Omai Gold Mines

I’m Elaine Ellingham, I’m the CEO of Omai Gold, a company we’ve been working on the Omai project in Guyana for about five years. I think it’s great that we follow the Hemlo presentation because when you look at some of these Archean gold deposits, which Omai is one, we look at this one, it’s been in production for 40 years. So a lot of what you’re looking here and the depth of the deposit, I would ask you to keep that in your mind as we start looking at Omai because for Omai, it only produced for 12 years. And in the four or five years we’ve been working on it, we actually initially set our targets at finding maybe a 5 million ounce deposit, and a lot of people thought that was something that was unachievable. So in fact, in April of this year, we put out our fifth mineral resource estimate, and it’s actually for 8 million ounces. So, a great achievement. But in terms of mines, and when you look at something like Hemlo, it’s early days, but it certainly has similar potential.

So I guess the other thing I would say about Omai, if we were in the horse racing business, Omai was considered the high risk, the long shot bet. But in fact, it’s been proven that it was a mine that operated for 12 years, but it was shut down when the gold price was just $400. So the owners of the mine, it was a tough, tough situation when the gold price had dropped to $250. And also, they had another project that they were trying to build just 200 miles away, so they took the mill there. So for a geologist, it’s the ultimate dream. Where there’s gold, there’s more gold, and it certainly held true here.

So just looking at the project today and where we’ve got to, three weeks ago, four weeks ago, we actually announced a PEA. And why we did that was because when you get to a very large resource, at some point, you have to pull the economics together. And for us, we have two different deposits, and I think it helped the Street understand where this project can go. But we do believe there’s an awful lot of upside, and we have five drills working currently. So we also have done some bold drilling, and we actually have confirmed that both deposits continue down to at least a depth of 1,200 meters. So perhaps 40 years from now, you’ll be looking at this, and this would be another Hemlo.

So, favorable jurisdiction. As most of you probably know, Guyana is considered one of the top jurisdictions these days. And as some of the typical and longstanding mining countries have become a little more tricky, let’s say, Guyana has certainly emerged as one of the great places where permitting is possible, and the government and the communities definitely wanna see the development of large-scale mines. So we’re a great beneficiary of this because when Omai was in production, it was actually 35% of the GDP of a country that was very poor. It created a lot of jobs, over a thousand jobs. So it had a good reputation in country, and a lot of people just wanna see this redeveloped.

So we are in the Guyana Greenstone Belt, which, location is important. There’s quite a number of plus 20, plus 10 million ounce deposits in the belt. Obviously, Rosebel, Las Cristinas are well known, and I think Omai is already in that category. So we are beneficiaries of the wealth that is hitting Guyana because of the development of the offshore oil. The road next to us, it’s only 10 kilometers away, is now essentially a paved highway. You can see our people on there.

The bottom left, because it was a past producer, brownfield site, it never really regrew. So in fact, the site is already cleared, and you can see in the bottom left there our warehouses, our large warehouses that we house about 75 people currently. And we have an on-site airstrip at the bottom right. And up at the top right, you’re looking at a 350 acre tailings facility that we have done some studies. We have the original design plans, and those tailings dams were designed to be raised to five-meter levels, so there’s actually quite a bit of capacity.

So yes, a country that now is generating a billion dollars a month on royalties from the offshore oil and receiving about, in kind, 450,000 barrels of oil a day as well. So we are uniquely located on what you see is that road that goes down to Brazil, and it’s part of the government’s vision to actually build a trade route from Brazil as a shortcut to the Panama Canal. And so they have a deep water port planned, out for tender, and we would be just well-located on that. There’s even the thoughts of putting a railroad down that route. So that’s a great place to be, in fact, much better than a lot of the Canadian mines.

So as we also look at it, if you look to the west of our property, 100 kilometers, there’s a hydropower project, the Amelia Falls project. There’s been news out actually in the last few days. It went out for tender. The tender’s closed, and the president’s announced that within a few weeks they’re going to announce the winner. That would be 165 megawatts. Originally, it was designed for Georgetown, but in fact, since then, with all of the offshore activity, Exxon has built a 225 kilometer gas pipeline to coast, and there’s gonna be a 300 megawatt generating plant, energy plant there as well, with a CNG plant as phase two. So life is changing very quickly.

So we have two orogenic gold deposits. They’re only about 450 meters apart. So the Wenot is a shear-hosted deposit, and the Gilt is an intrusion-hosted deposit. For those of you who know Sigman-Lamac that Eldorado has in Quebec, very similar situation. So the intrusion is on the right there, the Gilt deposit. It produced 2.4 million ounces, and at the bottom of it, 250 meters down, there was a late diabase dike. And obviously, those are very late structures, post-mineral, and as expected, when they drilled below, it continues down. So Gilt right now is about a 2.2 million ounce resource, just above 3 grams per ton.

The Wenot is actually where we focus most of our attention, and that’s an open pitable shear-hosted deposit, out subvertical zones, and we’ve drilled about 160 holes into that at this point, and that resource has come together very quickly. The old pit on that produced 1.4 million ounces. But remember, I mentioned it was in the low gold price environment, so they were very, very selective in their mining, and they were really mining one or two of the main zones, not very deep. And also, because there’s about 21 parallel zones, they left all of those other ones, and that’s why a lot of our resource is actually fairly shallow. So we still see significant expansion potential, and I think one of the things I would say is to date, our discovery cost has been about $4 an ounce. So that speaks to how easy this has been to expand, and we don’t believe that it is done yet.

But you can see the Wenot there. We’re looking at the plan map. And like a lot of these types of deposits, it straddles a contact between the sedimentary rocks on the south and the Greenstone Belt or the volcanics on the north. So that is occupied by a very persistent quartz-feldspar porphyry that’s mineralized. But in fact, about 100 meters north of that, within the volcanics, was an area that would be the most deformation and the most energy release from that system. And so that system actually is occupied by a series of dikes. And felsic dikes, which obviously a lot of us know, are beautiful host rocks for gold mineralization, and you have the bitter fracturing, the quartz stockworks, and then also a series of diorite dikes that came into that very active zone. So that actually is probably the dominant mineralized horizon. The quartz-feldspar porphyry would be second, but there are multiple other zones that actually span across 400 meters. So when we drill it, it’s actually difficult to get through all of the zones, and then we have to come from the south to pick up the other ones.

On the right, looking at the two deposits, you have Wenot on the right, and you’re looking at it from the end, so you can see it’s actually across about 400 meters. And then the Gilt, the intrusion-hosted deposit, it actually is not subhorizontal zones, it’s actually... or sorry, it’s subvertical. They are subhorizontal zones. Again, that’s very similar to what you see at Eldorado’s Sigman-Lamac Mine in Quebec.

So we have done a few drill holes more recently into the Gilt deposit, and one was for metallurgical work, one for rock mechanics, and the third one, we basically looked at the Wenot deposit not far away and thought, “Huh, if we just keep on going, we can test to see if that shear-hosted deposit continues at depth.” And if you know some of those deposits in Ontario, Quebec, they often do. So you might say it was a high-risk hole, it could have been folded or faulted off, but in fact, it kept going, and we actually intersected that Wenot shear area and the zones 700 meters below the lowest that we had drilled the deposit. So it’s a proof of concept. Obviously, that was over a two-kilometer hole, but we hit at least seven gold mineralized zones. So the shear was there. That quartz-feldspar porphyry, exactly where it should be. Quite amazing. It does speak to the depth potential of this.

So just looking at Wenot, this is the long section, but just remember, this is gonna be an open pit-type deposit. Our cutoff grade in our PEA was 0.27 grams per ton. If you look at some of the intersections here, obviously, they far exceed that. And nice wide zones, and a lot of those super wide zones are, in fact, in that dike corridor that I referred to. And some of these grades, 16.3 grams over 10.5 meters, 11 grams over 14 meters. When you’re looking for 0.27 grams per ton cutoff, they’re pretty sweet.

So I’ll just mention that when you look at what the potential is, the bottom left, what you’re looking at there is tracking how many ounces are on each 100 meters vertically down into the deposit. There was mining up in the shallow area, but where we started drilling, where there was no mining at all previously, it’s about 1.5 million ounces per hundred vertical meters. So again, you can see the interesting thing. You can see the pierce point in that one deep hole we did way down there, 700 meters down.

So I have a video here that I hope will run. So I mentioned we did a preliminary economic assessment that was announced about three weeks, a month ago. So this just gives you an idea. You can see the multiples of vertical zones in the Wenot deposit and the pit, the constraining pit that was built over that for the preliminary economic assessment. This also gives you an idea of how close the Gilt deposit is, the intrusive-hosted deposit. As you rotate around, that actually in front of us is the camp zone, and that’s on the extension of the Wenot, but we haven’t actually drilled that. There you can see all the zones, the separate zones of Wenot.

So the underground, the intrusive-hosted deposit, the top of that is about 275 meters down. You got a dual ramp system down into that, and we’re looking at about 4,000 tons per day out of that. And we’ll look at them individually. The Wenot would be looking at about 21,000 tons per day, so a combined 25,000 tons per day.

So the basic stats out of the PEA, it was for a production of 6.3 million ounces. And in fact, we had been aiming for about 250,000 to 300,000 ounces a year. During the PEA, it was clear that this mine could handle more, in the 25,000 to 30,000 tons per day. Just a year and a half ago, we were looking at the 12,000 to 18,000 tons per day. But with the expansion of these deposits, we worked with SLR, a tier one international firm, and they said we should be looking at 25,000 to 30,000 tons per day. That gives us over 350,000 ounces per year over an 18-year mine life. So that puts us into a rare category. It gives strong economics.

The net present value at 5% was 4 billion. We used a $3,600 gold price for the base, and it gives cumulative cash flow over the life of mine of about 8 billion. So initial CapEx of 1.4 billion. Some people were a bit surprised by that, but I think most people in the mining business, if you ask them how much it would cost to build basically a 25,000 ton per day gold operation, that’s about exactly the number they would give you. You can see the sensitivity obviously escalates quite rapidly when you get to the $4,200 gold price, which I think we were at recently, but not today. So for a 5.5 billion net present value and the 30% IRR and the 3.4-year payback period.

So I’ll just skip over that, but we did do a quick PEA a couple years ago. It’s interesting. That was just two years ago, and we were looking at a production of 1.8 million ounces. Two years later, we’re looking at a PEA for 6.3 million ounces. Gives you an idea of how quickly this came together. Here on the left, I would just say that the analysts’ view on our PEA were quite positive. They were saying we’re basically a globally rare development asset, room for optimization, globally relevant scale, and one of the best undeveloped projects in the sector.

So if you look at the left, that’s the production profile there in the yellow. You’re looking at the open pit that would be producing around 240,000 ounces a year, and the brown at the top is the open pit, or sorry, is the underground. And the underground is about three times the grade of the open pit. So you can see the first two years actually, because we’re cranking it up at the 25,000 tons per day, it ends up your pre-strip before you start, you pretty much have to put it all through the plant. So this is why we waffled on should we be looking at a 20,000 ton per day operation. But for us, I think we have to look to the future because we still see that there’s a lot of work to do and to expand this. So obviously, those two years actually suppress the net present value quite profoundly because the production’s lower, and you’re putting the lower grade pre-strip into that. So these are some of the things we’re going to address as we move forward very quickly. And we will look at a few of them.

One of the things is, so the Wenot open pit, I think it’s fair calling it a super pit. It’s gonna be 2.4 kilometers by 1.1 by 550 meters deep. One of the things that surprised the market was, as we had expanded in the last two years from that other PEA, there was lots of speculation that the strip ratio was gonna be 10 or 11 just because we were deeper. But remember all those subparallel zones. So we started drilling some of the zones from the south to fill them in because otherwise they would be waste. They’re lower grade than the dike corridor, but they’re still running 1 or 1.2 grams per ton. And some people’s whole mines are that grade or less. So in fact, that is what contributed to bringing that strip ratio down. So when you look at other super pits, like if you look at Kalgoorlie, a strip ratio of 6 is what you would expect for a very large pit like that.

So we know there’s a starter pit at the west end because that was never mined before. And so that is where you would start, and there’s higher grade zones that come right to surface. So rescheduling on some of the plan as we move forward is gonna address some of that. You can see in the lower right, in the cross-section, there are still ounces and parts of the deposit on the west and east that need additional drilling to pull those in. Remember the west side is where our starter pit is, so we do have some drilling going on there currently.

So the underground, this is a very robust deposit. And remember, it’s an intrusion, so it’s like a cylindrical deposit. On the right, it gives you an idea looking down at it from above. In fact, you’re looking at 400 to 500 meters across. As you know, a lot of gold deposits are tabular, fairly narrow. That’s quite a footprint. In fact, it runs about an average of 4,600 ounces per vertical meter. They always used to quote deposits like that, and the average for underground you always see is about 2,300 ounces per vertical meter. So we have thick zones.

In the PEA, it was all done assuming drift and fill mining because although most of the deposits within that intrusion, there are fingers that come out into the surrounding wall rock. And so to catch all of those, the consultants felt it should be drift and fill, and for a PEA, they wanted to keep it simple, so they put it as drift and fill. We certainly know that the operating costs are gonna come down as this gets engineered in detail to be a combination of blended mining rate that would be stopes in the middle, the brain scan you see there. The purple is actually over 5 grams, the red 2 to 5 and below that. But some of those go 100 meters vertically, so there’s gonna be a blended mining rate, which is a much more economic way to run an underground.

So next steps, we are expecting to do an updated mineral resource estimate this year before year-end. That’s our target. And then a lot of the PEA work, I hope you can see that there’s a pretty clear path to optimize some of this and keep expanding that deposit. I can just say that when you’re discovering ounces at $4 an ounce, there’s probably a lot more in the system, and you’ve seen that these continue at depth. It was a past-producing site, so we can advance some of the other studies. The tailings expansion work and, we’ve already applied for the EIA, and so the terms and scope come through shortly, and then we can continue on our baseline studies. We’ve already done quite a few of them. And in Guyana, there’s another project in country that I believe started construction before they even had their EIA done and approved, so the government is very keen to see these developed. Permitting is not gonna be what slows you down.

We are drilling quite aggressively. All the ones with the numbered holes there that you can see, 80 holes, they are not in the mineral resource estimate we did in April, which is why we say we will probably be doing an update. You can’t really drill Wenot without expanding it, but we are trying to bring some of the inferred into indicated as well, and that’s gonna be needed as we push forward towards a PFS. I would say we do stand out on our peers. Over 350,000 ounces, not too many at that level, and our 8 million ounces, you’ll note that even compared with peer companies, the average grade comes out around 1.7, especially in this gold price environment. Nothing you would complain about. Our P/NAV, very low right now.

That compared with our peers and, in fact, some of the other recent acquisitions, including one in country who has around a 0.6 NAV. So we think that as we continue forward in the recognition of the potential here and we get to some of these milestones that will certainly see some upside.

Yeah, so corporately, again, we just got into the GDXJ like some other companies, a whole list of them. We actually have profoundly outperformed the GDXJ this year. We’re up 81%, and I guess the GDXJ up about 6% or 7%. So, not a lot. We have about 650 million shares outstanding, not a lot of warrants or options, and sitting at a market cap of about C$1.5 billion, and we have a cash position of C$38 million. So ample to do what we’re doing. Our drill costs are low and, as I said, high-impact work, so.

Brilliant. That’s it. Thanks, Elaine. We’ve got time for one quick question. Yep, at the front here, please. The mic’s just coming.

How much strike along the Wayknote share has, and within your property has not yet been drilled?

It extends about… So we’ve drilled it along 2.5 kilometers and then another patch of it over about half a kilometer. There’s probably about four or five kilometers to the east and a kilometer to the west. Yeah. We did do three holes to the east end, and all the units were there. The porphyry was there at the contact, a lot of silicification. There was not sulfide, and you need a little bit of pyrite to get the gold, so there was a bit of anomalous gold, but we only drilled shallow, so we’ve gone for the low-hanging fruit.

Brilliant. Please join me in thanking Elaine. Cheers. Okay, thanks. [audience applauding]