Investor update

Aug 17, 2024

Press Release

Good morning, Brian. As my fellow Great Western Mining Director, it's been great to see the news that's just come out from the company you and I both work for. Tell us a little bit about it and what it will mean. Okay, Alistair, I'll do my best to summarize it. We have a prospect which we call the East Side Mine Group. We've had it for a long time. We've always liked it. It's a copper prospect, and it's been drilled by other people in the past, but not to great depth. We have shot geophysics over it successfully in an IP survey two or three years back and spent a certain amount of money on it, but it's slightly distant from our main copper prospects in the Huntoon Valley. The Huntoon Copper Project is a separate prospect altogether. We are limited to what we can do. We have limited people and resources and so forth, so it has been in the queue for some time without an awful lot of priority. We were approached recently by Bronco Creek Exploration, which is a division of EMX Royalty Corporation, which is a large U.S. company. Bronco Creek actually own adjoining acreage. In fact, they've staked additional acreage, so they pretty much surround us at our claims at East Side Mine, which is interesting. It's nice to have neighbors because if you have neighbors, it means other people believe in the area as much as we do. If you're all on your own, sometimes you can feel a little bit lonely and wonder if you're doing the right thing. Yeah. In this case, Bronco Creek have approached us and asked us if we would be interested in a pooling agreement so that we actually merge their claims with ours. They have many more claims than ours, but our claims represent about 30% of the combined claims, and we think we have the best acreage, but then, of course, we would, wouldn't we? People always do. Nevertheless, this is a good area. The plan here is that Bronco Creek would like to take this forward as a project. They don't have plans to spend a huge amount of money. Obviously, we've already spent some money on it. They believe that they can bring in large industry partners to develop this. I want to use a word which I've used a lot in previous conversations and which can be a bit overworked at the moment, which is that we believe we have a copper porphyry. We also, of course, believe we have a copper porphyry in the Huntoon Valley. Earlier this year, we took our Porphyry Consultant, Dr Lawrence Carter, out to East Side Mine to walk the ground, and he came back from that and said, "This is as good as anything else you have on your portfolio of acreage." We think we have something interesting, and we agree with the people at Bronco Creek that it is worth pursuing. They are porphyry geologists, and we think that we can turn this into something, and we hope that we can bring in a partner to turn this into a large-scale project, and it's very exciting. It may not happen overnight, but this is the first time in Great Western's history that it has ever done an acreage deal with another company. It is exciting, and it's part of the process of trying to get people interested in the copper potential of our acreage. We have been talking to a lot of people about our acreage in the Huntoon Valley, the Huntoon Copper Project, which is also a porphyry prospect. People like the company that's trying to farm it out to do more work, you should do a bit more, too early for us, the normal thing. We're getting a lot of people interested in talking about it, but we haven't done a deal on it yet. I think this is the first copper deal we have ever done, and we are a copper player, so this is the first copper deal we've ever done with another company, and we hope it will lead to bigger things, and it will also give us exposure to a much wider audience through being involved with Bronco Creek and not doing it ourselves as a small AIM company listed in this side of the Atlantic. It's a very exciting development, and I'm really looking forward to working with Bronco Creek and see what we can do with the East Side Mine. EMX, which you mentioned in connection with Bronco Creek, is actually a pretty well-known name in Canada. Talking of giving the project and the company wider exposure, having this sort of cascading upward. I think that's right. Yes. It's going to be a useful thing. The AIM market, as you know, Brian, has been quite dead. There's still activity on the ground. There is. In North American mining scene. Yes. What do you think the actual next steps on East Side will be? Are we talking about a financial commitment in terms of a work program here? You more alluded to a kind of attempt to package it up and sell it on? I think the latter is the case, that Bronco Creek and us have no plans to spend a great deal of money on it. We believe there is a lot of information there. It needs to be seriously drilled, and that will need to be seriously drilled by somebody else. No, we've got no big financial commitment coming up. For instance, I don't anticipate us suddenly coming up next week and say, "Oh, we want to do a placing to raise some money for East Side Mine." I don't think that's going to happen. I think with a fair wind behind it and the momentum of a much larger company, apparently the Bronco Creek people tell me that EMX have roughly 80 ongoing projects in North America at the moment. I don't know if that's a completely accurate number, but they are obviously a very busy and active company. Yeah. To be associated with them, I think is a big positive for us. I hope this deal will kind of get us into the swim a little bit more because we're just a small foreign group working in a very big place. Actually, to be coattailed onto a bigger group, I think will have a huge advantage for us, and I think it may make other people look up a little bit and wonder what else we've got, and what else we've got we think is very interesting. Perhaps you could tell the audience, anybody in the audience, who doesn't really know what pooling assets involves, what it really means. It's a kind of catchall term, but what are the specifics here? Okay. The specifics are that if these aren't the right numbers, which we have 30 claims and they have 70 claims, then we put the claims together into a group of 100 claims, and then we work together to develop them, and we share benefits, and we share liabilities on a 30/70 basis. It's as simple as that. Yeah. This project will be operated by Bronco Creek. We don't have the personnel to do this. We're just too thin on the ground for people with the other projects we have. Bronco Creek will take over the running of this project. I say take it over, we haven't done much on it since we shot a geophysical survey a couple of years back. We don't do much on it day to day. As I said, we don't have the people to do it. We're going to get a team as well, which is great. Basically, we share our fortunes and our misfortunes on a 30/70 basis. That's the deal. Yeah. I'm looking forward to seeing how this one develops because, packaging up East Side Mine into a bigger parcel of assets, it'd make the overall asset look much more attractive to any potential acquirers. It's obvious, to me, the rationale behind this deal. I think it's probably a win-win, one of those deals where all sides win, and it may be that whoever acquires it wins as well, if there is actually a porphyry there, as you say. I believe that's correct. I'm greatly encouraged by the fact that our own porphyry advisor has really given us a green light, and he believes it's a very interesting story. In fact, his comment was, "Why didn't you show me this before?" The reason was, of course, we have limited time and resources to do these things. It's nice to see something happening there because it's been an orphan child, slightly abandoned. We've always liked it. We've never thought of giving up East Side Mine. We've always thought it was something for the future, but it just hasn't been geographically in the core of what we're doing. To have someone else picking up the baton on this is going to be great. Do you have any notion of how long it may take before they sort of get parties interested in the property? Has there been any work with- I don't. I think that's an open question. What I can say is that working with them, and we haven't known them very long, and they've been extremely prompt in the way they've done things. They respond to things quickly. They come back very quickly. If there's been any delay at all, it's because they always need to get in the queue for their legal department to veto the agreements. The people we deal with are extremely prompt and very efficient, and very happy to have made their acquaintance and looking forward to working with them. Yeah. Good news all round. I think so. Good to talk to you, Brian. Thanks, Alastair.