Rio2

No worries. Okay, good, good afternoon, everyone. Um, thank you for the introduction. This is the cut down version of the Rio2 corporate presentation. The, the cover photo you can see there is the, the Fenix Gold ADR plant, um, during some of the recent storm events that we've experienced in northern Chile. We'll-- I'll delve into that a little bit more as we go through the presentation. Uh, a company disclaimer, you can look that up on the corporate website presentation if you really wanna read it. Included as needs to be required. Just like to start with our team because our team is very important to us, and there's two aspects to that, that we'd like to reflect. The, the first one is before Rio2, there was a Rio1. Rio1 was Rio Alto Mining, which operated in Peru from 2011 through 2015. We built and operated two heap leach gold mines, La Arena, Shahuindo, and that was subsequently purchased or taken out by Tahoe Resources end of 2015. And effectively, 80% of the people who are now in the Rio2 experience come from that previous history. So, there's, there's a, you know, 11-year history of a lot of these people and including the directors, most of them were there, too. And the second point I guess we'd like to make is that we're a very Latin-based company. Uh, our management technical office is located in Lima, Peru, and the management team was pretty much entirely Peruvian. So, we're a little bit different from your average, um, company. The corporate office effectively is in Lima. We have a small presence in Vancouver with our financial team who work from home. And recently, we've transitioned from being a developer into a, to asset producer. So Fenix Gold, which we've been developing in Chile for the last eight years, is now in a ramp-up year. And then Constancia, which is an underground copper mine located south of Lima in Peru, is a producing asset that was acquired in February this year. And we're now basically a two asset producer with the ramp-up in progress. A corporate snapshot. Last week before the gold price crash on Monday, uh, we were basically a $3.65 share price, which was equivalent to almost $1.5 billion US dollars of value. Um, some of our biggest shareholders are on that list. You can see BlackRock are probably the number one, and then there's a lot of other names that I'm sure most of you will probably understand or recognize. 7% of the company is owned by insiders. So, we have two assets, as I mentioned, in what we consider to be tier one jurisdictions. Our first asset, which is the development asset now in ramp-up year, is Fenix Gold. Fenix Gold's a high altitude, uh, open cast heap leach oxide gold mine in Atacama region of Chile. It's basically situated at an altitude of 4,600 meters for the process plant, and the mining pits are located as high as 5,000 meters. So, it's a difficult environment. And recently, with the weather events in Chile that we've experimented, uh, we've been impacted quite badly in Q3 by those events. Uh, you can see on that map that it's located approximately 160 kilometers from Copiapó. And that's basically, that black line on the screen is an international highway which goes across to Argentina. And the Fenix Gold project is, is located very close to Kinross's La Coipa project. And the Maricunga belt, which, you know, is a prolific gold, gold zone, has over 80,000 ounces of gold identified. Several projects from Aquios or Kingsgate up in the north down through La Pippa, Vulcan, um, sort of early stage development assets. Cerro Casale, Caspechi to the south. Uh, mention that this whole area is water challenged, so it's an area where there's a lot of potential gold deposits but no water for mining. So, the Fenix Gold project was started by trucking water from Copiapó up the th- international Highway 31. We're doing about 1,400 cubic meters per day of trucked water to allow the operation to, to work. And part of our expansion plans to the Fenix Gold project are the implementation of a desalinated pipeline, uh, in the next five years or so, which allows us to take that project from the 100,000 ounce level at 80,000 tons a day. In the future, being able to produce around 300,000 ounces. Okay? So 20,000 tons a day is our nominal rate for the starter project with the water transport by truck. That's a bottleneck on our project currently. Just some information that the reserves for the stage one starter project are 20,000 tons per day, 115 million tons at 0.48, roughly 0.5 grams per ton. This is a bulk, uh, heap leach project, very low stripping ratio of 0.84 initially. And once we hit our mining rate of 20,000 tons a day during this ramp-up year next year, we would expect to produce around 100,000 ounces. We have a big land package. Um, we're only exploring near mine at the moment, at depth and around the perimeter of the project. We're not looking at regional exploration. Our feasibility cost was $1870 gold back in 2023. That has changed. Obviously, diesel prices and, um, labor costs have gone up, but then again, so has the gold price. Okay? And we're looking to expand the project in about five years' time to 80,000 tons a day and 300,000 ounces. There's some photos recently from, you know, the aftermath from the weather events that we experienced. Top left photo is the leach pad. We-we've basically had three meters of snow during July and August. Fenix typically receives 15 centimeters of snow per year, so the quantum of, of snowfall that we had has been extremely difficult, and it's impacted operations quite badly. The, you know, photo to this bottom left, which is the operations area just after the snowstorm, you can see the The, um, containers and the offices were practically buried in snow. And whilst the storm cost five days worth of time, the, the cleanup and the getting the haul roads open again was another five days. So you can see the excavators and bulldozers opening up haul roads again. So difficult times and, uh, the leach pad, you know, very difficult to work with the covering of snow on the leach pad. The top right photo is Phoenix South, where the, you know, that we're mining currently. And you can-- fortunately, the snowfall wasn't so bad then. So Phoenix is a, a big bulk gra- bulk, low-grade oxide deposit. It's effectively, um, evolved volcanic diatremes. So those three peaks you can see are three cones that were part of a volcanic complex. And within the middle of each cone, there's, there's a vertical v- breccia structures rising up from below, and the breccias are mineralized. A-around the breccias and the andesites and dacite host rocks, there is a sheeted vein stockwork system. And s-so that there's two types of ore. There's the breccias which contain clasts of broken up stockwork thrown up in the breccias. And, a-and the host rock around them, there's the sheeted vein systems, which are about 30% of the mineral, or 70% of the mineral contained within the breccias. Uh, the circles at the bottom of the cr- long section are basically areas where we don't have enough drilling. With the gold price now at over $4,000, you know, the, the black line you can see on that cross-section or long section is $1,800 gold shell. And we're drilling constrained, so we've just been completing a drilling campaign at depth below the existing resource. The black holes were completed prior to the snowstorms. The gold holes still to be done. We'll restart them probably November, December once the weather improves. And with that information completed next year, we would expect to be publishing an updated resource estimate, um, probably early Q3 once the mineral results, the lab results are back, the model's been worked and, um, we have have it at an acceptable level to publish. So there'll be a, there'll be a big increase in resources from low-grade material moving into ore and, and then new resources at depth that we'll be adding to the deposit. Uh, the second project is the Condestable underground mine. You can see on the section it's located 90 kilometers south of Lima, so approximately two hours' drive south. It's sort of the, one of the dream projects in Peru because it's located on the coast at low altitude and very few, uh, projects are that lucky. And it's a historic project that's been working for over 60 years. So 60 years of replacement of reserves. Today, they still have 34-- 36,000 million, 36 million tons, sorry, of almost 1% copper equivalent. That's effectively made up of 80% copper, 20% precious metals, of which the bulk is gold content. Um, producing annually around 25 to 26,000 tons of copper equivalent, roughly 20,000 copper and the rest are precious metals. Um, very good low operational costs of $2.52 per pound produced. Again, a big land package, concession package, which has not been explored in the last 15 years by the last previous owners. They've been focused on production. And Condestable also comes with an expansion potential, uh, a, a approved permit that was received last month to take our plant production from 8,400 and step it up to initially 10,000 tons per day processed. And at 10,000 tons a day, we can then step to 12 with a short form permit, uh, for an additional 20%. So we-we're currently looking at the expansion plans for that, the CapEx that we require. Uh, we estimate roughly $50 million CapEx spend in Condestable for the expansion to, to, to 10 and 12. And we'll be basically, I guess, approving that with the board next quarter and announcing that to, to the market that we're un-undertaking that expansion. That's some photos from the Condestable operation. That's, you know, one of the mine portals to the top left, drilling underground, top right, loading underground, bottom left, and then mineral being delivered to the process plant in the, the bottom right-hand corner. So our H1 or Q2 highlights. B-basically, we continued with the ramp-up year. We had a slow, slow start in Q1. If you, you remember, we didn't achieve our targets. Um, some of those issues or most of those issues were resolved in Q2. The, the labor requirement for the truck drivers was resolved. The equipment issues was resolved with mining fleet, um, purchased for the project deriving from our alliance contract with Stracon. And we basically took our production from 13,000 to 16,000 over the quarter. We're looking to get to 20 as a steady state, sort of nominal mining rate. Uh, at the same time, we also had some really freezing temperatures during the, the, the May period. So the El Niño pattern has brought a colder than expected winter. We were minus 23 degrees during May, and w-we had a very fast learning curve on the leach pad of using our plastic covers to, to pre- to prevent the pad freezing. We, we did have some freezing issues as part of that experience. But by July, we had been able to employ double layer plastic covers on the leach pad, which were providing a 12-degree temperature difference from the ambient temperature. And as, um, a result of that, during the July and August storms, the leach pad was able to keep functioning and, and, and circulating solutions. So that was a positive, um, as part of that experience. Condestable produced as expected, very stable production. You know, 725,000 tons of, of processed at 1% copper. And basically, the costs were maintained other than diesel, which we can't control. So at the end of the quarter, of Q2, I know we're almost Q-Q3, but we had almost, you know, 50 million in the bank. So, so we have, we have cash on hand. And then we have kicked off an exploratory program in the Q3 coming up in Condestable around what were previously historic open pits. Phoenix Gold drilling that we talked about the Drilling around the perimeter of the project and to depth. And, uh, we published an updated technical report on the Conde Sable reserves, um, updating that t-old report which was over four years old. Uh, t- we also s-did work on ore sorting for Conde Sable. This is something that may work, it may not. We are committing to purchasing a trial machine, a pilot operation, uh, that would process up to fifteen hundred tons per day, and we'll, we'll trial that next year. It's been imported. Arrives end of October. If it works, it'll be an additional source of material from low-grade stockpiles, from waste dumps at .4 copper that we have on the project, ten million tons. And that potentially is part of the expansion plan in Conde Sable from eight to four to ten to twelve. But it, it remains to be seen if that's really... if the lab results can be replicated at an industrial scale. Okay. The Q3, we've published this on Monday morning, so we can talk about it. Uh, you can see during July, the impact of the first snow event. That was effectively one meter of snowfall. Reminding everyone that fifteen centimeters is the typical annual precipitation of snow. And then recovering from that at the end of July and into August, and then we got hit with a second event that brought two meters of snow, and again, shut the operation down for over two weeks. And then during September, we've had two or three smaller twenty-four hour to forty-eight hour events with the same thing, uh, operations shut down because of whiteout, blizzard, snow-driven conditions, and disruption to mining. So the, the, the net result of that is the gold production. You can see that in August, September, yeah, we were, we were basically achieving f- four thousand ounces per month in-into July, June, July. And then we've dropped to two thousand four hundred. September looks like it's going to be closer to two thousand nine hundred when we finish the month. And then if we have good weather conditions for the rest of the quarter, or fourth quarter, we'll be able to ramp that up again to four, four thousand initially, six thousand, seven thousand, which will get us to approximately forty thousand versus the sixty thousand that we guided at the start of the year. So it's a combination of the slow start in Q1 and then, then the weather impact that we've experienced during the, you know, the, the winter season. So basically, we have, uh, big growth plans within both assets. We've sort of talked about it. The Phoenix expansion to the project requires a water pipeline. We've been working for over a year now with two diesel providers that have existing infrastructure today. They have-- We're at the point now where we have term sheets presented by both of those providers, and we'll be making a decision into Q4 on which provider we go f-forth with. And that information will then allow us to publish the long-awaited PFS study for the expansion. So expect to see that in December. And that, I guess, will give everyone a photo of what the Phoenix expansion looks like when we have a water pipeline. We move to twenty thousand to eighty thousand tons per day and a production of up to three hundred thousand ounces per year, which takes advantage of the resource. You know, the resource for Phoenix from two thousand twenty-three is five million ounces at .38. So again, a, a big deposit, bulk low-grade mineralization. Um, the Neamine exploration, that has been suspended. We were hoping to do that mineral resource estimate update at the same time. Hasn't happened, so the drilling will restart November, and we would hope to be able to publish an updated MRE statement two thousand twenty-seven, let's say second half. Okay? So once we decide on a water provider for the project expansion, we then move into a engineering stage. Initially, engineering to support the EIA application. Then the engineering study continues in parallel with the EIA application, moving through to detailed engineering, and we would hope to have a construction decision presented at the end of two thousand twenty-eight. That pipeline CapEx could be anywhere between a hundred and fifty up to four hundred and fifty, depending on the configuration of the pipeline and other off-takers. The on-site CapEx for the expansion of Phoenix to eighty thousand tons a year is estimated to be around two hundred million dollars. So, so that's something we'll be looking at. We'll be turning that into a feasibility study at some point, uh, n-next year or early two thousand and eight. And the construction of the pipeline once, and the project expansion at the same time, once a decision is made, is expected to be about two years. So basically, that would have us expanding Phoenix in two thousand thirty-one, um, late two thousand thirty-one, and the ramp up during, you know, two thousand and thirty-two to maybe two thousand and thirty-three, eighty thousand tons per day placed on the leach pad. Conde Sable continues to operate at eight point four thous- thousand tons a day. The ore sorting pilot plant, that'll start at the end of the year, and we'll run that for one year if the results are encouraging. And the near-term expansion based on the permit that was approved the last month to take it to ten thousand tons a day. There's construction decisions imminent on that, and procurement would start Q4. The updated, uh, sorry, the expanded plant works would start second half '27 and carry through to two thousand twenty-eight, and late '28, we'd be ramping the project to ten thousand tons per day. The ramp to twelve potentially involves ore sorting, but we also have two historic open pits at Conde Sable. There's information that we cannot publish because the, the, it hasn't got the quality controls. You know, Q-Q-QA hasn't been done on those. But there's indications that there's a good surface resource of millions of tons at .4 in, in the Co-Conde Sable open pit. So we'll be drilling that. We've started last week for sixteen thousand meters this year, seventeen thousand next year. And at the end of '27, early '28, we'll be publishing a surface resource for the Conde Sable copper deposit. So that's something that could potentially lead into a future open cast operation. Again, we don't know. It could additionally be material that supplies the plant during the twelve, um, thousand ton a day expansion. Lastly, just quickly to finish, uh, we do have the Tungsten projects. Uh, this is something that came with the shell company that was used to form Rio2. So Prospector Resources was, was the shell company. This project's been sitting on the shelf for eight years almost now, and we've dusted it off, given that tungsten prices are favorable at the moment, critical metals. Um, we, we completed a site visit. We published a 43-101 based on the existing drilling information, you know, historic drilling done in '83, 2005, 2008. And you can see there's some intercepts there that are okay. Um, they're, they're probably not well, but they're, they're not bad either. So we're committing next year to do a summer drill campaign o- on this project. It's located approximately 70 kilometers southeast of Mayo, Mayo in Yukon. And that 2,000-meter drill program will allow us, allow us to make a decision on what we do with this. The, the idea is probably to spin it off to a different company or sell it as an asset. It's not something I think that is Rio2 that we would expect or want to develop ourselves. So, so that's it. Thank you. All right. [applause] Any questions, please? [applause] All right. Well, I might jump in with one in the last couple of seconds, Andrew, if that's all right. So at, um, Contestaful, um, given the pre- positive- Sorry, I'm just trying to hear you. Yeah, I know. Sorry. Um, I was saying at Contestaful, given the positive outlook for copper, um, is there an opportunity to bring forward that open pit and maybe upscale it? So yeah, the, the question, is there an opportunity to bring forward in time the, the open pit and upscale it? Difficult, because it's an open pit s- surface operation, and Contestaful is currently approved for an underground mining operation, so we have to go through an EIA process. If we potentially just, you know, the hits coming back were very positive and we could see a significant resource developing, we could possibly fast-track that permitting process. But, uh, I mean, five years is probably reasonable fast track, maybe four years. We'd probably cut a year off that maybe. But it's, it's, it's, uh, unfortunately not something... I mean, we really need to understand what that resource is. It, it may even warrant a new plant. So instead of the 12,000 tonne a day existing plant, maybe it's a f- you know, 50, 60 million tonnes of 0.4 copper that would require a 20,000 tonne a day plant. So we sort of need to really understand what the resource is, um, and what we're actually trying to permit through the EIA process. So we could possibly cut a year off that maybe. Okay. Brilliant. Look, thanks again, Andrew, for a really interesting presentation. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Uh, next company to the stage is McEwen. And presenting today-