Astral Resources

Karl, how you going? All right. Okay, well thanks for that introduction, Karl. I love the idea of traveling 16,000 kilometers to be introduced from someone from Perth who lives probably less than 10 k’s from where I live. But anyway, let’s do this. So Astral Resources’ first time presenting here at Denver.

As some high-level background, Astral, we are developing the Mandilla Gold Project. It is located 70 kilometers south of Kal in the goldfields of WA. The project consists of Mandilla, Spargoville, and Fayville, and it hosts 2.1 million ounces at 1 gram per tonne. All of this will feed into a 2.75 million tonne per annum process plant, which is a conventional three million gold plant to be located at Mandilla. That was all detailed in our pre-feasibility that was published in June of 2025, and it will be superseded in the March quarter of next year when we publish our DFS.

We are currently drilling at Mandilla. We have two drill rigs there, one diamond rig which is testing the Thea Deeps, which is our cornerstone 1.4 million ounce deposit, and an RC rig, also at Thea, which is completing a 12-by-12 meter infill program to de-risk the first 16 months of mine production. So to date, the Thea Deeps program has been extremely successful. We have demonstrated the potential to almost double the vertical extent of the gold mineralization there, and the RC program is certainly meeting expectations with the averaged assay grade of all the reported intervals so far well above the mineral resource grade.

So from an investment highlights perspective, I think the equation is actually relatively simple. This is the West Australian Goldfields. It is a great jurisdiction. It has a relatively stable political landscape. The community is strongly supportive of mining, and the area is rich in established infrastructure. As I said earlier, we have 1.2 million... oh, sorry, 2.1 million ounces at 1 gram. This will continue to grow with resource updates at Spargoville, which should be out in the next week or so, Camperman in the December quarter, and then Thea early next year.

The pre-feas did point to 12 years at close to 100,000 ounces per annum of gold production. Even at a base case of a US gold price of $2,975, the project had a 12-month payback and a $1 billion net present value in US dollar terms. At today’s gold price, notwithstanding the 3% drop last night, that’s close to $2 billion in US net present value. We are well-funded to complete the DFS and move into development. We’ve got US$46 million in the bank and line of sight on another US$35 million with the early revenue opportunity at Fayville. That DFS is in progress and will be completed in the March quarter. And certainly, at the moment, we are very cheap compared to our peers.

So focusing on Mandilla, you can see the location’s 70 kilometers south of Kalgoorlie, and it is 600 kilometers east of Perth. In the pre-feas, the mine was operating for 13 years and the plant for close to 20 years. A long-lived, high-margin, open-pit gold mine. The process plant is a conventional three milling plant, and it is a conventional large-scale open-pit mine. The deposits all exhibit very high metallurgical recoveries, so 95% recovery, a 150 micron grind, so a very coarse grind, which will lend itself to pretty cost-effective processing.

At Thea, we have demonstrated the ore body remains open at depth. The Thea Deeps diamond drill program is continuing to return typical Thea-style mineralization well below the current mineral resource estimate. As I said, double the vertical extent. The Spargoville tenure also represents additional upside, and so does Camperman. Both of those areas we’ll be drilling in the next couple of weeks.

Corporately, we are well-funded, US$46 million in the bank. With that early mining opportunity coming in from Fayville, we expect to be able to top up our bank balance. Relatively well-supported from an analyst coverage perspective. The share price did cop a smack post the Iran war. It is certainly starting to bounce back. But it does present a very unique opportunity to invest in a developer, given we are so cheap compared to our peers.

So if I look at the developer peer group, I will limit it to Ozgold and MI6 at the moment, so 1 gram per tonne open-pit developers. MI6, at the top of that peer group, extremely well-funded now, but bear in mind they are gonna be paying out 6.9% in royalties for the next 6 million ounces. Ozgold, another peer, being snapped up by the TSX-listed OceanaGold. Both of those being valued in the US, sorry, Aussie $300 per ounce EV range, well over double where Astral is currently sitting. We will be significantly de-risking the Mandilla Gold Project over the next couple of months, and as a result, we do present as a very cheap opportunity to gain exposure to open-pit developers in Western Australia.

So from a board perspective, we do have Mark Connolly as our chair. He has been successful in building mines, probably more recently a lot more successful in delivering opportunistic M&A. Justin Osborne was key to the successful drill-out of the Gruyere Gold Mine in Western Australia. And David Varcoe, who’s also on our board, principal mining engineer of AMC, effectively does open-pit development studies for a living. So the board is reasonably well-equipped to steer us as a management team as we develop Mandilla.

From a management team perspective, we know how to run a cheap junior explorer. We also know how to build and operate gold projects. The bulk of this team did take Egan Street’s Rothsay Gold Project all the way through to fully permitted, and were successfully bought out by Vault Minerals. Importantly, this operation is still operating today, and it has delivered exactly what was written on the tin, and that technical work was done by this team, which is now developing the Mandilla Gold Project.

Now, moving on to the pre-feas. This is the study that we did publish in June last year. The mine designs were actually based on a US dollar gold price of $2,100, and the base case revenue assumption was $2,975. It’s a simple large-scale open pit, the strip ratio around 6 to 1. It was premised on a three-stage crush and a single-stage grind, 2.75 million tons per annum, with exceptional gold recoveries, as I mentioned earlier, 95% at a 150 micron grind. And to reiterate our location, we are talking about building a gold mine a mile off a major arterial highway, 15 miles from a regional town that has an airport and established mine workers’ accommodation. So as builds go, this should be relatively simple.

Importantly, at a gold price of US$4,300, the payback on this $160 million development is six months. The internal rate of return is 190%. The NPV in US dollar terms is $2 billion, and the free cash flow is $4 billion. So this is a solid project with fantastic financial metrics located on Kalgoorlie’s doorstep.

So with the DFS, it is in progress and it is well advanced. We have received the CapEx and OpEx costs from our engineering supplier. We’re in the middle of doing that dreaded value engineering phase, looking at the CapEx and OpEx trade-offs. We are focused on costs, but at the same time, I’m not gonna be so focused on trading a CapEx savings for an OpEx cost that I’m gonna bear for the rest of my life when I’m running this mine. So we’re working through that now. The ITE, the independent technical expert, that is underway, focused on the mineral resource estimate for Mandilla. Debt financing will be a critical step for us, and getting an early completion on that ITE will allow us to transition from DFS to a final investment decision as quickly as possible. Detailed mine designs and schedules are underway, as is the mine contractor pricing.

We did announce yesterday a transaction that has simplified the ownership of our tenure across Mandilla and Spargoville. That transaction was a long time coming. It was a difficult negotiation, but it does now give us unfettered access to develop our project and support our approvals. So now the site layouts are effectively finalized, and we’ll be submitting our works approval, native veg clearing permit, and the mine development and closure plan in this December quarter.

From a schedule perspective, delivery in the March quarter, the infill drilling that we’re doing will give us all of that stage one in a measured category by the time we get to that final investment decision. So that’s 16 months’ worth of mill feed at our 12.5 by 12.5 drill density. We are certainly well-funded to complete the DFS and move into that final investment decision process. And as I mentioned earlier, I’ll talk about it a bit more, we are focused on this early revenue opportunity with Think Big.

So three slides on Thea. I just wanna talk to how we have managed to grow this at depth and how we’re de-risking it with the infill as well. So we set out to do a 3,000 meter program earlier this year. Since then, we’ve extended that now to 11,000 meters. This isometric drawing shows where visible gold has been logged with each of these diamond holes that we have drilled. Every hole has demonstrated the potential to significantly increase the scale of Thea. And as I mentioned before, we can already see the ability to double the vertical extent of this deposit. We’re now focused on understanding what is the strike extent of this at depth, which is why we’ve extended it to 11,000 meters.

So the isometric drawing shows two section locations that I’ll just quickly talk through. So hole 263, 16 meters at 4, 127 meters at 1.2, and 81 meters at 1.4. A significant extension at depth. The next hole, 259, also returned 45 meters at 2.2 just beneath the pit shell, and then several intersections all the way down to 700 meters of downhole depth. Thea remains open on this section.

The next section is 100 meters south, so 378 returned 53 meters at 4.7. Hole 377, there’s just the visible gold and the quartz logging on the drill trace there. But those drill results are starting to come through now, and we are very confident that we’re gonna demonstrate another high-grade result, very similar to that 53 meters at 5 in 377. So certainly building the concept to be able to demonstrate how we can move underground post mining the Thea open pit. Again, it remains open at depth on this section.

Now with the infill, we’ve been progressing this. It’s on track to finish by the end of the year. What you can see there is the light blue drill collars are the RC drilling that is remaining inside stage one. That yellow shape is the stage one open pit. It is 4.2 million tons at 1.1 grams per ton. That’s what the pre-feas spoke to in terms of this first 16 months’ worth of mining. We are over halfway through this drill program. To date, the first 99 holes, 11,000 meters, we average 1.9 grams per ton. Subsequent to that report, another 206 RC holes, 14,500 meters, and we’re averaging 1.4 grams per ton. This is a 1.1 gram per ton resource. So it is certainly delivering in terms of the resource confidence we need, and it is meeting, if not exceeding, the expectations with regards to the grade here.

So with Mandilla, we have a long life, large scale open pit. We do have two additional projects, one adjacent to Mandilla in Spargoville, and the other 65 kilometers by road, which is Fayseville. So Fayseville is 14 kilometers south of Kalgoorlie. Three deposits, Think Big, Campman, and Rogan Josh. We have recently completed a heritage survey there. We just got the clearance, and we expect to be back drilling with a diamond rig at Campman as soon as we get the drill pads cleared. And that’ll be following up some high-grade results we got from Campman earlier this year, which included 14 meters at 7, 13 meters at 7, 21 at 3, 15 at 4, and 23 at 3.

So we’re keen to get back into Campman. We’re also updating that Campman MRE for the December quarter. The last time we updated it, it was at a A$2,500 gold price. We’ll redo the calcs at 4,500. So we’re gonna get a free kick in resource growth just from the gold price alone, let alone those new results from earlier this year and what we’re gonna achieve with the diamond program that’s about to commence.

With the early revenue opportunity, we did announce last year that we were gonna progress a funded JV style agreement to mine Think Big. The satellite mines at Fayseville were in the pre-feas, but they’re not core to the development of Mandilla, and this opportunity just allows us to bring revenue forward by three to four years. Now, depending on the gold price at the time, Think Big could certainly contribute around US$35 million to our bank balance. You add that to the US$46 million we have at the moment, and it does provide a developer that is very well-funded as we move into the development of Mandilla.

The native veg clearing permit for this has been received. The mine development and closure plan is submitted and is currently under approval, and we expect to commence mining in the March quarter of next year. Our JV partner in MMS has recently completed 6,000 meters of infill. Our results are on screen there. 11 meters at 7, 12 at 6, 3 at 10, 2 at 10, 9 at 6, and another couple of intersections at 8 grams per tonne. So Think Big is certainly continuing to shape up as a very profitable early revenue opportunity for us.

Now, moving on to Spargoville. We got control of this through the takeover of Maximus in May last year. It made a significant difference to the size of our holding there at Mandilla. We have reviewed that area. We have 17 prospective areas that we are keen to start drilling. The first priority is the Wattle Dam complex. There’s a series of deposits known as the Spiders. We have just updated that, so that will be coming out in the next week. We also updated Eagle’s Nest and 8500 North. Again, at the same time as we did the heritage survey at Campman, we completed one focused on Wattle Dam. We got that clearance as well last week, and the plan is to move the RC rig into there in the next couple of weeks as well.

Something to remember is the deposits of Spargoville will be less than a couple of kilometers away from the Mandilla process plant. So we will be mining high-grade ore from Spargoville and using that to supplement the Mandilla base load when we get into production.

So coming up, we will be reporting ongoing results from Thieyeeps and the Thieye infill. We will continue to do work on de-risking the development pathway for Mandilla. We’ll put out updates on Spargoville and Campman in this December quarter, and our plan is to recommence exploration at both Spargoville and Campman in the coming weeks. Think Big will commence mining in the March quarter and expect revenue in the June quarter of 2027. The DFS in the March quarter, and also an update to Mandilla in the March quarter as well.

So to wrap up, Mandilla is already a long life, high margin, open pit mine. It will get bigger as we continue to grow at both Spargoville and Campman, notwithstanding the depth extensions that we’ve had at Thieyeeps as well. We are well-funded with US$46 million in the bank, a line of sight on another US$35 million. That funding will see us very well capitalized as we move into development. And compared to our peers, we are trading at a significant developer discount at the moment. Thank you.

Thanks, Marc. Cheers. Any questions for Marc from the floor? Might just ask a quick one, Marc. You’re six months away from a decision to mine. Any thoughts put towards long lead items and such?

It’s a long answer, this one. The interesting thing, Jared Engineering are very keen on a single stage crush SABC circuit. The pre-feas was premised on a three-stage crush, single stage ball mill. We are still working through that in terms of our flow sheet selection. Once we confirm that, then we can look at the long leads. But look, we just got a whole pricing submission from one of the OEM vendors, and we’re talking 32 weeks for the longest lead item. So we have plenty of time still.

Sure. Okay. And maybe just talk to the team’s build-out, what that’s looking like as another one of the developers.

Look, our GM is already on board. We’re well enough resourced to deliver the DFS. I think once we get past the DFS and we have line of sight on FID, that’s when we’ll start to build the team. So we’re a few months behind where Grant is. So I don’t need to be building that team just yet. I wouldn’t mind some additional resources around approvals and environmental, but technical guys, we have some consultants that we’re relying on for the process infrastructure and non-process infrastructure at the moment.

Fantastic. Any more questions for Marc? Christian? Go for it.

Christian, what’s the average...

A number that I can talk to you offline. But if you get your plant operational nice and early, I’m happy to talk to you.

Okay. Loaded question, that one. Thank you. Very good. Thanks, Marc. Cheers.