it's going to call into question how much of our travel was actually adding value. We don't know yet. I think some of it still does add value. I think face-to-face meetings add value. I think the serendipity that's possible at an in-person conference that is not possible at online conferences is also important. Some of the best leads I've got were accidental, literal water cooler meetings, right? So I think those conferences are still important, but for this year, I'm still thinking I'll be in London at the end of the year, but that's it. That's my only plan and that may not yet happen, so.

1:17:33 One thing I'd say there is, of course, there's marketing to investors that's important. One of the things, maybe the bright sides of this from a company strategy standpoint is that because we're all working from home, and that's true, I think, so for all 3 companies, we've all got projects that are of a scale, I think that are of interest to major mining companies. And so, maintaining communication with those groups, keeping them updated on our projects and probing them for where their heads at on projects that they would look at. What we've found since COVID has gone into place and all these work from home measures have gone into place, we've actually been able to engage those groups more because everyone is working from home.

1:18:21 It's a lot easier to get people because they're not traveling, etc. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would echo those points. You know, actually, certain Martin's point is valid, and we've seen exactly the same thing. Suddenly, it's easy to get a hold of people because no one can say that they're on an airplane. But I've been surprised that I've been as busy, if not almost busier, with the number of online conferences. Yesterday, it was official, the Denver Gold Show is now going to be, they've cancelled that and moved that online as well, so that's one of the big shows that was one of the last holdouts. So yeah, I mean, it's busy.

1:19:07 I think that we did another show and we had 16 one-on-one meetings, all virtual, all taken right here. And so we're still having a chance to meet the investors, but I do miss those those watercoolers sort of run ins. And less water and probably more cocktails, but and where you get the good lead and you meet a new investor or a new potential strategic investor. Bianca, are there any more questions or? Oh my goodness, so many. I think, why don't we do this, just because I don't want to keep you on for too, too long. But there are so many and we still have 100 people in the room right now. So it's been great to have everyone out. Why don't we end with 2 questions.

1:20:02 The first question coming with from Hakan Tunc and he says, what measures can be taken to fast track these projects to meet base metal demand in post COVID-19 world? Yeah, I don't think there's a way to fast track permitting. You know, that each of us have a reality in terms of permitting timelines. You know, unless we can get governments behind speeding those up. And to be fair, the Yukon government has a panel right now that's investigating duplication of effort and permitting processes. But, you know, the other fast track is financing, right? You know, the valley of the death and Lassonde curve is somewhere where you risk getting trapped because you can't build the momentum to get through engineering and permitting.

1:20:53 And I think maybe it's time to look outside the conventional equity markets. I think that all of these projects are abundantly viable. And so, if your TSX-V listing isn't getting you the traction to get it done, then you have to get a little more creative. Go ahead, Paul. Okay. Yeah, I mean, how do you fast track? I mean, as my VP of engineering always says, you can pick budget or you can pick schedule. You can't pick both, right? So it's called pour more money in. But I think, you know, as as Morton pointed out, I've been surprised at, you know, the interest, at least in our project, and we've we've had, you know, smatterings of interest from from the majors, but it's seemed to turn up a notch actually post-COVID, and maybe people just have more time in front of their computers rather than traveling around the world to look at these projects. And so that breaks open some of these projects as it does bring in that capital and it brings in that rush to fast track it.

1:22:04 And I think that's sort of key moving forward. Yeah, I would echo everything there. There's really in a lot of ways no ways to fast track these things. But, you know, I will I do think in, you know, at some point in this cycle, once we're through the worst of COVID, we'll see $4 copper, we'll see a buck 50 zinc again. I won't speculate on the nickel price. 10 bucks. 10 bucks. Thanks. But that's all the fast tracking you need right there. Great. Final question guys. There's still so many questions and I would encourage anyone who's on the line and had a question that we couldn't answer today, please email us. We'll make sure that we get an answer for you and that we get you in touch with whoever you want to ask.

1:22:54 But for the group, what's your outlook for base metals going into the future? What do you see in the next few years? I'll go. I mean, I think I just kind of said it there. You have many years in all of these commodities of under-investment and exploration development. And at some point that results in higher commodity prices. And the investment thesis that follows from that I think is fairly straightforward. So what's the expression the best cure for low prices is low prices? I mean there's been a massive underinvestment and I mean as Stefan started with, the inventory of available greenfield projects is razor thin, right? Like there's just not enough new discoveries and proven resources to meet demand for the next 10 years.

1:23:49 So the people sitting on viable resources now are sitting on something extremely valuable, right? And I think that the question is, does this looming infrastructure investment and economic recovery, does the sentiment lead the reality? I don't know if we see tightness in these metals in the physical space for another year and a half, but sometimes sentiment can lead that and we might have high prices anyways. So my estimate is mid to late next year, but possibly earlier if sentiment gets a hold of it, as it often does. Yeah. And I mean, the only thing I would add is, I think the other thing that this, the COVID has done is it's begun to expose which governments are well run and which countries are well run and where certain – I mean, we all have these large projects that really are positioned to bring in a large partner.

1:24:46 And so, Canada is looking pretty good. We've had a good response. You know, you look at some, you know, particularly in the copper space, what's happened in some of the countries in South America, it hasn't been quite as good. So I think that that country risk is going to come back and be a sort of key drivers as we move forward and as we need to bring more of these base metals into the market. Great, that's it for questions. I'll pass it along to our presenters and to Stephan as well for any final words. I'll just, I'll kick off. I just, I mean, I think we've covered it well. And Bianca, I want to thank you and the listeners for, I think this was scheduled for an hour and we're at an hour and a half. So thank you guys for persevering.

1:25:40 And yeah, if you have any further questions, just fire them, email them off to us and then we'll get back to you. And I would just add that this has been a great session for us. I think Firewood's going to do our own dedicated kind of town hall style session. We'll be able to get much longer form and much more detailed if people are interested. So stay tuned for that if you're on our mailing list. Yeah, thanks everyone for attending. Please do, for some of the unanswered questions or some of the other questions that were put out too, please do reach out to the people at 6, Bianca and the team there. They'll direct those questions to us or you can send them to info at fpxnickel.com and we're very happy to answer those questions and engage in further conversations.

1:26:30 Thanks guys for having me along for the ride. It's always interesting hearing about what you guys are up to as well. So I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Stefan. Yeah, thanks, David. All right, everyone. Thanks for attending, and be safe. Take care. Bye. Bye.