Lahontan Gold Corp

It’s nice to see at least a few people still here at the conference, so thank you for joining me this morning. I am the founder and CEO of Lahontan Gold Corp, and this is absolutely one of my favorite companies I’ve ran in the history of my time in this industry. We’re in the beautiful Walker Lane, Nevada. This company was formed in 2020 through great friends, putting in two assets myself and one from our friends over at Victoria Gold, and we were off and running, and we’ve been drilling and just heads down, heading towards getting our permits to build the Santa Fe Mine this entire time.

So where we sit today as a snapshot, we have about 430 million shares outstanding, a $175 million market cap Canadian. We trade about 39 to 40 cents right now. We’ve got great shareholder base. We have a lot of US and European-based shareholders. We trade on the TSX, OTC, and Frankfurt. We have great volume in our stock. We do focus mostly in that territory for shareholders as we’re going to the New York Stock Exchange next year, so we’re preparing for a momentum heading that direction.

So where we sit, we’re in the Walker Lane, Nevada. It’s the driest part of Nevada. It’s fantastic for permitting. As you hear Rachel, permitting’s a hat trick, as we like to call it, and a lovely dance we do with the regulators. We’ve been very fortunate in that all of our baseline stays we had approved last year. Nothing grows here. Because it’s a past producer, we do have a bond on our property of a half million dollars that we monitor our wells. And yes, we have water. We have four wells with more than double our capacity needed for building the mine, so that’s very good. But a lot of knowns to this property, road access, substation, and everybody in the community of Hawthorne basically works for us that is of age.

The West Santa Fe asset we picked up a couple years ago, this asset is absolutely fantastic. It was a low cost acquisition for the company, $1.8 million, seven-year back-end envelope option agreement, so low risk up front. What we see that’s exciting here is it’s all oxide. It starts at the surface. It’s a lookalike to Santa Fe, but higher grade, and it’s 13 kilometers away. So whether we find 100,000 ounces here or a half million ounces here, it doesn’t even matter because it’s all truckable ounces, so very low cost.

The MoJo asset is a high-grade gold and silver vein system. I vended this into the company from my private company. It’s a lovely high-grade gold and silver, 25 grams gold, up to 600 silver. We have a nice internal resource. I would love to tell you where we are drilling on it, but right now we are super focused on getting Santa Fe into production. And then, of course, we have Redlick, which is right next door to Silver One, the Candelaria open pit project that was mined for 30 years that we’ll look for maybe a partner in the future.

So here’s our land package of Santa Fe. It’s 28.3 square kilometers. You can see the mining that took place from ’88 to ’94 was done by Corona Gold. They did a fantastic job in a very difficult time of gold prices, $340. Open pit mining. The four black circles you see, Santa Fe Slab, Calvada, and York, those are the pits that were mined. All the blobs in around it is just all the resource blocks and all the drilling we’ve done to date. I really haven’t allowed the team to see how big the system is from an exploration side because I just don’t care. I wanna make sure we get into cash flow as soon as possible with the longest mine life. So that’s been our major focus in and around these areas, and it’s worked out quite well.

We just updated our resource, a 22% increase of 2.4 million ounces split between indicated and inferred. These are great numbers. However, Nevada is crazy busy. We have 150 holes still sitting in the lab, which is quite frustrating for all of us. But that being said, this is a snapshot from January. So the results are great, and this will be going into our updated PEA that will be out in the next week or two, and the numbers are absolutely phenomenal, so we’re very excited about that breakdown.

So about two weeks ago, we announced an M&A deal. It’s a small transaction, but it has fantastic rewards for us as a company. As our land package and the pits around the Santa Fe were coming to our border, I was getting worried about a layback agreement for the future. And so I went to Emergent Metals. It’s a small $6.5 million market cap Canadian company that really doesn’t trade well, and it’s more of a project generator-style company. We had had the option agreement for West Santa Fe with these guys, and I looked at it and decided it was much cheaper just to take them out than make payments on 90 claims that we needed for our York pit.

So this deal is very good for our shareholders. It’s less than 4% dilution. We get our West Santa Fe for free and clear and cancel out $1.73 million in payments. We also remove a 1% NSR, and we also remove another 1% over our York pit. We also get 2 million shares back of our Lahontan shareholders valued at 560,000 Canadian dollars. We grow our land package by 75% to 93 square kilometers, which is fantastic. We also pick up two Quebec royalties of which I have interest on already and two properties as well. And then the Fairchild Group picked up an option agreement for Golden Arrow, which has got a half million ounces of gold. So not only do we get shares in that company, but we get payments. If they fail, then we get the project back. So again, a win-win. We make money off this deal, and we really get the land package we really needed.

You can see in the block on the north area there, we’re not only getting that little chunk in the middle of 90 claims, but we’re getting a heck of a lot more. So we have solved that problem. The south block is actually a fantastic copper asset that in the future, next year, we’ll probably do a spin-out for Lahontan for a copper company, but for now, at least we control that environment. And this is why we wanted the West Santa Fe free and clear. It’s 13 kilometers away, all that beautiful mineralization you see on the surface that we’re drilling right now. We’ve got 7,000 meters to see how big the system is. But across the way is Santa Fe, 10-minute drive, so very nice location.

So this is what it looks like, dry, dry, dry. Nothing grows. We’ve looked for pygmy rats. [laughs] We’ve looked for all kind of raptors and to no success, so great from that standpoint. Road access, you can see the Santa Fe pit. That’s the largest pit on the property. In the forefront of the picture, the Slab Calvada Complex that was mined at the end of mine life. This is the low-hanging fruit for us. It’s very low strip here. Corona Gold was just looking for the next shovel before Homestake took them out and then Barrick and so on. But for us, we’ve certainly found a lot of ounces here. You can also see that I’m standing next to a substation on our laydown, which is so exciting because somehow Corona Gold talked Invenergy into putting a substation on the property back in the day. So that’s huge for us.

In the middle, you see two dark areas. Those are reclaimed heap leach pads. We have been drilling these. We have four of them. According to our records, which are fantastic from mining back in the day, it shows there should be around 200,000 ounces there. So we took out a sonic rig and did all these short holes, vibrational rig to not hit the liner. 107 holes, and we’ve had a very successful program so far. But again, this will be added into our mine life for the future. I really call this the giggle factor because about a year ago when gold just kept going up and up and I just looked around our whole property and said, “Wait a minute, the mine dumps, the heap leach pads, there is no waste on our property.” So we’re very excited about this because as our resource sits today, it’s still the third-highest grade of open-pit operating mines, so we have a lot of flexibility and margins to grow from.

So the Santa Fe pit, this is how it sits today. It’s only 90 meters deep, still quite small. That’s gonna become one big super pit. You can see the 50-degree pit walls, so very competent rock. Drilling here is amazing. It’s very low cost for us. But also we know that this is competent for the future. There’s no water at the bottom. We had to prove to the state and federal level that we wouldn’t be hitting the water table by drilling eight expensive sonic holes, putting piezometers down them. Successful, no finding any water, so we have checked that off our list. And as our permitting process has been going on in parallel, we are doing all of our rock characterization studies and groundwater and air quality, et cetera, and all of those are in a line for us to be breaking ground and getting our permit in Q2-ish of next year.

So here’s some of the heap leach pads, and these results came back, and I was thinking I hadn’t had enough coffee that morning because heap leach pad one, which is a run-of-mine pad, was showing grades of 2.72 gold of 70 meters wide, which I’m thinking somebody pointed the wrong direction of what pad to put this on. But you can see this is not geologically controlled, so it’s important for us to drill 107 holes and really see if our data matches up with the historic data, which is 0.34 to 0.35 at 200,000 ounces. So these 10 holes were average a half a gram, so we’ll see what we get, but again, this is just gonna add to our mine life for the future.

This is some of our exploration drilling the team has been doing on the Calvada East and new West Slab Gold Discovery. We believe these are gonna be additional pits, and this again was butting up to our border, which is why I needed that land package, so good successful program for the team.

Okay, so this PEA is old. It was done in 2024, December, 1950 pit shells of gold and with a lower resource. This is contemplating mining about 750,000 ounces, seven-year mine life. For the new model, we will be mining 1.7 million ounces and a 14-year mine life, so the numbers are changing dramatically. But there are a few things that are still quite important about this document. The AISC is quite low at 1,233. We still don’t see it going up above 1500. I haven’t seen the final draft yet, but still very reasonable. The CapEx for this model is $135 million. We don’t see it jumping up much more than 150. This is still with a 20% contingency.

And why is it so low? Well, we have so much infrastructure in place. We also are using contract mining. We’re looking at Turner Mining Group. They’re fantastic. I met with them a couple weeks ago. They’ve committed a four to six-month build-out, building our pads and getting us ready to go. So that would mean we’d be pouring our first button in Q4 of next year, so very short timeline. And then, of course, a rapid payback, and this one shows 1.8 years of $4,000 gold. The new models are showing between 12 and 15 months, and that’s really important to me because when you go to fund a mine, I like to look for the cleanest non-dilutive dollars we can get for the company. I used to work for Waterton, a debt fund, so I’m keenly aware of how great debt can be and how terrible it can be. [laughs] So as we look through all this, we are looking at doing an 80% debt facility and the rest in equity, keeping the project very clean.

So when it comes to permitting, everything you see in blue is what we’ve been permitting. It’s a very weird shape. One, we just didn’t own all the land back in the day, two and a half years ago. But two, we wanted to go for a smaller permit. I’m all about business and cash flow, and if we did this under an EA versus the EIS, it saves us a year of time, millions of dollars, cash flowing as quick as possible, and then of course, we can go for a mine expansion, which is kind of a no-brainer, and so they just wanna know what you’re doing for a six-month timeline. So when you see the rest area there, that’s the second heap leach pad. We don’t need it for four or five years in a mine life. That whole area is already being permitted for the baseline studies. We should have that permit in hand in about six months, so about the same timeline as we get the permit to actually build. And then we simply just go back and tell them we want a mine expansion. So that’s the game we’re playing to get into production as quick as possible.

So here’s the timeline. We’re anticipating still on track for middle of next year of our permit to build this. We are doing this a little different than a lot of companies. We’re not publishing a PFS. We are doing an internal PFS, of course, but this PEA has everything we need to get our permit to build. State and federal do not care if you call it a PFS or a bankable study or a PEA. They wanna know how much dirt you’re moving, how much pollution you’re kicking up, et cetera, et cetera. So this document will tell us all that information. And then as we go behind the scenes, our mine engineer is tweaking everything because we have so much more data in the hopper that we’re all waiting on to get this up to a PFS level and what we’re comfortable with once we get towards the build. 2028 will be full ramp up, and we’re anticipating 100,000 ounces a year. That being said, in the PEA, you’ll probably see about 90,000 ounces a year, but once we get all our data back, the goal is to have that nice sweet spot of 100,000 ounces a year.

West Santa Fe, again, we love this asset. We don’t know a lot about it, except for we have about 200,000 ounces internally. This is old data. You can see how short those lovely holes are from ’85, ’86. But the point here is this oxide starts at the surface, so it’s very important to us. And we went through this, did some network and got very good results, 81% for gold, 60 for silver. So this asset, the sky’s the limit over here, and right now we’re actively drilling it. We did twin some holes last year and was hitting three to five, six-gram rock of gold on the surface, which was not in our database. So this could be a lot stronger system than we thought in the past. It’s got really high-grade silver, which we absolutely did anticipate because there’s six or seven shafts on the property that they mined for silver in the ’30s, so we all know that they’re obviously not mining low-grade silver. So if that really comes into play, then we’ll probably have to put a Merrill Crow on site at some point, but that’s a Hollywood problem, so we will find that out over time. Again, these are the results of our network. I just wanted to do a quick and dirty report to make sure we can extract the metal, and the answer was yes.

Our share price is doing well. We’re hovering around 40 cents right now. I think people are really waiting for this PEA, as I am myself. The volume in our stock is fantastic for a junior, about three to four million shares a day between OTC and TSX. The Frankfurt Exchange is starting to pick up as we did bring in some very large shareholders out of Germany, so it’s nice to see that kind of volume for our shareholders.

We just changed out our board. I love this board, so competent and well-rounded. Anthony Rowe worked at RCF and been very great colleagues for a long time. Moran is at Monetary Metals, so when it comes to doing financing, I certainly have some great people to turn to there. And then Shane Williams, engineer as CEO of West Red Lake. He’s got a depth of knowledge for us. And then Evan Pelletier, he’s American Gold and Silver COO. And then, of course, Brian, the co-founder, is geologist. So between all of us, we’ve got a small, tight board, not too many cooks in the kitchen, but can make really good decisions for the company. We also added a mine engineer, a VPX. They’re building out their teams right now to prepare us for next year. We just hired Billy Cho, who is a production CFO. So we are focused on building this ourselves. We are focused on doing more M&A and becoming a mid-tier producer next year as we go to the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. I’m interested in the reagent economics once it comes to processing via the heap leach, particularly with any inflation that may have taken place since the PEA was completed a couple of years ago. Would you just run us through how you’re seeing that progress, and are there any bottlenecks in the supply chain for those reagents?

So far we are not seeing any bottlenecks. We did discuss that with our contract miners, and they confirmed that we’re not seeing that. We are seeing the ASIC going up because of fuel costs. But we’re not seeing big jumps. That’s why I’m saying that even if I push the numbers to 150 million for the market cap or CapEx, that it’s still a lot of room for all that.

Okay. Thank you. Are there any questions from the audience?

Just in a similar vein, what portion of the Santa Fe resource is non-oxide? And is that going to result in higher processing costs down the track?

Yeah. So you’ll be seeing a study coming out about our sulfides quite soon. We’ve been studying them in a leach technology that I can’t really talk about too much. But essentially, we have tapped into getting very good recoveries of heap leaching our sulfides that we’ll be explaining to the market, which is why our mine life is continuing to grow. But our mixed material and our oxide was processed back in the day quite well together. We get about 55% recoveries for the mixed, and 70 to 75, depending on where you are in the system for oxide. So getting the sulfides up to the recoveries of the oxides will be huge for us. So when people see this new PEA, you’re going to see two stages of it, of about the first six, seven years mining all the oxides and then switching over to mining the sulfides because the grades are great, much higher, and still the recoveries are there with this new technology that we’ll be continuously studying for the next year.

Okay. Please join me in thanking Kimberly for her presentation. [audience applauding]