Orezone Gold

Thank you very much. So, first of all, thank you for the Denver Gold Show for this opportunity to speak again. Forward-looking statements. So Orezone over the past year has really transformed. We’ve now a multi-mine operation in two jurisdictions. This year we will produce between 160,000 to 180,000 ounces. Sorry, 230,000 to 240,000 ounces from the two operations. And we expect to continue to grow that production over the years.

Our main mine is in Burkina Faso. We’re now in the hard rock two operations there, and we’ve just taken over the Casa Berardi mine in Quebec at the end of Q1 of this year.

So a little bit about the Bomboré Gold Mine. 2.4 million ounces to an average depth of 37 meters. Resources, 5 million ounces down to approximately 75 meters, quite shallow. Low strip ratio, simple operation. This year, as I said, we’ll do approximately 160,000 to 180,000 ounces at all-in sustaining costs, including royalties of around 600 for between 2,100 and 2,300. I expect we’ll be in the lower end of that cost guidance this year. Shallow open pit operation. We are now targeting some higher grade zones beneath the pits, quite successful. So look out for more results later this year in that regard. We’ve also added 100,000 meters of drilling. We’ll be coming out with a new resource reserve life of mine plan at the end of Q1 2027.

Casa Berardi was our major acquisition. It’s in the eastern, sorry, western border of Quebec, Ontario. It’s been going for 30-plus years. Great jurisdiction, highly skilled workforce. Produced over 3.2 million ounces over 30 years and another 3 million ounces of resources still remaining. And we also own 37 kilometers of the Casa Berardi Break, a highly prospective region. We also acquired in that package, Haver Hosket, which is on the Cadillac Larder Break. Fabulous address to own a project, and we’ll be coming out with a PEA on that in about a month’s time. I’ll walk you through that later on in the presentation.

We just released the Casa Berardi life of mine. We acquired it in March of this year. We had the team on site working with a group of consultants. Really had the team actively involved in this. The life of mine shows 14 years of mine life continuous, open pit and underground. Approximate production of 116,000 ounces a year over that life of mine average at all-in sustaining costs of just under 1,900. And NAV at consensus just over a billion at spot over almost 1.5 billion. And we will be doing a lot of drilling. We’ve already started. We’ll probably do about 70,000 meters this year, and next year, the target is over 100,000 meters on the project.

Couple of key things about the life of mine study. You can see the gap between cash and all-in sustaining costs at the front end. That’s really us putting the investment back in, ramping up the development, ramping up the equipment, et cetera. What we really wanna do is use that investment to ramp up that production, and we fully expect that we will backfill that production in as we go ahead over the coming years. Our target is to keep this at over 150,000 ounces a year for the remainder of production beyond 2023. 2033, sorry.

So a little bit about the history. It’s difficult to find mines up in this area. You’ve got 30 to 70 meters of till cover. It was discovered in the ’80s, put into production and ramped up by TVX. They ran for a number of years at around 100,000 from the east only. And they then had a chimney failure where they went into the crime pillar. Gold was 260. They sold it to a company called Aurizon. Aurizon developed the west. It was discovered by Inco TVX, ramped it up to over 160,000 ounces a year, come under a hostile bid by Alamos, and then subsequently acquired by Hecla. As you can see, the underground production started to really decrease, and the open pit came into groove. That was really where Hecla were at at the time. Silver was low. They had other acquisitions that they bought. Then this became, not an orphaned asset, but an asset that wasn’t getting a lot of capital attention. And that’s really where we come in.

And this really tells the story of what happened. This is the 2013 43-101 of Aurizon when they were getting acquired. Inco TVX were here in the east. They were mining to the mill right here. They had discovered the west. Aurizon drilled it off, sunk the shaft, were mining there, had discovered the principal, had not yet mined in it. And then since then, really Hecla was harvesting the underground and really out of this small little bit. So it’s very, very underexplored. They mined this pit here and the 160, and we will continue to mine the 160 and open up the 134. But really, all of the exploration below here in this Abitibi region is still wide open. So we will actively be exploring these zones.

An underground mine, my background is underground mining. You really have to be ahead in development. You have to be ahead in development for your mine planning, and you have to be ahead in your development for your exploration. You gotta keep in front of yourself, particularly when you’re mining right along a fault. If you don’t push out and away from it, you can’t drill back and keep following it down. And as you can see here, the exploration drilling in those years that Hecla were really focusing on the open pits went really down to zero, and the development went from 30 meters down to five. We will ramp both of those up. Right now, we are at 17 meters a day. Our target was to be at 16 meters a day by the end of the year. We’re at 17. I hope we can hit 20 meters a day. We’ve bought several pieces of new equipment. We’ve been hiring actively in the region. We brought on a contractor to assist with that, and that will be the lifeblood of this operation.

A couple of things about our life of mine study. We did it at the throughput rate, nameplate of the mill. We have already made changes to that mill. We’ve had it up to a daily rate of 4,700. We fully expect to be running at 4,400. We’ve made some adjustments to how the mill’s been running, et cetera. We’re gonna do open pit grade control. So right now it’s mined off at 25-meter centers. We’ll be doing grade control on the rest of those pits. We’re gonna do metallurgical test work. We’re gonna be setting up a met lab on the project, and we will also be bringing full computer control to the mill system. So we see a lot of upside on the base study alone without exploration.

But truly, one of the key things when I look at a mine is how many tons per vertical meter, how many ounces per vertical meter do you have? And this is what, I’m truly saying a world-class underground mine. If you look at four grams and above, which is here, this is what this mine is all laid out at. There’s almost 7,000 ounces per vertical meter here, and that’s why you had a 4,000 ton a day mill. You could fill it with underground, provided you keep developing it. These red zones are all plus nine grams. They were mined out, but we will continue to explore those. We will continue to explore this gap. We see that as somewhat low-hanging fruit because we’ve got underground development there. We’ve got a ramp right here. We will continue to explore these zones beneath the pits. We released some drill results on May the 19th, which showed what that could be like, and expect to see more of that in the coming weeks.

One other key thing that we noticed when we were doing this work was this is the Casa fault. It’s not actually an active fault. It’s quite sandy. It’s not clay gouge material. It goes from maybe six inches up to a couple of meters. The mining process through it, they go transverse through it, very safe. Then you go long hole on the other side. But you will notice that all of the underground material is on the south of the fault. But if you look up on plan view, the open pit zones are in the north of the fault, and they’ve just been drilled down to open pit depth. So the north is wide open. We are now drilling at the 800 meter level down there. There was some previous historic results that really attracted us to it, so drilling through the fault where we expect to release results on that in the coming weeks, and then we put a drift in there and drill that whole zone, as you can see, wide open. So all of these zones on the north are completely wide open.

The region itself is obviously a phenomenal place, the Abitibi, to find mines. But as you can see here, the cover where it’s zero to five meters, this is where all the mines are discovered. We own 37 kilometer of this belt. Detour, when I was at Placer Dome doing some work, we shut that down and sold it. It’s now gonna do a million ounces a year. And I won’t tell you what we sold it for. [chuckles] But if you look at the region itself, here you have the Val-d’Or, 14 mines and 70 kilometers of strike. Kirkland Lake, 37 kilometers of strike, six mines. Timmins West, 15 mines under 54 kilometers. 47 kilometers, six mines. We have one mine on a major structure, and it’s simply because it hasn’t been explored. It’s difficult. There’s 30 to 50 meters of till, but those techniques have really improved in terms of the gold grain counts, sonic drilling. Geophysics has improved significantly.

We’ve just hired a regional exploration manager. He will be putting all this data together, and his task will be to completely focus on this region outside of the Casa Mine. You can see here, this is the Casa Mine here. There’s been some exploration. You can see some of the drill results that we’ve had or has been had. We will now do a complete regional program here over the winter months, and so expect to see something coming out of that here in Q2 of next year. The low-hanging fruit in that regard, we’re in the Abitibi. Our neighbors, as you can see, are all down here at two and a half to three and a half kilometers. We’re on average depth of 700 meters, so just going deeper, we think the gold came from below, not above, so we think there’s something down there. So we’re gonna actively explore that as well.

We also acquired a project called Haver Hosko. The previous owners, Aurizon, before Hecla acquired them, they did a feasibility study in 2012 at $1,350 gold, 14-year mine life, 104,000 ounces a year of production. You can see the comps out there. We’re right on the Larder Lake Break, where our neighbors are IAMGOLD, sorry, Agnico, Eldorado and Wesdome. So we’re in a hell of an address. One pit was drilled and put into the study. The other pit was still in inferred. We will actively drill that. There’ll be a new PEA coming out in October. We’ve just completed metallurgical test work that has been extremely successful, very pleased with that. And so we will come out with the same size mill, 3 million tons per annum, and that will be out in October. So we expect that we will see some value coming into the story from that. We will actively go into feasibility study.

We are mine builders. We’ve got a great track record of that. We built the oxide mill in Burkina for 148 million. It was 3 million under budget, 5.2 million nameplate. We’re running at seven. We just finished the hard rock last year, our team. We built it for about four to 5 million under budget, 2.5 million ton per annum. We’re now running nameplate three within a year of starting a hard rock mill. So we’re pretty good at what we do. We’ll bring that team over. We’ll get this feasibility study underway, and we’ll actively run this into a construction decision, hopefully by end of 2027 into early 2028.

So we still think there’s a lot of value to come into the stock. People are valuing us really still at [chuckles] the Burkina Faso 0.3, 0.4 discount. If you bring in Haver Hosko, probably trading at 0.25. We bring out money out of Burkina. We took out 50 million this year. We’ve just been approved by the government to take out another 110. We’ll start taking that out in Q4. 2028 should be about 240 million to our account after all the government taxes and free carried is paid. And we will actively start buying our stock back. If people don’t wanna give me any value for that asset at 0.4, I’ll use my one dollar coming out of Burkina and buy my 0.4 NAV asset. So it’s pretty easy math for me.

We don’t need the cash to do anything with. At the end of Q2, we had 118 of cash, and our debt right now at the end of the year will be about 45 million, and it’s ring-fenced around Bomboré. It will be finished, paid off by Q3 of next year. So at the end of Q3 next year, we will be zero senior debt. That’s the Orezone story. A lot of news flow coming forward. Looking forward to doing that. Active, we’ve hired a new COO, VP of Exploration, VP IR, a regional exploration manager, VP corporate social. So we’re gearing up to become a mid-tier. Thank you.

Patrick, thank you very much. Any questions from the audience? All right. Happy with that? Maybe a quick one from me.

Sure.

It sounds like you’ve got enough on your plate right now in terms of the growth in Canada, but are you looking at other assets as well, or are you just gonna focus on what you’ve got in the portfolio?

Yes, we will continue to look to grow. We’ll obviously do that in a way that we feel we can manage it and something that we can build. One thing we don’t wanna do is blow up the capital structure. We wanna look at something that we feel comfortable building. We will still look in West Africa. We’ve got a great team there to build, but likely outside of Burkina. But obviously, we’ll continue to look in Canada as well. Difficult to find, but yeah, we’ll be actively looking for things.

Great. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Patrick. Cheers. [audience applauding]