Roxmore Resources

Thank you, David, and thank you, Mining Forum Americas, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It’s my pleasure to be able to take you through the Roxmore Resources story today and our Converse project in the Battle Mountain Trend of Nevada. I think Roxmore has come together as a relatively recent story. I joined the company about 12 months ago and brought in really the old board from Roxgold Resources, where we developed the Yaramoko gold mine in Burkina Faso, and we’re building Séguéla in the Ivory Coast. And it’s really been for us about taking this large heap leach project at Converse on the development path towards production. And I’ll take you through where we are with that today.

Couple of things to note about Converse is it’s very large. It’s 5.2 million ounces of indicated and inferred. The economics of our recently released preliminary economic assessment were very robust. I’ll take you through those in a bit more detail. It’s a very strong production profile, at just on 250,000 ounces a year for 14 years with closer to 270,000 ounces in the first eight years. And there’s a few, I think, strong indications from exploration that we’d be able to do better than that in the early years as well. It’s in Nevada, a great jurisdiction. I don’t think anyone will argue with that, that Nevada is one of the premier jurisdictions to develop and operate mines around the world. We have a very experienced team who’ve done this before, both taken projects forward either into production or been taken over by larger companies. So we like the development space and de-risking projects and moving them forward. And we think we have a compelling valuation opportunity as well for the stage of the project and the promise and the potential that we see being unearthed there.

Just to give you a little insight as to the location, we sit at the northern end of the Battle Mountain Trend, very close to SSR Mining’s Marigold project, which has been in production for north of 25 years. Further to the south, there are a number of really household iconic names for mines like Pipeline, Cortez, Gold Rush, and the recently discovered Four Mile down there. So this really is a great location for looking for and building a mine. Access to infrastructure, as you can see here, is excellent. We have the I-80 interstate highway running between Winnemucca and Battle Mountain, about six or seven miles north. We have two power lines crossing our property. They go down to the mines further south. You can see Marigold just to the east of us.

And our claim position there has been recently expanded. We have added about 70% to the land package, really in an effort to give us maximum flexibility for developing the project. We didn’t want to be constrained by our land package for where we could put waste dumps, heap leach pads, et cetera. So we’ve gone out and acquired some private surface rights as well as staked some open land. We are in the checkerboard here. For anyone familiar with Nevada, the checkerboard public-private offsetting one square mile blocks. We have water rights. They were acquired with the project a number of years ago, just under 3,000 acre-feet of water. So we are well-positioned to go forward with what can be a critical input for projects in Nevada.

We have a really solid plan of operations. We have 50 acres, so we have more than enough land or area of disturbance to deliver the pre-feasibility study and then the bankable feasibility study. We don’t see ourselves being limited by having to go back and re-permit or anything like that. And I think the fact that we have 50 acres from an exploration perspective signals that historically, there hasn’t been a lot of really red flags around permitting here. Compared to a lot of other explorers and developers, it’s a large footprint for us.

In terms of the PEA, we published this in April. Total material mined was 300 million tons at a grade of 0.51. This is a large disseminated ore body with large continuous runs of mineralization. Very good conversion from resource into mineable material there. We mined 4.9 million tons, sorry, 4.9 million ounces, recovering three and a half million ounces for the 14-year mine life and 250,000 ounce per annum run rate. You can see there the layout. It’s a nice compact site. That additional land has come in very handy in terms of optimizing the layout we have. In terms of operating costs, competitive, just under $1,800 an ounce. Capital costs, we estimate at $830 million. That includes about $115 million of capitalized pre-stripping in the pre-production numbers. And then life of mine-sustaining capital of just over 500 million US.

In terms of the results, we ran the base case at consensus $3,600, and it generates an after-tax NPV5 of $2.75 million. So a really attractive CapEx to NPV ratio, three to one, which is a metric we really like to focus on. And very high IRRs, as you can see there, after-tax IRR of north of 42% at 3,600. At 4,700, obviously, the metrics look even stronger. So we see this as a robust project that will work through a range of different gold price scenarios. A little bit of some of the sensitivity here. You can still see an attractive project at lower gold prices, although we hope, like I’m sure everyone else in the room, for continuing higher prices going forward. But just to say that this is not a project that needs an especially high gold price, although it will enjoy one like other gold mines.

In terms of the resource, when we came to Roxmore 12 months ago, the prevailing resource estimate at the time was six million ounces, with five and a half million ounces in measured and indicated, and half a million ounces as inferred. Whilst we didn’t necessarily have an issue with the direction of the resource, we felt that the drill spacing that was in that resource was a little on the aggressive side. So along with our consultants, SLR, who are also the QPs at Marigold a couple of miles away, who know this type of mineralization very well, we wound that resource estimate back to 5.2 million ounces with just over two million in indicated and three million in inferred. We felt that a more conservative, more resilient, and robust resource was the right way to go here before we took the project forward. We have absolutely no doubt that we will get all of those ounces back and then some. It’s just a matter that the drill spacing, I think, was just a little bit too far apart to really be able to sustain financing, et cetera. So we bit the bullet this year, still delivered a very robust project, and have now initiated quite a comprehensive drilling program.

We’re in the middle of a phase one, 30,000 meters of infill and extension drilling. That will be matched by another 30,000 meters early next year for 60,000 meters in total. And we really see this resource converting very nicely. You can see the grade differential there between indicated and inferred. We believe a good portion of that is an artifact of drill density. And as we start putting more piece points into the inferred material, we’ll start to see an improvement in grade there as well. So that’s a tailwind we can see. The drilling that we’ve been doing to date, and we’re about 15,000 meters into that first phase one program, when you look at the correlation between what we’re seeing in assays and what we’re seeing in those inferred blocks in the block model, we see a really good trade-off, I think, and we’re quite confident that we’ll see that grade bump as we go forward.

Another thing to notice before I leave is that there is not currently a formal silver component to our resource. Typically, silver grades run around six to eight times the gold grade. And the fact that it’s not in the resource estimate currently is really a result of differing assay techniques historically. So what we’ve done is we’ve sent 5,000 pulps to the labs to assay for silver. And that will then form the dataset to enable us to include silver in the next resource estimate. So we expect a pretty significant silver resource, somewhere in the range of upwards of 30 million ounces. And we think that when that’s added to the economics of the next study, and it’s not in the preliminary economics at the moment, that we’ll be looking at upwards or towards a million ounces of silver payable a year, which will give us some opportunities around financing and streams initially, but also will make the economics look stronger as well.

With the program I mentioned, the drilling has been going exceptionally well. All of the historic drilling that was done at Converse was vertical and terminated in mineralization. So what we’ve been looking to do with a refined geological model is drill angled holes. They, we believe, give us the best chance of hitting some of the high-grade feeder structures that have been missed with the vertical drilling, and we’re definitely seeing that come into force. And then we’re also extending the drill holes beyond the pit walls or the pit shells, out and outside of mineralization to really give us a feel for the full potential here. So a lot of the drilling that we’ve been doing at Converse is not only, I think, confirming the inferred and hopefully converting that to indicated and better, but also improving the grade, but also adding ounces outside of the current pit shell.

We released really our first exploration step-out hole. We stepped out to the west 90 meters. Reported that hole the week before last, and it was, as you can see there, just on 60 meters at 1.85 grams, including nearly 20 meters at 4.8. And that’s a really impressive result for this project. Most of the drilling at Converse is long runs of 0.3 to 1 gram material. So to see these high grades starting to show up on that western flank is really interesting for us. We think that’s a wide-open horizon for us to add more ounces, but more importantly, higher grade ounces. So we’ll be getting after that as we speak. We have three rigs running on the project at the moment, predominantly doing the infill. However, we have two more rigs set to arrive in the next four to six weeks. And when that comes, we’ll be able to start going after a bit more of the exploration with a little bit more alacrity, which we’re really looking forward to.

But you can see there, these are some of the typical results you see from that hole 9C. Two zones of 138 meters at 0.65 and another 110 meters at 1.3. And that’s been, I think, driven by a much better understanding of how the mineralization came here, how the breccia works, and how the intrusion affected everything. So we’re looking forward to continuing to drill out with the balance of the 45,000 meters that we have planned. You can see here a section, as I was mentioning, those drill holes. So these are the infill holes that we’ve been drilling. You can see nice long runs of broad mineralization and then continuing to push them beyond the limits of the current pit shell. So we think that we’re on, I think, a really nice tailwind to having a much-improved resource estimate when we come to Q1 and then Q3. So we’re planning two resource estimate updates next year. First and foremost, bringing silver into the equation in Q1, and then wrapping up the 60,000 meters of additional drilling in Q3, which will form the basis of our pre-feasibility study scheduled for late next year.

Metallurgy. It wouldn’t be a heap leach project in Nevada if we didn’t talk a little bit about metallurgy. This project is hosted within a skarn, so it is not your typical Carlin-style mineralization. And by that I mean it doesn’t mean that sulfide material is refractory. I find that my Nevada geologist friends have a troubling habit of using sulfide, fresh and refractory interchangeably, which we’re trying to really drill out of them at Roxmore. The sulfide material here at Converse is free-milling. If you were to mill it, you would get 96% recovery. So definitely not refractory, despite what you might read on X. And we’re very keen to dispel that, and we have 75 columns done historically. We have commissioned Caps Cassidy to do another 48 as part of the pre-feasibility study. So we’ll be seeing really good coverage of variability across the different redox types, oxide, transitional, and fresh.

We’re doing some work on a SART system. There is some free copper here, particularly in the northern portion of the deposit. And that we believe has driven what we’ve assumed to be relatively high cyanide consumption costs in our PEA. We think that that’s a lever that we can pull on with a SART system to lower that cost of cyanide and make a small saleable copper product as well. So that’s work in progress. And then we’re refining our HPGR test work as well with Caps Cassidy. So this is a three-stage crush. Takes the material down to a quarter inch. We have assumed that the tertiary crushing component is a HPGR, and we’re doing some more work on that as part of the PFS.

So in terms of moving the project forward, we recently hired a study manager who came to us from Ausenco and has worked previously at SSR Mining and Knight Piésold, Mika, and she’s been doing a great job of really pulling all of the work streams into a coherent plan and getting forward with all of the consultants working from, I guess, an agreed footprint.

So things to look for. Resource growth, as I’ve mentioned, we’re drilling aggressively 60,000 meters in total. The metallurgy, we have 48 columns heading off to Caps Cassidy in the coming weeks. So that will be a Q2 news flow item, we think. Pre-feasibility study set for the end of ’27. Feasibility study, 12 months or thereafter after that. And then getting into permitting. We have appointed Sunstone Environmental as our permitting consultants. Very relevant experience. They were successful in permitting the Spring Valley project nearby, which is a very similar-sized project. So we think that they are very fit for purpose for the permitting task ahead of us.

So the catalysts that you can afford carrying on some of these is really continuing the results from the drilling. The silver assay program, where we think that that will have a significant bump on the gold equivalent ounces. The technical studies, as I’ve mentioned, the column tests, and then really leading up to the pre-feasibility study at the end of next year, with permitting really starting in earnest there. So we’re targeting a final investment decision around the end of, in sort of mid-2029.

In terms of the corporate structure, have 73 million shares outstanding. Market cap today is approximately 300, between 300 and 320 million Canadian. We have some warrants outstanding that are in the money, and they’ve been coming through. They’ve been a useful source of financing for us this year. We have $35 million in the bank, but about 10 million has come through warrant conversions over the course of this calendar year. So we expect to see them continuing to come in. We’ve built up a really, I think, significant starter kit for institutional investors. When we joined the company 12 months ago, there was really only one investor of any note, ICM. And since then, we’ve added L1 Capital out of Melbourne as our largest shareholder. And you can see Franklin, Libra, and Merck as well.

We’re getting out, telling the story. This project has been hiding in plain sight for a number of years. We think its time has come, and we’ve really enjoyed so far the last 12 months of really working with it. We think the best is yet to come and look forward to reporting on the ongoing drilling. But also, as the development program comes together and we deliver that pre-feasibility study next year, our goal and our belief is that circa 5 million ounces of heap leachable material in Nevada will be a very attractive proposition for investors and a very attractive financing opportunity for us to take forward and ultimately put into production. So with that, I think, have some questions.

Yeah. Well, open it for questions. Do we have any questions for John? Yes, at the back on the left, please. Just wait for the microphone, please, John.

How many assays support the resource statement? How many assays? Yes. How many data points support the several hundred million tons? I think it’s about 80,000 meters of drilling, so that would probably— Eight, 8,000? Well, there’s 80,000 meters of drilling, not all of which would be through the ore body. I would say there would probably be 50,000 individual assays, but I’m guessing. I’d have to— What’s the highest assay in the database? Oh, I couldn’t tell you. It’s not that high, though. It’s a very evenly distributed data set. Thank you.

Do we have another question? I might just, ’cause we’ve got a minute left. So when you were talking about the resource, you’ve obviously got a higher component of inferred material. So what is that optimal drill spacing to actually get it into indicated status? And then that deep hole with the elevated gold, did that also have elevated silver?

Yes. So just a question was around converting the inferred material. So, sorry, the— The drill spacing. So the drill spacing that was adopted for indicated is 60 meters, and that accords with what you would see at Round Mountain, Bald Mountain and Marigold. It was considerably wider in the previous resource. And then in terms of elevated silver, I think the recent hole that we had was just under 10 grams silver. So it was higher. And you do see a slight negative correlation between the gold grade and the silver grade. So typically the silver grade is relatively higher on the lower gold counts, but that still maintained at around 10 grams for that hole over that 20 meters.

Brilliant. Thank you. Please join me in thanking John for his presentation. Thank you very much. [applause] Thanks, mate.