Sinclair Gold

Thanks, Paul. Thanks everyone for joining us. Really happy to be up here today. Look, we are Sinclair Gold. As Paul said, I’m Jeff Sansom, CEO. A lot of you may or may not have heard of Sinclair Gold before. We’ve really only been around in its current name and state for the last seven months. Before that we were Alicanto Minerals, and we were a smaller company looking at Swedish assets. In December last year, we came across the project, the Mount Henry Gold project, which was one of Westgold’s non-core assets that they were starting to look to monetize. And we had a look at the asset and absolutely fell in love and I think I’ll start to show you why.

But just before we get into that, the capital structure sits here. We’ve got 186 million shares on offer. Really strong register, 30% institutionally held by some of the better-known resource funds globally. Westgold Resources, as a result of the transaction, came out with 17% of the register. Board, management and advisors have circa 20%. So a really solid register that gives us confidence to be able to deliver on what we’re trying to do over the next couple of years. In addition to that, we’ve also got some pretty strong analysts that follow us. As you can see, Canaccord, Argonaut and Euroz, all three of them cover us, with very strong recommendations on what we’ve got.

So just a bit of a recap, then I’ll get into it. We acquired the Mount Henry Gold Project back in February. We finalized the acquisition in February this year. We paid $15 million cash up front for that project. And also Westgold got 19.9% of our register for that one. What we got in return was a 915,000 ounce gold deposit grading at 1.2 grams per ton. A lot of the exploration work was done only to about a hundred odd meters below surface and in two discrete areas. A lot of the intercepts and drill holes that the previous owners had put in also ended in mineralization. And so it gave us a lot of confidence that what we were buying was actually a much larger project.

As I said, we finalized that transaction in February, mid-February. Two weeks later, we had a drill rig on site. We ramped it up to four drill rigs, and now we have five rigs on site. When we acquired the project, we said quite comfortably that we think this is a much larger project, and that we would grow the resource base. Six months later, we put out a resource update which doubled the resource to 1.8 million ounces of gold at a grade of 1.2 grams per ton. Importantly, we used a $3,900 Australian gold price and had a cut-off grade of 0.5 grams per ton.

All of the growth came from two areas, Mount Henry and Celine. So that’s really important to look at because the gold coming out of those two assets is really high quality, and I’ll talk about that later. The next impressive thing is that 90% of all of the ounces are in the top 200 meters. So from surface, 200 meters down, that’s where you find all of the gold. The ounces per vertical meter on the consolidated basis is 12,500 ounces. And that’s a pretty impressive number. Importantly, I guess the other thing is that these are potentially open pit opportunities, and I’ll start working through that a little later on.

But when we look at that 1.8 million ounce resource, that’s not the end of what we’re looking at trying to do. We still see a huge amount of growth from across the tenement package that we have. All of the deposits are open at depth and along strike. We’ve got a large number of holes that are pending assays. At the moment, I think turnaround times are between 40 and 50 days, so there’s a huge backlog of holes that we would be looking to release over the coming weeks and months. Outside of that, the deposits themselves are really simple. They’re shallow. They show that they’ve got open pit potential, and we’ve got a lot of confidence in the gold that’s in the ground at the moment. Seventy percent of the resource is in measured and indicated. And importantly as well, this area was a historic open pit producer, and I’ll start talking about that in a minute.

And look, Paul from Pantoro gave a pretty good rundown on the jurisdiction. This is in Norseman, so we’re 200 kilometers south of Kalgoorlie, and we’re 200 kilometers north of Esperance. Esperance is a major port, Kalgoorlie is a major mining district, and Norseman sits right in the middle of the two. There’s a huge gold endowment within that area, and we are smack bang in that area, just to the south of Pantoro. And in fact, their Scotia underground mine is about a kilometer to the south of us. And this has also been a deposit that’s been historically studied. And I’ll preface that by saying that it’s a historic study back in 2016, and I’ll talk to some of those numbers later on. But we do have a really good understanding of how the flow sheet might look, what the economics might look like, and what the scale of this asset could eventually be at a theoretical rate.

So, as I said, this is what we acquired. Sixteen kilometers of mineralized banded iron formation from north to south. The resource sits within about 25% of the total strike length of what we’ve got. And in between that, you see a number of red dots that are highlighted there. Those are drill holes that have returned pretty high-grade results. Twelve meters at six, ten at 88.2, twenty meters at 2.6. Those are really solid intercepts that have been drilled to about 50 meters and haven’t had a huge amount of follow-up in between. So when you look at that as a consolidated 16-kilometer trend, you think, “Wow, that’s a pretty exciting opportunity just sitting along the banded iron formation.”

If you then come forward and look on the hanging wall, there’s North Scotia, which sits about 500 meters off the hanging wall. This is a narrow vein, high grade system, similar to what Pantoro is mining down in their Scotia underground and also up in their Okay Mine. This is a 2.6 gram per ton ore body, and it hasn’t necessarily seen a huge amount of exploration through that hanging wall. So once we look at the BIF as an exploration opportunity, we can then step forward into the hanging wall and start looking for that narrow vein, high grade system along the 16 kilometers. And then when you look further to the north, there’s six kilometers of ground that’s been very, very lightly tested. In fact, there’s really only one drill hole that’s returned results, and it’s thirteen meters at one gram. Not a huge amount to look at at the moment, but it just shows that gold is everywhere within this system, and that’s what we’re gonna start to look at as we continue to drill this out.

So I’ll start on this one. Selene is the southernmost deposit that we have in the mineralized system. As you can see from that cross-section, from surface down to about 200 meters vertical depth, Selene dips really nicely at about 20 degrees. Thickness, it swells up to about fifty-seven, sixty odd meters, and it’s a really consistent ore body. So this almost is the economic driver of the project, where you wanna put your process plant as close to this thing as you can and have a consistent feed from this open pit material that would drive the economics of your process plant. As you can see, the blue and yellow highlight there is the resource that we put out two weeks ago. There’s 900,000 ounces of gold sitting in this deposit at the moment. It’s open in all directions. We put out some assays a week ago, which showed that we’re extending the down dip extents of this ore body with every drill hole that we put in. So there’s a huge amount of opportunity and potential for Selene.

And to just throw out a bit of an illustration or a bit of a contextual idea, on the left there is the Capricorn Metals Karla Winda open pit. Remarkably similar to what we have at Selene, albeit different mineralized systems. But back in 2016 when Capricorn Metals put out their first resource, they had 26 million tons at 1.1 for 900,000 ounces, 100% inferred. Ours is 25 at 1.1 for 900,000 ounces with 81% indicated. Geometry, Karla Winda is dipping at 25 degrees, we’re dipping at 20. As a result of that, our gold is shallower. Ounces per vertical meter there, the context is that in the 5 to 15-meter range for Karla Winda, there was a laterite system which had higher grade. But I think the center of the body really did have the same style of ounces per vertical meter in the six odd thousand ounces range.

So not saying that Selene will become something like Karla Winda, but with this thing being open, we’re drilling down deep, we’re drilling at depth every single time we step out. We’re still hitting the same mineralized system. So it just gives an indication that these relatively small ore bodies can continue to grow. Karla Winda at the moment is a 2 million ounce resource. I think there’s about 500,000 ounces of gold being produced out of that one. So if we ever do get close to that, that’s a pretty fantastic outcome.

The next asset that we have is Mount Henry. This was an area that was previously mined by Westgold back in 2016 to 2019. This is a different style of ore body to what we’re seeing at Selene. This is a steeply dipping, multiple mineralized lode system. It’s dipping at about 70 degrees, and we’ve drilled the resource down to about 250 meters vertical depth from surface. In addition to that, we’ve also put a couple of holes which take it down to about 480 meters. But the immediate focus of what we’re trying to do here at Mount Henry is to drive that open pit boundary down as far as we can go. We wanna shore up open pit optionality across both Mount Henry and Selene. And then we’ll start looking at growth options outside of that as we start to drill the project in more detail.

Outside of these resource areas, as I mentioned up front, there were a couple of holes that sat in between Mount Henry and Selene. These are the next generation of potential resource growth opportunities that we’re looking at. Birthday Gift sits in between Mount Henry and Selene. It’s about three and a half kilometers of strike that was drilled to, on average, about 50 meters. The intercepts that you’re seeing there are ten at 88, twenty-three at 1.9, seventeen at 1.9, nine at 3.2. Really solid grades that were intercepted back in the early nineties, but just haven’t been followed up for a number of reasons. Outside of that, there’s Artemis, which effectively latches on to the end of the Mount Henry open pit and mineralized zone. And again, you’re seeing twelve meters at 4.3, two at 15.8 from surface and drilling hasn’t gone much deeper than fifty odd meters. And same with Plutus.

So when we look at it and we think about it, I’ll take you back to the beginning when I said there’s a study that was done by Panoramic on this resource back in 2016, which showed that for a 1.6, 1.7 million ounce resource, that equated to a 900,000 ounce reserve. When they studied it back in 2016, the study suggested that that would produce 130,000 ounces a year for seven and a half years through a conventional CIL process plant with a 3 million ton per annum capacity. Now, that gives a bit of a scale and an understanding that this has been studied and was an economic ore body back in 2016.

So when we look at this now, we say, if you use a bit of artistic license and squint a little bit, you might be able to see that there’s potential for a number of these exploration prospects to potentially turn into something that may look like an open pit at a later date. And then it’s for you guys to understand what’s the actual size of this? How big does it get? We’re sitting at 1.8 million ounces at the moment. We put out an exploration release a week ago, which showed that there was more growth, which sat outside of the boundaries of that 1.8 million ounce resource. We put out an annual report which shows that the executives are remunerated or incentivized for a 3 million ounce resource. So theoretically, there’s a number that sits above two. But again, you guys be the judge of what that may be.

But even if you take the thought process of finding something at Birthday Gift at depth, if some of those exploration targets start to match together, this does become a materially larger multi-million ounce resource. And if you just go, well, if you double that studied 1.7, and maybe you’re around the three, four million ounce range, the capacity of the mill that should be sitting here should be about five to six million tons per annum. And then when you think more broadly than that from a strategic perspective, that becomes the mill of the region. Pantoro sits to the north of us with a 1.2 million ton to 1.5 million ton per annum process plant. And then further north of that is Westgold with their 2.6 million ton per annum process plant.

So the optionality for this project and this eventual outcome could be quite significant if there’s a way to find other high-grade sources that sit either in the hanging wall of what we’ve got in the ten kilometers of strike there. And then when we move to the north of what we’re seeing at Artemis, of the untouched or underexplored areas up there, if there’s additional ounces out there, then that all starts to look pretty attractive as a long life open pit project in the heart of Norseman.

So what we’re trying to do here at Sinclair is give shareholders, give investors a bit of an idea of what we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to approach the marketing. As I said when we started, we said when we got the project that we would grow the resource meaningfully. We said that we were gonna put it out before the end of FY26, and we brought it out in September. We doubled the resource from 900,000 ounces to 1.8 million ounces and kept the grade at 1.2 grams per ton. We used a pretty conservative gold price assumption of A$3,900 an ounce and a cutoff grade of 0.5 grams per ton. We’re now also saying that we’ve got 30,000 meters of drilling to complete before the end of this calendar year, which will then inform the next resource update, which we expect to deliver to the market before the end of FY27. We’re also expecting that there’s gonna be a fair amount of growth there.

But then when we also start to look at what we might look for next year, there’s a pretty compelling number of targets. If we start drilling some of the regional prospects like Birthday Gift, Artemis or Plutus, then that starts to be pretty enticing for what the growth capacity could be there. So when you look at us in the next six months, you’ll see exploration releases up until the resource update, which we’ll put out in FY27. And then from FY27 going forward, there should be some interesting information and exploration updates related to how we’re targeting the more regional programs. And then after that, we’ll start targeting the other components of the high grade narrow vein hanging wall systems. And then also after that, we can start looking at the six kilometers to the north of what we’ve been looking at.

So I think there’s quite a large amount of news coming up. There’s a lot of growth that we could see, and in the short, medium or longer term, there is actually a fair amount of growth. And the target that we’ve got internally is that we expect that this will become a substantially larger multi-million ounce gold project sitting in one of the best jurisdictions in the world. So thank you very much.

All right. Thanks, Jeff. Any questions from the room? Thank you. Jeff, just a quick one. Just going back to your long section there. Look, it looks like that was pattern drilled on ninety-degree holes back in the nineties. And some of that newer drilling looks like it’s got different azimuth on it. Any commentary there in terms of previous exploration? Was that drilled pre-2016 in the nineties? Any commentary on that?

Yeah. So a lot of the drilling was done between 1993 and 2005. And that was done by Kinross. So I’d say 95% of the drilling that’s been done historically has been RC, and most of it’s been trying to target the north-south orientation. We have started drilling and we’re just using diamond. Despite it being a fairly mature million ounce resource that’s been around for thirty years, the structural information and understanding that we have as a result of that is relatively limited. So with the diamond core that we’ve got now, we’ve also had some structural geos out on site to try to help us with some of our targeting. And we’re picking up a lot more detail in terms of some of the stringers that are coming and the opportunity for east-west hanging veins. And then as you step out a little bit further, the opportunity for some of those hanging wall structures and the high-grade systems that are potentially lost in some of the RC.

So the majority of the drilling was done back in the nineties. And so what we’re doing now is we’re trying to reimagine exploration and try to take a bit of a different approach to how we’re looking at this, because there hasn’t been a huge amount of exploration here. And yeah, we’re absolutely following up on all of it.

Great. And one last one from me, Jeff. Just 38 in the bank, what’s your burn rate like and how far out does that cash balance get you with your current level of activity?

Yeah. So 38 million bucks in the bank. We’re well-funded. That was at 30 June this year. Each rig runs about half a million bucks a month. So we’re well-funded to get to the end of this 30,000-meter... Well, it is a total of 50,000-meter drill program by the end of this year. And then we’ll have plenty in the bank to start looking at what we’re doing for next year. So in the background, we’re also starting to look at how we can do some desktop studies or some confirmatory tests on the met, or review the work that they did in the study back in 2016 to see if we can utilize some of that going forward. We’ll be doing some environmental works; there’s two seasons required for your environmental studies, so kick that off ’cause we don’t want any of that to be a bottleneck. And so when it does come time to flip the switch, we wanna have enough, I guess, gas in the tank to be able to go straight into study. So there’s a number of different pathways that next year takes. And I guess the outcome of the drilling will define what we’re looking at for next year.

Great. All right. Fantastic. Well, my instructions here say end of Tuesday, so if you could join me in thanking Jeff and the rest of our speakers this afternoon, that’d be great. Thank you. [audience applauding]