Dakota Gold

Well, thank you for joining us today and hosting Dakota Gold. Again, Shawn Campbell, Chief Development Officer of Dakota Gold Corp., a company which is advancing the Richmond Hill Gold Project in an effort to revitalize the Homestake District over the next few years. I will be making forward-looking statements. You can read the disclaimer here, as well as on our website and as part of our press releases.

So Dakota Gold has a unique investment proposition. We are a US company with a US head office, a US listing, and a US project. We offer investors the opportunity to get exposure to gold while minimizing that geopolitical risk that you see in the industry right now. We have, right now from a macro perspective, one of the best times to be building a gold asset. With gold and silver at all-time highs, with financing available, we’re excited to be advancing our project in that environment.

We have a leadership team with a track record of success. Bob Quartermaine, our co-founder, has built six mines successfully over his career. We have Jack Henris, our CEO, who has been the MGM of the Carlin operation in Cripple Creek, and I’m excited to be part of that team as we move this project forward through the development stage into construction and production over the next few years.

Our primary asset is the Richmond Hill Gold Project. It’s a simple heap leach project where we put out a resource and an IO with cash flow last year. We’re looking forward to a pre-feasibility study and having reserves in the fourth quarter of this year, followed by a feasibility study next year, permits in ’28 and construction, and gold production in 2029. So near-term gold production in the United States. On top of that, because we were first movers in the district, we secured over 50,000 mineral acres, so we have a high-grade opportunity less than two kilometers away from Richmond Hill, which allows us to take our cash flow from our first asset and reinvest it in our second, third, and even fourth opportunity in this very prolific district.

Importantly, our two main projects are on private land. That is why I can talk to you about a timetable like that, which gets us to production in 2029, advancing responsibly but quickly through the permitting process to be able to build a mine. And lastly, we raised capital earlier this year, so as of June, we had $99 million in the bank, and what that allowed us to do is de-risk, start building a team, secure long lead time items, and put us in the driver’s seat as it comes to how we choose to finance this project as we move forward.

So here you can see a map of where our project is located in the United States in the Homestake District. And as a reminder, the Homestake District contains the Homestake Mine that produced over 40 million ounces of gold in 125 years. On top of that, you have the Wharf Mine, which has been in production for over 40 years. So within about five square miles, you’ve got over 130 years of production and almost 45 million ounces of gold. A district as prolific as Timmins or any of these other gold mining camps, but very condensed.

So when we came into the district, we were able to secure the crown jewels of this district from the Barrick Reclamation portfolio. If you can remember, you’ve seen K-92, Skina, well, we were the third deal to come out of that reclamation group. And in addition to the Maitland and Richmond Hill project, we staked all available ground, bringing our total land package to 50,000 mineral acres. So important, we have our single asset in Richmond Hill that we intend to bring forward to production, but we have our second, third, and fourth opportunity in the district as we look to revitalize the area.

So the Maitland Gold Project that I’ll talk briefly about here is the high-grade underground opportunity. This is a long strike the Homestake Mine in the same mineralization adjacent to that project. We’ve had 47 intercepts where we put out 11 grams over 4 meters, and very excited that we have that quality of a project to follow up after Richmond Hill.

Richmond Hill, when we acquired the project, had over 900 historic drill holes, almost entirely showing mineralization. We were able to secure that project and spend the last five years to bring it to where it is today. So last year, we put out a mineral resource, and you can see there 3.6 million ounces of measured and indicated, 2.6 million ounces of inferred gold, so a very sizable, potentially heap leachable resource. We followed up last year with an IO of cash flow at a conservative 2350 gold price. And using that gold price, we still had a $1.6 billion NPV and a 55% IRR. We were also, because of how simple the project is and where it’s located, achieve a very low CapEx number of 384, very manageable for a company with our size and scale to be able to execute on.

But I’m also excited to talk about how the work over the last year towards our pre-feasibility in the fourth quarter has been able to take some of those metrics and opportunities and move it forward into a pre-feasibility study. So a meaningful production number of 153,000 ounces a year while maintaining a low AISC of less than $1,100 an ounce.

On this slide, you can see more of the detailed key metrics related to our IO with cash flow that we published last year. So a reminder, at a conservative 2350 gold price, you had a long mine life producing a meaningful amount of production at 153,000 ounces a year. The grade just above half a gram, but that strip ratio of between 0.6 and 0.44, depending on the case, meant very simple at-surface deposits where you could have the opportunity, and we’ll talk about that, to really target your higher grade early in the mine plan.

It came together with a sub $1,100 ASIC, and one of the benefits of being only two kilometers away from the Wharf Mine is each stage of the project, each component, whether it’s mining, whether it’s processing, we can benchmark to an operation that has 40 years of history in the district. And so Wharf has been operating at that $1,100, $1,200 ASIC, and we believe we can move forward along those same lines with a simple three-stage heat bleach crush similar to what they have. The initial CapEx sub $400 million with a $50 million contingency and leading to that $1.6 billion NPV. But in the bottom, what we show you is that we can obviously flex the gold price, and at a recovery of anything above 70%, this is a $4 billion opportunity where we can move forward and execute on.

That study had this production profile, and the one area I’d like to draw your attention to here is just that in the first three to five years of our IO with cash flow, we envisioned mining at below the life of mine average grade. So what I’ll take you through is some of the drilling that we’ve done subsequent to that IO with cash flow and how we believe we can optimize that to get at or better than life of mine average grades in the first five years. Those first few years really drive the economics like IRR and NPV and is a great opportunity for a deposit that’s right at surface with no strip.

This is a site layout of the project, and I’ll hit again on that term simple. It is a three-stage crush heap leach. We don’t have a tailings dam. We don’t have bridges to build. You can see here the size and scale of the facilities is quite small, the footprint. We did issue a press release on Monday, which further simplified it, and instead of the approach of having three heap leaches, we will have one consolidated heap leach in the southeast of the property. Again, further simplifying it from a permitting, operating, and execution standpoint.

This slide is showing a number of things, but the first point I’ll highlight is that our cutoff for the drill database for that IO with cash flow and our existing resource was late 2024. Since that time, we have put 350 drill holes into it, which will add 30% more drilling, obviously a much higher level of confidence as we come out with the pre-feasibility study later this year. In addition, in our press release two weeks ago, we released all of the metallurgy that will form part of that pre-feasibility study. And while we’re excited that the results were better than what you would see in most conventional heap leaches, we had one area called the breccia lithology that strongly outperformed that average and actually returned over 90% in potential heap leach material, which if you’re familiar with a heap leach, that is a very, very high number.

So while we had initially envisioned starting mining in the north, and that’s why our infill and expansion drilling was focused on that area, you can see in this map where the yellow is, and we put limited additional drill holes into that breccia material. So now when we look forward to the pre-feasibility study, we will have a mine plan associated with that, and we will have a reserve associated with that, but we currently have two drills and we’ll grow to three so that between the pre-feasibility study and the feasibility study next year, you’ll see a significant amount of infill in that really high recovery material, which allows us to already know of what the opportunity is to improve upon the PFS as we move forward into FS.

On this slide, this is a close-up of where we’ve done some of that expansion drilling. We focused on this area because it was very clear the deposit extended to the northeast, and we envisioned mining first in that area. At the time, we were focused on grade and a sequence which will allow us to backfill the pits. Now, as I mentioned in the previous slide, we can focus on recovery. But just to highlight here, one, there’s a clear expansion to the north. We deliberately drilled that at a drill density that would allow us to convert that material. And two, we had many intercepts that were well above the average grade of the deposit. Now, the deposit is a large mineral resource that we published, and so it will be difficult with the 900 drill holes for us to meaningfully impact the overall grade of the deposit. But being at surface, the opportunity is to try to optimize and sub-phase that and target some of these higher grade pockets early in the mine life, again, impacting the first couple years of production and really impacting those NPV and IRR metrics.

So going from the IO with cash flow and explaining the plan that we put out to, again, the important trade-off studies for us as we look forward to the PFS in the fourth quarter of this year, we have a number that we had to work through. But the two that were really going to move the needle for us is the first one and stacking rates. When you look at a conventional heap leach project, it’s an unconstrained processing facility. You really have the ability to continue to increase that, providing your mining can match that. Now, we envisioned in our IO with cash flow 30,000 tons a day because when we came out with that project, our company was at $250 million market cap, and we wanted to show that our project could work at a smaller scale because I think there’s a lot of projects out there that you need to have that size and scale to make it work and can’t be reduced.

What we’ve looked at with that large mineral endowment and with the successful conversion is can we go from 30,000 to a higher number of throughput and still have a strong mine plan and economics associated with it? And so we’re looking at between 30,000 and 60,000 tons a day. The key change there is going from a jaw crusher on the front end to a gyratory crusher. There is a CapEx increase associated with that, but it gives you a lot of mine flexibility, and it gives you the opportunity if you convert further material, like we are intending on doing with our drill program in the breccias, to continue to increase the size and scale of the operation.

And then the mine sequencing where I showed you those high-grade intercepts near surface, the opportunity is to subphase those and target high-grade pockets of mineralization, meaningfully impacting the grade in that first three to five years. In addition, we were very happy to put out some of the network where we really were checking the boxes on what you need to be able to do to show that this material has the ability to convert from a resource to a reserve along with that pre-feasibility study.

So here we like to remind people that this is where you want to build a mine. We are 20 minutes from town. We have a public access road coming to site. We have a power line coming to site. We have 200,000 people that live within an hour of our operation. This operation will have 300, 320 employees. So very simple. To build it, we don’t have any bridges to build. We don’t have massive power lines. We don’t have to build a camp. All of that makes it cheaper, but it also makes it less risky when you’re building that project.

We also benefit from the fact this is not a greenfield operation. We have the Wharf Mine. So it’s a district that has been in constant production for 140 years with the local population and regulators all being very comfortable with mining in this area. You can also see that it’s less than two kilometers from our Richmond Hill private property to the Unionville zone and the JB Gold zone. Those high-grade opportunities that I told you about the intercept where we have a possibility for a second mine two kilometers away from Richmond Hill.

So wrapping that up into the timeline to production, in 2026, we will put out our pre-feasibility study in the fourth quarter. The feasibility study in mid 2027. We started our permitting process from the moment we put out with the IA with cash flow because we were able to sit down with regulators where we benefit from the state and county permitting, show them the project and agree on the baseline data collection.

Just as an example, the water monitoring is going to be one of the most important aspects of the permitting process. So when we came up with our IA with cash flow, we were able to meet with the regulators. We showed them a map of the project. We had designed 25 water wells. During that meeting, we agreed we would move one and add one. So we had 26 water wells to go drill and collect baseline data. But what that allows us to do is when we come in with our notice of intent, which is the next stage in the permitting process, we have already got an agreement as to what the baseline data was meant to be to form part of that permit. So very different from what you would see in a federal permitting process.

So we expect the permits in late 2028, at which point in time we can be shovel in the ground. And for a simple three-stage heap leach crush process, we can be in construction in ’29, production before the end of ’29 and be a producer on that timetable. In addition, because we raised that capital earlier this year, we’ve been able to de-risk that construction by identifying long lead time items. So about two months ago, we put down a deposit for a build slot for a power substation. That is the longest lead time item in the industry right now. It was 24 months, but it’s growing to 36 months. But having that treasury just allows us to dictate the timing of the financing, but also de-risk the construction and build a team that can execute because we can show people as we’re recruiting them that we are financed until shovel in the ground and we will be a producer. And that’s a large part of being able to recruit such a talented team to move this project forward.

So just switching to our second project after Richmond Hill. And right now we get no value in our stock from this project. But you can see on the right-hand side, a mine which produced 40 million ounces of gold over 125 years. They actually drifted out onto our property underground and made a discovery called the North Drift Discovery. We were able to follow up at the Updip Extension where with 60% success rate, we intersected mineralization with 11 grams over 4 meters. So we believe this is another multi-million ounce potential for underground. But when we were looking at how we deploy capital, we felt the best approach was fully finance Richmond Hill. It has a relatively quick timeline into production, after which we can go back to the Maitland Gold Project and bring this property forward as our second gold asset in the district.

We’re very fortunate with the prolific nature. So sitting right above that JB Gold Zone is the Unionville Zone, which is another high grade underground opportunity, different style mineralization, more similar to Richmond Hill. But here you can see, again, with the prolific nature, we’re drilling around old mine workings. We’re drilling in halos, extensions. We will be putting a small campaign against this to come out with an initial resource just to show people the high grade potential and the second and third asset in our portfolio, despite being a junior.

From a valuation perspective, I showed you on an NPV basis about a $4 billion opportunity earlier based on the eye with cash flow. We’re trading at about $50 an ounce. When you look at the milestones we’ve got coming out with a PFS and having a reserve, coming out with our FS and having further de-risked it, being in the permitting process. These are all key milestones that are in the company’s control. It’s about execution. And all of these are factors which we believe help increase that EV per ounce and move us to the left. When you look at 150,000 ounces of production, and we’ve talked about ways where the pre-feasibility study could have a meaningful impact and potentially increase that, you can also see that 150,000 ounces is worth 2.3 billion based on an average market cap. But being a US based company with a US asset, there’s the opportunity to trade at a premium to that as well.

On this slide, you can see our share cap table. Very prudent with how we’ve deployed our capital. So we’ve got to where we are today with only 134 million shares outstanding, essentially no dilutive securities. $800 million US market cap with a hundred million dollars in the bank. This last year, we’ve gone from three analysts to seven, which has been a great trajectory, and then a very blue-chip shareholder registry with Bob Quartermaine, our founder, being number one, but some great funds. When we did our financing earlier this year, it was oversubscribed, and we were able to make sure we put those funds into safe hands.

So just as a recap, a lot of work. 350 million raised, 250 deployed to date to get Richmond Hill and our other projects to where it is. Pre-feasibility study later this year, feasibility in ’27 with permits and construction in ’28, production in 2029. So very excited over the next couple years to take this project and become a producer in the home state district. Perfect.