Thesis Gold & Silver

So we are focused on developing our Lawyers-Ranch Project, which is located in North Central British Columbia in the Toodoggone District. It’s a large gold, silver epithermal project that we’re moving towards development. I’m gonna be making some forward-looking statements, so I’d encourage you to read this on our website or on the presentation.

Okay. So why Thesis Gold? I think a number of reasons really gonna make us stand out as one of the top development stories in North America. We’ve got a large mineral resource. We’re measured and indicated and inferred 5.3 million ounces, and we view that very much as a base case scenario, and I’ll get into that in the coming slides where the upside is on the project. But one of the unique things here is that the core product is silver. We’ve got over 100 million ounces of silver on this project, so one of the largest undeveloped silver deposits in North America, where we’re looking to produce about 4 million ounces a year.

That resource fed into a very strong pre-feasibility study that we put out in December last year using fairly conservative commodity prices at just $2,900 gold and $35 silver. And that generated some fantastic project economics, a great production profile, and the numbers highlighted on the right-hand side here. So an after-tax NPV of $2.4 billion and after-tax IRR of 54%. And really that is driven by a strong fifteen-year mine life, where we’re producing on average 190,000 ounces gold equivalent a year. The CapEx is relatively light. It’s $740 million Canadian, and given how strong the economics are and that light CapEx, the payback is just over a year.

I mentioned upside. We’ve got a 500 square kilometer project footprint here, and really we’ve just scratched the surface on that. This project here is focused on… Most of the ounces here are from Lawyers, but there’s a lot of upside across our Ranch project. We got key support from our First Nation members here. We’re working very closely with them, and they’re actually equity shareholders in the company as well, which is fairly unique. And I think one of the other key things, a lot of the credibility here, comes from the investment by Centerra Gold and AngloGold Ashanti, so two strategic shareholders, AngloGold being very recent as well.

Okay. So the map on the right-hand side here is a core Toodoggone District. Our area, our 500 square kilometers is outlined in orange and gold color. And this area is a brownfield development site. It was in production in the late eighties, early nineties, and as a result of that, the infrastructure in this part of BC, although remote, is actually very good. You can see the road network that extends onto our project. You can drive to the project from Prince George in northern British Columbia. Takes about ten hours, but the roads are great. We put in three new bridges over the last few years.

There’s an airstrip just on the southern end of the Lawyers project. You can fly straight from Vancouver to the project, takes two hours, and then be back the same day. And there’s also a power line tie-in at Centerra Gold’s Kemess project, which is about 45 kilometers as the crow flies. It’s a large copper gold porphyry system that’s currently in care and maintenance, but they’re looking to bring back into production around 2030. And I think that was part of the rationale for Centerra’s strategic investment into us as district scale synergies in and around the Kemess project. So although quite remote, fantastic infrastructure that is relatively turnkey for BC.

And then in BC in general, I think arguably this is probably one of the best times to actually be trying to permit a mine in British Columbia for decades. Not only is the federal government and the provincial government pushing really hard to move projects through the permitting process, and I think there’s a list of projects that have been approved recently, over the last eighteen months at the top there. Our project was also selected for the One Project-One Review approach, so the federal government deferred the permitting process to the province, which is excellent. Essentially saying, “We don’t see anything of federal concern here. We’re gonna let the BC province push the permitting process through ahead themself.”

And the district itself, it’s arguably, I would say, one of the most exciting districts to be exploring in at the moment in North America. It’s had a lot of attention. Not only do we have over 5 million ounces, Centerra’s looking to put Kemess back into production. Freeport and Amarc made a big porphyry discovery here a couple of years ago. So the district itself is shaping up to be twenty to twenty-five million ounces today with a pathway to many more ounces.

Taking a step back again to look at the PFS. The base case economics on this are fantastic, but if you look at the graph on the left-hand side there, spot case, and this was spot at about the time we put out the study in December, was $4,100 gold and $51 silver. We’re pretty much at that today. But you can see at spot the after-tax NPV is $4.4 billion. The upside case at $5,000 gold and $90 silver is $6.6 billion after tax. So the project economics here are incredibly strong, and I think that just speaks to the quality of the asset, and there’s a lot of downside protection here as well.

Okay, so this is looking at the Lawyers project. So as I mentioned, our land position is essentially made up of two projects, Lawyers and Ranch in the north. Lawyers is about 97% of the total mineable ounces, so it’s the guts of the system at the moment, and this is what you’re looking at here on the screen. Ranch makes up only about 3%, and you get to Ranch on that road at the top of the image. It’s about 25 kilometers. But that material will be trucked from what is relatively flat to downhill to a centralized milling facility here on the Lawyers project.

Now, Lawyers is made up of three main large open pit deposits, AGB, Cliff Creek, and Juke’s Ridge. At Cliff Creek and Juke’s Ridge, though there is an underground component to those deposits as well, it’s very much open at depth. From surface, we’re down about 550 vertical meters, and it’s drill constrained down there. They mostly inferred ounces at depth, so they didn’t make it into the mine plan. But rather than drilling six to seven hundred meter deep holes to develop three to seven meter wide stopes, we’ve used that capital to explore on the Ranch Project to the north where there was much closer to surface mineralization. But my point really is that, and I’ll get to this in a coming slide, this system is still very much open at depth and will continue to grow beyond what is outlined in the pre-feasibility study.

Now, you can see the footprint here as well. It’s a relatively small footprint, centralized mill between the deposits on that flat plateau, limited vegetation, waste rock on the far side, tailings would just be pumped around into that nice big, broad valley. So small footprint, logistically friendly. Another thing worth noting here is you can see that it’s rolling hills. It’s not the rugged topography of coastal British Columbia. We’re in the rain shadow of the coastal mountains. We don’t get ten meters of snow a year. We blank last year in camp with about 50 centimeters of snow on the ground over the course of the winter. So again, something that just makes this project a little easier to operate than others in British Columbia.

Okay. So now taking a look at the Ranch Project to the north. As I mentioned, it currently only makes up 3% of the total mineable ounces, and that comes from the zones on the bottom of the image here you can see that are along the road. There’s probably about 800,000 ounces there total. About half of that is maybe measured and indicated. But that field of view you’re looking at there is probably 40 square kilometers. It is a very large, high sulfidation, epithermal field where we really just scratched the surface.

And I think I’d draw your attention to the Steve deposit, for example, where that was a target that we worked from the ground up. We made a high-grade discovery there last year where we drove 38 meters at 3.6. Now, that’s not in the resource. It’s obviously not in the mine plan, but I think it speaks to the caliber of the opportunity that exists at Ranch to make continued discoveries.

So this year, currently underway, we’re doing about 10,000 meters of just pure exploration drilling where we’re following up at the Steve zone. I think we’re on our tenth hole there now. We’re seeing the same styles of alteration and mineralization from that discovery hole last year, so I’m expecting some good results in the weeks to come. Mandusa was another new target that we developed. We’ve drilled three holes at Mandusa. Looks pretty strong. Also drilled at BV South and a range of other targets in this area that don’t have names yet. But my point is that Ranch is really just getting started. There is a lot of opportunity here to keep building on that 3% that we currently have in the mine plan.

Now, I’m gonna skip past this. Let me see. Is there a production profile in here? No. Okay, never mind. What I was gonna say is that in our production profile, you just have to imagine this, I guess, is that after year three, so there’s a strong fifteen-year mine life. We’re producing 190,000 ounces life of mine. But the first three years it’s about 280,000 ounces, then it drops off. And that is a factor of mineable ounces stopping at Ranch. But hopefully I’ve demonstrated to you that that is actually not gonna happen. We’re gonna be able to continue making discoveries here, pull ounces into the mine plan to hopefully maintain that 250,000 to 300,000 ounces over the course of the next few years.

Then after year seven, it drops off again, and that is a reflection of the underground stopping at Lawyers. But as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of inferred ounces down there that we’re gonna be able to convert, and it’s open at depth, but we’re not gonna do that work until we actually put the decline in and get underground. So again, I think that will help backfill the production profile. So realistically, rather than being 190,000 ounces a year over the life of mine, fifteen years, we’re probably more like two fifty to three hundred. And I think over the course of the next few years, we’re gonna be able to demonstrate that.

Okay. So in terms of permitting, as I mentioned earlier, I think this is the best time to be permitting a project in BC. A lot of projects have gone through the permitting process recently, but ours is a little different in that we actually just started permitting in December last year. So it’s a really good opportunity to demonstrate how things have improved in BC and Canada in terms of permitting. We started in December last year with the submission of the initial project description. We’ve gone through early engagement, and just on Friday last week, we submitted a detailed project description to the government. They accepted it on the same day. That’s excellent. So now we’re looking at an EA readiness decision by the end of the year.

So we’re moving through the process really well. The government is working actively with us and our nation members as well to facilitate moving the project along quickly. On the timeline that we’re on, hopefully, we can get through process planning, application development, and the effects assessment by the end of ’27, submitting by early ’28 for a decision in late ’28, early ’29, which would be about three years for the whole permitting process, which is a big departure from the typical trend in BC, which has historically been about seven years.

Okay. In terms of capital structure, this is relatively really clean. We’ve got about 295 million shares out. There’s no warrants. Market cap’s of just over a billion Canadian. And more importantly, we’ve got about 120 million cash in the treasury at the moment. So we’re really well-capitalized to see us through into 2028 post-feasibility study. We don’t have any debt. There’s no streams on the project. Royal Gold owns a couple of NSRs, half a percent at Lawyers and 2% at Ranch. Those were purchased from the vendor of the project a few years ago.

We now have a really strong range of analyst coverage on the project. Four of the Big Five banks in Canada, Scotia, National, CIBC, TD just launched on us very recently as well. So I’d encourage you to take a look at that. And our share price has performed incredibly well, and I think that’s just a reflection of, one, a good market, but also, two, there’s so few good development projects out there across North America of any sort of significant scale that have upside, that have support from nations, and infrastructure pretty much in place. And I think as we’ve continued to de-risk it through pre-feasibility study, through permitting, then we’ve seen real gains in the share price.

Our shareholder base, I think, reflects that as well. We’ve got a very strong institutional base. I’m sure everybody recognizes a lot of the names on the screen here, but I think, as I said, that just reflects the strength of the project. Also, as I mentioned earlier, strategic interest from AngloGold Ashanti and Centerra. And arguably probably more importantly and unique for a project at this stage and scale is that three of our four First Nation partners on the project are actually equity shareholders. About this time last year, they put up about $350,000 each, which is not a huge sum of money, but to them, it’s meaningful. But I think what that does is just demonstrates really good alignment between management and the nations in terms of how we’re developing this project and the vision we have for it moving it forwards.

Okay. So in terms of our timeline, 2026 has been a great year for us. Anglo came in early in Q1. We changed the name to Thesis Gold and Silver to more accurately reflect the silver endowment we have on the project. We made that fantastic discovery at the Steve Zone that we’re currently following up on. The exploration program is underway, where we’re looking at doing about 10,000 meters of drilling this year at Ranch, where I think we’re gonna see some strong results. Permitting is progressing exceptionally well. We saw Anglo top up their position more recently to just under 10%. A couple of weeks ago, we were accepted into the JDXJ. I think all of these things really just continue to demonstrate the credibility of the project, the direction that we’re going in here, and also that BC’s transformed itself as a permitting jurisdiction.

And then looking further afield, we’re looking at a feasibility study by Q4 next year. The work for that is ongoing at the moment. I don’t think you’re really gonna see any major departures from the PFS that we put out last year. The deposit’s very well understood. I don’t think you’re gonna see any changes to the infrastructure, locations of waste rock or tailings. Metallurgy is very straightforward. So all those things will probably remain pretty similar in the feasibility study. And then in terms of EA and permitting, we talked about that a little bit, but I think late ’28, early ’29, we are expecting an EA decision. So thank you very much. I’ve got a few minutes left, I think, so happy to take any questions if there are any.

I’ll open up to questions from the audience. There’s a microphone that’ll come to you if you have a question. I’ll start if I may.

Sure.

You mentioned there’s a 50-kilometer hydroelectric line away, the tie-in at the Camas Mine. How much excess capacity do they have, and how much do you think it would take both in time and dollar terms to build that?

Let me flip back to the slide. It’s a good question. So you can see the power line here comes into Camas. So Centerra actually owns that power line. It’s about a 400-kilometer-long line, hydroelectric green power. We are going through a system impact study with BC Hydro at the moment and so is Centerra to evaluate where that power is gonna come from, from the grid to accommodate both what they’re looking to do and what we’re looking to do. There’s enough power on the line to accommodate both projects at the moment with a bit of a buffer, and I think we could probably up the capacity on the line even further from that.

BC Hydro has to do a little bit of work on one of the substations near where the line originates to be able to accommodate this, in terms of upgrading some of the transistors. Obviously, those are long lead items, but it’s nice that we’re actually dealing with BC Hydro right now to work through that process. In terms of the work being completed, it’s on track for 2030, 2031, which is perfect for us coming online. And the ramp-up phase for us during construction would be diesel gen sets anyway. So I think the timing works very well, and there’s certainly capacity on the line. In terms of the cost to build it, from their project to ours, it would just follow the road up a nice big broad valley. It’s about seventy million.

Okay. Okay. Anybody else? One quick one. We got a minute left. Ranch seems to be quite underexplored, unexplored almost even. You wanna just walk a little bit through your main exploration goals for 2027? Is the focus still Steven Bingo, or is there any other areas that maybe we should focus on?

I think it really gonna depends what comes out of this year’s drilling, to be honest. We don’t have any results back yet, but hopefully they’re gonna start coming in in the next few weeks. I’d anticipate that we’ll probably continue focusing at Steve and flush that out and see what it evolves into. Hopefully there’s potential for new discoveries on some of the other targets that we’ve drilled, I should say. So I think it’s really a question of get the assays back from this year and then evaluate where we go in 2027. But I think you’ll see a considerable exploration program next year, and that feeds into what I was talking about with the production profile and how I think realistically we’re probably more like a 250,000, 300,000 ounce producer going forward. And you won’t see that in the feasibility study, but I think we’ll point to that and hopefully the drilling will do the hard work there and point to itself.

Great. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thesis Gold.

Thank you. [clapping]