Maritana Minerals

Well, thanks, Kyle, for the introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here in Colorado Springs at the Mining Americas Forum. We are a gold development company, and we’ll be a gold producer in the second half of ’27, as Kyle mentioned. We have our 2.1 million ounces of gold resources in the ground, and we have our jewel in the crown, our 2.5 million tonne per annum processing plant, 50 kilometers to the north-northeast of Kalgoorlie. So our operations are in and around the Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie districts, a premier mining address and great jurisdiction for gold mining in Western Australia. We completed feasibility studies at scoping and PFS level in February this year, and that demonstrated a run rate of 100,000 ounces per annum over a five-year life of mine plan.

We’ve already started early works. So we’ve started demolition works and construction works out at Black Swan. So Black Swan is a nickel concentrator that we aim to refurbish the front end, the crushing circuit and the mills, and then build a new carbon and leach circuit on the back end for gold production. So those works are underway, and we’re currently also well-funded at the moment, just under $230 million in the bank as of the end of the June financial year.

So looking at us at a glance, share price around 77 cents. Capital structure’s still reasonably tight at 372 million shares on issue with a market cap of around 280. So net of our cash, our EV’s around 51 million Australian, so pretty good value there. $24 an ounce is pretty cheap for an explorer, let alone a developer that’s gonna be in gold production next year with our own processing facility. So please have a close look at us.

Our board and management team, we’re backed pretty deep. We’re quite hands-on. So at board level, covering the areas of mining, engineering, geology, and metallurgy, and then the broader management team has deep experience in the goldfields of WA, over 180 years of experience, living, working, and raising our families where our operations are based. So Brendan, our CFO, and Christian, our GM of Corporate Development, are here with me today and at the conference. But I’ll probably call out a couple of other names. Elizabeth Jones, Liz joined us about five weeks ago. She spent the last 10 years at Ramelius Resources and has been running their Mount Magnet hub. So she’s got great experience in hub-and-spoke modeling, mining and processing and refurbishing plants and getting things into production and getting things online. So she’s a great asset to us.

And probably the other person is Doug Flannigan on the bottom right there. So Doug’s our project director. He’s charged with building our processing facility. Doug’s managed projects up to $4 billion in capital here in the US, Southeast Asia or Australasia. So we’re very pleased to have a guy of Doug’s caliber also building our processing plant.

So looking at where our assets are based, Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the WA Goldfields is about 600 kilometers east of our capital city of Perth, around the center of the map there, and you can see our tenure is shown in red. The key assets, the bottom left bubble there shows our Burbanks asset, over 750,000 ounces at that project. And then about a 15 minute drive to the east of Kalgoorlie, we’ve got our Barara project, which is 400,000 ounces. So two of our cornerstone key assets will underpin our five-year plan and make up more than half our resource book.

One thing that’s in our portfolio that doesn’t have any value in there is our Nimbus silver zinc project. So that’s the gray box you can see on the right-hand side. So Nimbus is only one and a half kilometers from our Barara project, very close to Kalgoorlie. It’s got 20 million ounces of silver and 104,000 tons of zinc. So we have a multi-commodity portfolio, but gold is the main game for us.

So our hub-and-spoke model, we’ve got our processing plant 50 kilometers to the north of Kalgoorlie. It was previously a nickel asset, as we’ve discussed, refurbishing it to a gold plant. So there’s no gold assets at our plant. So we’ll be mining from our operations and then road training the ore into our centralized processing facility. So it’s no surprise our Burbanks and Barara assets, our largest assets, are underpinning the feed to the plant, particularly in the early years. And then we’re also turning on some underground projects at our Cannon and Pennies Mine projects, which will increase the grade through the plant and also our ounce profile. So we look forward to getting into Cannon in the first quarter of calendar next year in the March quarter. And then there’ll be other projects that supplement our base load feeds to fill out our five-year life of mine plan.

So that’s a drone shot of our plant as it stands pretty much today, even though there’s been some ongoing works out there. As we’ve established, the bottom half of the page is the infrastructure that’ll largely remain intact, so the crushing circuits and the mills. And then we’ll build towards the top of the photo there the new carbon and leach circuit on the back end of the plant. One good thing about getting a brownfields project is when you’re refurbishing, a lot of the civils and a lot of the labor’s already been sunk. So you can actually get a plant up and running for about half the cost of a new plant. So building a plant of this size today is about $250 million Australian. The other thing is permitting. So we’ve got over three years of tails deposition ready to go and already approved. We’re on grid power. We’ve got our own water bores that we’re currently re-equipping for construction water, and then they’ll also convert over to processing water down the track. And we also have all our approvals in place, so we are ready to go.

So just looking at the plant itself, this is all the assets we’re decommissioning that we don’t need from the nickel process before. Particularly on the right-hand side, a lot of that works has been completed. So the old conveyor trusses, the fine ore bins, and the screen houses and those sorts of things have been pulled apart. What we’re going to do is leave the flotation circuit intact. So we’re not refurbishing the flotation circuit. All our gold ore is free milling and can be through the CIL process. But we do have 220,000 tonnes of nickel metal in the ground at Black Swan. So leaving that flotation circuit intact gives us great optionality to process nickel in the future. And also, as we’ve established, we’ve got our 20-million-ounce silver zinc project at Nimbus, which is also amenable to flotation.

Looking at the refurbishment phase, this is the assets we’re gonna fix up. So new conveyors, the mills themselves. We’ve got a SAG and a ball mill. We’re actually pulling down the ball mill, sorry, the SAG mill at the moment, and we’ll send that off to Perth for refurbishment. And then we’ll fix up the process ponds and the tailings thickeners and those sorts of things. The new construction, particularly on the right-hand side. So from the mills, you can see a piping rack going over the left-hand side of the page that’ll get into the leach and absorption tanks. There’s a new pre-leach thickener that’s already been ordered. You’ve got your reagent sheds and those sorts of things. And then when we’re all finished and done in the second half of next year and producing gold, that’s what our asset will look like.

So early works. We’ve got GR Engineering Services. They’re on the ground at the moment constructing our plant. If we look at the top left photo there, that’s our temporary construction camp. So we already had 16 rooms on site. We’ve got another 57 in place, so over 70 rooms. We are also building our own 60 man camp also at Black Swan, and that’ll be in place by January next year. So we’ll have over 130 rooms in place, and our peak workforce will be about 110 personnel building our plant. The top right photo there, you can see some of the demo works pulling the old trusses down, and you can see the fine ore bin in the background, that’s actually down now as well. So well advanced in the demolition works. Bottom left photo is just some clearing for some backup power, diesel storage, and those sorts of things. And then the bottom right is one of our bores that we’re refurbishing and re-equipping at the moment, as I said, for construction water initially, and then that will also feed into the plant down the track.

This is our Bararra project. So this is the northern pit. So we mined for about 15 months at our Bararra project and completed that in December last year. We were processing at a third-party processing facility to the north of Kalgoorlie. We terminated that agreement earlier this year, one, because we were paying too much, and we weren’t sure if we were getting all our gold back through that agreement. But what it’s done for us is we’ve got a substantial stockpile out at our Bararra asset. So 460,000 tonnes, 14,000 ounces is ready to go at our Bararra project, which greatly de-risks our ramp-up through Black Swan, through that commissioning phase with that base load feed and stockpiles ready to go.

We’ve also got a 60,000-meter drill program underway at the moment. The first 27,000 meters of that were at Bararra, which is being completed, and we’ve probably got 60% of the holes back and announced those last week. But the main thrust of this 60,000-meter program is to de-risk our assets, convert more of that inferred into the indicated material, and de-risk our production profile. So we’ve got three rigs drilling at our Cooten Craig project at the moment, which is the next asset we’ll turn on after Bararra in early 2028. And the graph there on the bottom left, you can see, is just the five-year plan. So 74% of our resource base is in the measured and indicated categories, and 26% in the inferred. And as we’ve said, we’ve got this 60,000-meter program underway to improve that further.

So looking a bit further at our Bararra project, the light-colored pit outline, so you can see, is the mining we completed late last year to a depth of about 65 meters. And then the darker designs you can see there are for our five-year life of mine plan, down to depths of around 120, 125 meters. So as we’ve established, we’ve got 14,000 ounces on the deck ready to go, and we’ll mine another 96,000 ounces from this project starting in July next year.

Our Cannon project is just a small underground development. As I said, we’ll start this in the March quarter next year. This project will add some nice foreground material to our head grade, to increase our grade and our ounce profile as we start up the project.

And then we also have our key Fairbanks project. So Fairbanks has got 129,000 ounces in the study work that we did in February this year through the main pit in the north. And as you move to the south, you can see the Salmon pit there. So that’s a new discovery. We’re gonna send the rigs there in the next four weeks or so and get that program done by the end of November. But there’s a good opportunity to bring another pit into the program. Note there’s good underground potential at our Fairbanks project, and there’s no underground in our five-year life of mine plan at the moment.

So what you’re seeing there is a long section. It’s quite a good strike length, five and a half kilometers of strike at our large Fairbanks project. The red there shows the indicated, and the blue shows the inferred. And we completed a 15,700 meter program and updated that resource in the last month. So you can see the extensions to the resource is shown in the hashed outlines in the red and the blue. And that project is still open along strike and also at depth. We’ve got our new Galaxias discovery that added to the ounce profile, and then you can see to the left of the page there is where our Salmon project is. That will start drilling in the next month or so to grow this resource further.

Black Swan potential. So we acquired the Black Swan plant in February last year through a merging with Poseidon Nickel, and that company was largely a nickel-focused company. But they did do a lot of work in and around the tenement package at Black Swan. So historically, only 5% of the assays have ever been looking for gold. So we see there’s enormous upside in this package, not only for further nickel discoveries, but also gold discoveries, which will be pretty close to our Black Swan processing facility. We’ve got some historic hits there of better than six grams a tonne about 200 meters from the mill. So some good follow-up we can do. We’ve completed a 5,000-meter air core program, and we’re starting to get some of those results back through the next month or so. So we’ll get those to market.

Key milestones for us, probably really focus on the bottom of the page with our Black Swan processing plant. So we currently got that $25 million early works program underway. We will convert that to an EPC contract, hopefully within the next month. We’re just finalizing that negotiation with GR Engineering Services. But they are on the ground, and they are doing work and progressing towards that first gold in the second half of next year. So everything is on track at this stage.

So just summarizing us up, we’ve got a good resource base, over 2.1 million ounces of gold in the ground. We have our own processing infrastructure. We’re currently drilling now a 60,000-meter program to de-risk our projects. We’re well-funded at the moment, just under $230 million in the bank as of the half year just gone. And we’ve got a very experienced team and management board that can deliver this project and to deliver value to our shareholders. Thanks very much. [audience applauding]

Awesome. Thank you, Grant. Do we have any questions for Grant? Grant, I might ask you a couple. Firstly, around M&A, there’s a bit of a shortage on milling capacity in the region. How do you view M&A, and then is that something that you guys are thinking about as you’re building the project?

Yeah. Very much so, Kyle. I think it’s pretty well established. There’s probably eight processing facilities in the Kalgoorlie region, and they’re all full. Where the gold price is at the moment, there’s just no capacity. So by us getting our plant online next year, we’ll unlock some of that capacity. So we can look to opportunities of JV-ing with other companies that don’t have a processing solution. We can look at toll, or we can look at M&A and bring more projects in to our project portfolio, increase that five-year life of mine plan and also look to front end better grade and better value projects as well. So yeah, we’ve got a bit of a war room where we’re looking at who’s in and around us, and there’s plenty of targets we’re looking at at the moment. So I think the M&A space, not just with us, but in general around Kalgoorlie is still gonna be pretty hot for a while to come.

Yeah. And just one more from me. Obviously first gold second half of next year. Just walk us through how the team build-out’s going.

Yeah. The team building’s going really well. As we said, we’ve got Liz Jones on board as our COO. We’ve actually got an offer in place and accepted for our general manager as well. They start in the first week of November. And we’re also building out particularly the underground team for Cannon, which comes online in the March quarter next year. So those work streams are well advanced for people on the technical side. So we’ll look to put our own management and technical teams in place, but we will contract our underground and open pit resources, which helps de-risk things from a working people ramp-up point of view.

Yeah. Wonderful. All right. If we don’t have any more questions, thank you, Grant.

Yeah. Thanks, Kyle.