-ations rep for American West Metals. I'm delighted to be joined by Managing Director Dave O'Neill, who's here to share an update on both the West Desert Project and the Storm Copper Project. The format for today is that Dave will give a short presentation. Then we'll open it up to a detailed Q&A. If at any time you'd like to ask a question, just do so using the Q&A feature at the bottom of the screen. I will now hand over to you, Dave, to share the presentation.
Thanks, Dannika, and thanks everyone for joining. It's been a little while since we did one of these and we're trying a slightly different format today with a little bit of a video in there as well to take people into the West Desert, where we're drilling at the moment through some a very short video. Bear with me while I start the share. What I'll do, very quick introduction and overview of where we're at with things Storm and West Desert, and then we'll get into the Q&A section, which I'm really looking forward to. I really like that, you know, format where people can ask the direct questions of us and it's a bit more to and fro, and I don't have to hear my own voice the whole time. Onwards. Bear with me.
Look, as people know, there's some questions about the Storm PFS and timing of that and why we've converted to West Desert with a lot of our promo and stuff, and that's a natural progression where we are right now. The Storm PFS is continuing full tilt behind the scenes, and I'll talk to that in a bit more detail. We're also drilling at West Desert, so naturally when the rig's turning, there's the news flow coming through, and there's the excitement around that. That's why we have shifted the IR in the very short term because, you know, we're still waiting to settle on the Storm development options there, and I'll talk to that, like I said, in a bit more detail shortly.
West Desert, we are drilling. Drilling's going well. We're progressing very rapidly now. Investors would understand that we've just done a recent AUD 10 million placement. A lot of that is because of the early success of the project and the wanting to really extend that program without any limits on capital. You know, you'd hate to start getting results and then have to do another capital raise on the back of that. It might cap the price and the market capitalization, et cetera. Getting it in now gives us that runway, allows us to execute without any overhangs. Let's see if this works. This is the interesting part. Enjoy this. Here at West Desert in Utah. Back drilling in 2026. The last time we were here drilling was 2022.
We've been fortunate enough for investors. Got some big funds like Tribeca on board. They wanna see critical metals expanded, particularly in the U.S. We're here today with our first exploration drill hole. It's just going down as we speak. West Desert's a big mineral system, one of the world's largest, but also the only indium deposit in the continental USA. It's very important to the strategic and critical metal scene here in the U.S. This is zinc sulfide. The zinc traditionally comes up with high grades of indium and silver at West Desert. You know, this is on the XRF 50% zinc, so, you know, this interval will assay very, very high for zinc, and that shows the quality of the mineralization here and also the scale of it.
This particular interval is already 60 meters thick, and we're still drilling. Who knows what lies beneath. Very high in zinc, very high volumes of indium, lots of copper and lots of silver as well. Look, this exploration program we're doing now will look for all of those things and with predominant focus on copper and the critical metals. Lots more exciting drilling to come, hopefully. Cool. Okay. Look, it's just fortuitous how I was there during the first hole. That was not planned that way, and we're lucky we had hit something quite good, and I'll talk to that in a bit more detail with the Q&A, et cetera. Maybe it's best that I just refresh everyone's memory on what West Desert is as it stands today.
Back in 2022, we obviously did the drilling around the initial deposit. There was an existing deposit that when we purchased the project, we put a JORC compliant resource around that, and that's really defined what it is today, which is 1.3 million tons of zinc, plus copper, silver and gold, but also around 24 million ounces of indium, and that's the unique part of West Desert. It is one of the largest deposits in the U.S.A. Look, and it doesn't sort of stand there with just indium. There's a lot of other metals in there, gallium, germanium and tellurium, which we haven't really assessed in detail yet. Look, this essentially is a base metal deposit.
If you know, investors saw our video that we put out last week, these systems are polymetallic. They don't rely on one metal for the value or price setting, et cetera, et cetera. This is a typical porphyry system with a skarn, high grade skarns around it. That's where we see the growth opportunity here. That's what we're seeing with our first drill hole. Just to refresh, this was a historical mining district back in the early 1900s. There are existing zinc, silver, lead mines there. They're on the periphery of the mineral system. We're very close to Bingham Canyon and Tintic in Utah and close to rail, and we've got power, we've got water, and it's very well set up from an infrastructure point of view.
Everyone I imagine on this call understands what indium is used for, but it's particularly becoming more prevalent and a high value commodity now with the, you know, the exponential growth in stealth aircraft and, semiconductors and solar panels, et cetera. I won't talk too much about the dump sample thing in the interest of time, but there is a very unique opportunity at West Desert. Like I talked about, we do have the existing mines there. There's a significant amount of spoils left there. Back in the day, they only mined what they could see, therefore threw a lot to waste dumps, you see that with the gold mines around Western Australia, et cetera. We've sampled those. They're very high in zinc, lead, silver, as you can imagine.
This is what the old-timers didn't realize, there's also very high tellurium, germanium, and indium. We're looking at that. We've taken some samples. We're going to get them processed in the nearby labs to see how, you know, what we can do with these because the U.S. government is providing funds for mining companies to rehabilitate some of these old mining dumps and giving them money to remove these spoils. If we can get paid to remove them and then make money from them, then that could be an easy win and an early stage opportunity for West Desert while we look at the bigger project.
That's what, you know, West Desert, like we talked about quickly there, it is a big deposit as it stands today. You know, certainly that first drill hole that we've drilled, suggests it's only gonna get bigger. It's in two main areas. We have the Deep Zone , which is sort of a part of a carbonate replacement deposit. It's sort of in stratiform , and it sort of sits within the sediments. You can see the sort of curved form of that there. The main deposit, which is a skarn, it sits on the edge of a porphyry. It's magnetite rich, which is an important bit that I'll talk to.
We have the blue zone there, which is the oxide part of the deposit which we're looking at, with these waste dumps and et cetera, on how to sort of maximize getting critical metals out of those materials up in that part of the deposit. I'm glad I can actually talk to this slide with a bit of arm waving. You can see the West Desert deposit there. As I said, the skarns at West Desert and around Bingham Canyon and Tintic are magnetite rich, they have a distinctly high magnetic signature, as you can imagine. This image you see here is a magnetic image. You can see there in the black dashed line, that's the outline of looking down on the West Desert deposit as it stands today.
You can see the little black dots there where the drill holes lie. You can see obviously there's a very distinct magnetic anomaly going about 4 km to the edge of our project tenements, in fact. We decided to step quite a way out, fairly risky drill hole in the scheme of things. This is what we're all about. We don't wanna just incrementally grow this thing. We wanna see how big it can be very quickly on. We stepped 400 m eters out, we've hit mineralization. Looks very, very similar to the West Desert main deposit there. Not part of the carbonate replacement down the bottom, the laminated stuff. It looks like more like traditional skarn. Almost 80 meters of that material. That's very significant.
We've only got one hole in that entire margin, as you can see there, so that's a fairly big step out and obviously, it, you know, it's not in the best part of the magnetics as well. As you can see there, from around there as well, you know, there's quite a few drill holes outside of the West Desert deposit that have hit high-grade mineralization. We're really fairly confident in what we're seeing in this drill hole and what we see in the region, that there is significant zinc, copper, indium, silver, et cetera, to be had in this, in this area. The other thing I'll point to here is that if you can see the magnetic low to the north of the West Desert deposit there, we think that's the porphyry.
You can see that there's a number of other magnetic features around that, sort of low, the blue and the light greens. You can see that there's no drilling in that. This is when we talk about that only 10% of these projects have been explored, that's just around the porphyry margin. As we know, Bingham Canyon originally started out as a lead-zinc mine, and it's because the skarns were discovered early. That naturally progressed as you explore away from these obviously geophysical highs, you discover more things like the porphyries and things like that. This is following that same pattern. That's what's very exciting about this project. Again, highlighting what I guess essentially what we've talked to.
You can see there now, this is a long section looking north through West Desert. You can see, it's a fairly aggressive step out that we've done. And we're looking forward to drilling the hole to the east of that, where the Utah Deep area is there. Look, it's early days. We expect the assays in a few weeks. They're already at the lab. They're being processed. The other thing I'd talk to as well, we did do some infill sampling, in around the resource, and that, you know, again, the assays have started to trickle in for that. Hopefully, we can get those in the next week or two as well, and we can, you know, put them out to the market as well. Those assays will be different. They're not expansion.
They're essentially outside of the current resource, but they are infilling key areas and skarns that were never just never sampled back in the day. Obviously, with the XRF gun now, we can go through and look at these unsampled areas, determine that there is some base metals there, and then resample them. That's what that project was about there. Hopefully there's two bits of news here, the existing resource work infill and then also this exploration work we're doing now. In the interest of time, I'll just move quickly. Storm. We haven't been sitting still on Storm, and we have missed our date of the PFS.
That is really because it's presented a couple of extra opportunities for us. You guys obviously understand the original concept was around this fairly small scale in the scheme of things, beneficiation plant which would put out a DSO-type product. That's still absolutely the case and we're assessing that. Also, what the resource growth has done is obviously presented a different opportunity, which is a slightly bigger mine. We're sort of sitting in that 300,000 tons of copper now. Also, the grade's come down. What does that look like from a development point of view? What is the threshold to develop that further? We've gone, you know, down a few metallurgical rabbit holes trying to get the best we can with this beneficiation.
Sticking with beneficiation, so not going to full flotation, et cetera. It's generated two opportunities for us, and we're very close to defining, you know, which one is the best pathway forward. Remembering that, you know, what we're looking at now is phase I for Storm.
Obviously, you know, this is a belt scale opportunity, and we see, you know, in 10, 15 years time, probably transitioning to a phase II with further exploration, looking within the greater Storm belt, which is obviously, we own 100% with our joint venture partner Aston Bay. That would take more capital and rather than go back to the market and tap you guys on the shoulders all the time, we prefer to, you know, see what phase I does, what the best opportunity presents to us and put the best foot forward for Storm so we can fund the exploration and expansion into the regional areas. That's where we're at. We're very close and I do urge patience. You know, we want to do it right first time.
We don't want to have to go back and reassess things in the next phase. What that looks like for permitting, I know there was a couple of questions for permitting, I'll touch on some of that now, is that we got the exploration permit approved. That's been fully approved for the coming years and the pre-development work, and now we've got that mine application has actually been submitted as well. That's in with the Nunavut Planning Commission. The next stage is the NIRB. That's usually a two-year timeline. That's already been passed a few hurdles in there, and we're just waiting to see once we finalize the mine design, that'll push that forward. It's all happening behind the scenes. Yeah, like I said, patience. You know, good things come to those who wait, hopefully.
Yeah, keep, you know, keep an eye out for further news on that. That might take us to the Q&A section, and I might just flick through slides as they become relevant and we can talk to, you know, rather than just look at my head, we can look at interesting slides.
Perfect. Sounds good, Dave. Thank you. Thanks to everyone who sent through a question. There's a lot in the Q&A as well, so I'll do my best to consolidate all of those. I might actually just start off with the Storm questions because we did receive a lot of those via email, so I have already consolidated them. Firstly, Dave, I guess what's the delay? This one's from Jill and Vincent. They've asked, "What is holding up the Storm PFS and what aspects are required, what aspects have required more work than expected?
Yeah. I guess I touched on it just then, but opportunity has really delayed it. The, you know, like I said, do we proceed with the very small, well, not very small, relatively smaller scale DSO and much simpler processing opportunity, or do we progress with the bigger mine? With that comes complexity and also cost. You know, it, with beneficiation, we got it to a very efficient process with the PEA. As the grade drops and the tonnes increase, you increase your throughput. If we've also gone down some metallurgical rabbit holes in trying to perfect the system further and get higher recoveries. What is it?
Yeah
You know, like all economic projects, it becomes a balance between capital, and return, obviously grade, throughput, recovery, et cetera, et cetera.
What you do is you open up all these different opportunities and it's about settling on which one sort of suits. Look, personally, I think, you know, where we are, the bigger mine probably needs further exploration work and you probably want to make it four or 500,000 tonnes before you pursue that, the lower grade, bigger opportunity. Comes with higher capital, as all these things do. We'll stick with the more DSO, more robust, stockpile some of that lower grade material for the phase II, you know, which is going to be in 10, 15 years or whatever.
That's why we're still assessing these opportunities and, you know, it's taking us more time because we are finding these kind of unique and cool metallurgical ways of being hopefully one of the most efficient type DSO projects globally for, in the terms of copper. Yeah, that's what's really delayed us.
Yeah
nothing untoward. Yeah.
Indicatively, when do you think you will deliver the PFS?
Yeah. Well, like I said, we'd like to settle on in these coming weeks the final, you know, which way is forwards and then obviously make sure our Is are dotted and our Ts are crossed and then, you know, put something out shortly after that.
Okay, thank you. Jake has asked a question on the April capital raise. He wants to know why the capital raise was completed before the pre-feasibility study disclosure rather than after at a potentially higher price.
Yeah. Well, I guess the two are disconnected, Storm and West Desert. Going back to West Desert and, you know, the reason, and I think there was a question around, I may as well answer it now as well.
why there seemed to be a current, a shift in the promotion of West Desert. Well, that's completely opportunistic and also a coincidence of where we're at with both projects. In September last year we had, you know, a significant amount of money come in and that was really to re-energize the American project. While Storm was continuing, was fully funded to the PFS, et cetera.
This extra money came in essentially to move, you know, West Desert forward but with the focus on critical metals, et cetera. As that has gone into the drilling phase, naturally, like I said, a lot of promotion has gone to that 'cause it is exciting. You know, the drill rig's bits turning and it is producing news now where Storm's still waiting. The capital raise that we just did, based on the first drill hole, we tapped on the shoulder as well and said, "Look, we've got another AUD 10 million there." Like I said, is, you know, do we hold back and you know, you know, who knows when we'll get assays back. You know, these things aren't always in your control, et cetera, et cetera, and how long's that gonna be.
You know, do we cap the market, so the share price and the market.
Yeah
capitalization, you know, based on Because people know that at some point, we'll need more money to expand this, or do we go earlier and give us that runway, give us that space to actually execute fully now and expand the program if we need to based on good results? It's like I know everyone's crystal ball is different and you've got to do what you think is best at the time.
Yeah.
You know, again, sometimes when that capital comes in you can't, you sort of can't refuse.
Harrison's actually asked, "Was the U.S. government offered an opportunity to invest in your most recent capital raise?
Yes, I can't talk to what is going on behind the scenes.
Oh.
Obviously, there's confidentiality around the U.S. discussions and things like that. John's in Washington D.C. as we speak.
John Prineas
Yeah, John Prineas, who's a co-founder of American West and a non-exec director. He's also with St George Mining. He's attending the Defense and Aerospace, you know, conference at the moment for critical metals. Talking to all the right people. They the government generally would come into some of these projects in the past at a PEA or a PFS level, you know, with more certain timelines on development, et cetera. They are now looking, you can see some other Australian ASX companies where they are dabbling earlier in and it's, you know, giving them the confidence that you know, that you have a forecast or a vision of developing these projects and what your plan is. The, yeah, like I said, those discussions are ongoing.
Okay. Brilliant. I guess while we're on sort of the government engagement, can you tell us how recent conversations with the U.S. Department of the Interior have been going and other agencies if they've progressed? What does the pathway to grant or loan funding look like, specifically for West Desert? Just to tie in there, one from Michael Bentley, thank you for asking a question, can you give us a bit more detail on the historic mine waste opportunity at Utah at Emma and Galena?
Yeah.
He's trying to understand how American West will make money from this.
Sure. The first bit, like I said, I mean, as discussions continue, they're confidential and we can't disclose anything.
Okay.
or when.
You can always ask the question.
No
on the webinar.
They may be listening.
Yeah
Certainly, there's a number of opportunities in terms of different streams of funding. It depends which department it is, but there's a critical metals fund, there's in-process innovation. You know, there's a bunch of different streams of funding. There's also the mine reclamation, which Michael is actually referring to. We're looking at all of those, and all of those are applicable to West Desert and to Storm. Some of these do cross over to Canada. The Canadian system's also got their own versions of these. We're looking at everything.
Oh, yeah.
in both jurisdictions. The mine waste, what would happen is, just say we had I won't come up with a volume, but we would be paid to remove that material and rehabilitate that back to, you know.
Foot
What it was pre-mining. This is just the waste spoils. If we were paid to remove those, if we could move those to a place that could actually process them, then we have the ability to, whether it's through a small heap leach being an oxide ore, with a, you know, et cetera, et cetera, then that is an opportunity for us. We get paid to move them off site. One, this would all be toll treating, so we'd all send it somewhere. We don't know where we'd go to, the places that, you know, there's Bingham Canyon there's a copper smelter there. There's Trail in BC, which is zinc, indium smelters, et cetera. Do we set up our own little heap leach on site?
You know, again, refreshing investors, a lot of West Desert is patented land, so it is private land owned by American West Metals. That presents permitting opportunities for us where we do not have to go through the federal government, we just have to go through a local government.
Permitting pathways to those kind of operations are very much quicker and easier to achieve without federal intervention, et cetera. That's what it presents. We don't know all the ins and outs right now. That's something that we're still assessing obviously.
Okay. Brilliant. I'm sure Michael will ask a follow-up question if that wasn't sufficient. We'll also link in the replay a link to the video that we just got done on the history of West Desert with the consultant geologist, Mark, in this sort of part. If people want to have a look at that, we'll link to it later. Moving on, another funding question. This one's from Kieran on Ocean Partners' financing. He says, "What milestones remain before the Ocean Partners facility, up to 80% of initial CapEx can be drawn down? How confident are you that Storm can be funded without major shareholder dilution?
Yeah. The Ocean Partners, the current heads of agreements stipulates that the funding can be accessed after FID. Discussions with Ocean Partners suggest that, you know, what, and what does that look like? Because it is AUD 40 million, it is, I guess, phrased as AUD 40 million or up to 80% of the, sorry, 80% or AUD 40 million, whichever is the greatest, of the initial capital. Exploring that further, what is, when does the initial capital come into play? That is what we are exploring at the moment. For example, if we were to order some of the equipment two years in advance, does that, you know, access some of those funds? Because it, you know, it counts as initial capital, but it has been paid way back now, or in, you know, shortly or whatever.
That's what we're exploring. There's absolutely an opportunity to bring some of that capital forward. You know, nothing has been confirmed at this point.
That would be absolutely something we're looking at.
Okay. Vincent's asked, "Is the 2026 Storm season progressing or not? If so, when?
Yeah.
Is a bigger camp planned?
Exactly. Any, so the current camp we have now, just to touch on that quickly, is certainly enough to do what we need to do in the next year or two. As part of any development there would be actually, we'd move the camp up to where the Storm site is, and we'd make that bigger and start the construction of a bigger operation there. It's up to 60 people at the moment, so it can absolutely cater for anything we need to do. Planning is absolutely ongoing, the drill planning. If we were to do pre-development activities like geotech drilling and or reclamation, sorry, sterilization or whatever drilling, we'd absolutely use that opportunity to do more exploration. You know, half the effort is getting crews up to there and opening the camp.
While you've got a drilling crew there, you'd do exploration as well. That's a no-brainer. For very incremental costs. That planning work is ongoing. It'll obviously depend on where we land with the development scenario.
As to what that plan looks like. You know, if it's the bigger one, then we'd go out and we'd want to probably add resources quite quickly. There's a lot of Inferred resources we could convert to Indicated and potential reserve already existing. We might like, you know, want to expand in the region there where the smaller opportunity might be more bespoke kind of program and starting to, you know, and then bringing some of the higher-grade material in. The lower opportunity is a more higher grade mine. Stockpiling some of the lower grade stuff, we'd probably do work around the Cyclone Deeps trying to bring some higher-grade underground material.
Okay
into that mine plan as well.
Yes. Okay. When do you expect to be able to update shareholders on the exploration plans for Storm?
once, like I said, once the development scenario's dropped.
Okay
that'll flow directly out into the, what the plan looks like.
Okay. Great. I'm conscious of time. There's more questions on Storm, but I'm going to flick to West Desert. Hopefully everybody can hang around for another sort of 5 or 10 minutes. We've mentioned that there's been a shift to from Storm to West Desert, but you mentioned that it's not because West Desert's the new flagship, it's just a matter of seasonality and drilling. You've got two flagships almost. The first question's from Michael, it's on the Nevada Deep discovery. He's asked, "Hole 2601 intersected over 77 meters of visual zinc copper skarn at Nevada Deep. How does it compare to the Main Zone, and what does it say about the size of the system?
Yeah. Great question. The other thing I will add is that our Storm geological crew is actually working at West Desert.
Oh, great.
we use this with that. Yeah, APEX Geoscience, they've been fantastic for us in the past. They're down there as well, we'll have to split them up, you know, once Storm and, you know, West Desert go at the same time or get more people. That's a good thing. It gives us continuity and we've got the right people doing the job. Yes, it looks very similar to the main deposit. That's a simple analogy I can give where it goes in and out. We hit the porphyry. It looks like it's the skarn that actually sits on the porphyry. It's massive magnetite with sphalerite and clots of chalcopyrite through it as well. There'll be some copper rich zones.
You know, based on the visuals that we've already published, you can see that there's the stuff that was in that video.
very high grade looking material. Also sort of more veinlets and not massive intervals of it. You can probably infer kind of grade from what the, maybe what the West Desert Main Zone looks like. The thing to consider here is we can't see on the XRF what sort of other metals there are. You know, we can tell if it's zinc, sphalerite. You know, we can tell if it's chalcopyrite or other copper minerals, et cetera, 'cause it's very clear. Traditionally this stuff's very high in indium. I'd have to say that the, what we've found around West Desert is the lowest risk element is indium.
Oh, interesting.
zinc and copper comes and goes, depends where you are in the system, but there's indium through everything. We even find iron ore, so magnetite iron ore with indium in it. I would assume that is probably, I'm guessing that's probably one of the lowest risk elements, so, you know, hopefully we get more indium there. Also other things like gallium and, germanium and, tellurium, which haven't traditionally been looked at. The other thing I will point out is that obviously there's very interesting here, and I won't talk too much to it because the assays always make you a liar, but there is this high-sulfidation overprint in hole one that we do not see much at West Desert.
With this we're getting a lot of arsenopyrite, we're getting a lot of molybdenum down in the bottom of the drill hole, and that traditionally in these systems is associated with gold. Again, we, the Niton can't tell us what we've got, but we do have tellurium up to 1,000 grams. We've got bismuth and we've got tungsten, is what Not tellurium, sorry. Tungsten up to 1,000 grams, arsenic up to 2,000, and also strong bismuth. There's all these other elements there, you know, pathfinder elements telling us that we may have a sniff of gold as well. Hopefully some good intervals.
Okay. When can investors expect the assays for the gold and the rest of the critical minerals that you outlined? I guess, what needs to happen before gallium, tellurium and the other minerals can be included in an updated MRE?
Look, I think a lot of the historical drilling didn't assay for most of these metals, that's an issue. We'd have to go. Some of the core was missing from the very earliest things. They did the basic base metals, silver and gold kind of thing. You know, that's why the gold and the indium, you know, resources at West Desert are Inferred. The work we've done just now, hopefully can upgrade a lot of that stuff to Indicated for indium and gold. You know, again, there's probably more work to be done for the other elements. You know, some of the core is still there. We can still do it. That's We'd have to assess that as it comes.
In terms of assays, like I said, we're at the window of the assay labs now, so everything's been sent off. It's wait.
Yeah.
You know.
Well-
I'd like to think what we're seeing from the resampling is starting to come in here. That's sort of three to five weeks. That's what that's doing. The turnaround time's there, so hopefully it's similar.
Okay. You're clearly very excited about this latest drill hole, well, the initial visuals on it. I guess with 10% of the prospective area, I guess explored, where are you gonna prioritize the exploration going forward across the project?
The clear opportunity as this slide sort of presents is to the east, you know, chasing these magnetic anomalies. Like we've said, we've got a direct correlation with the main and deep zones at West Desert with the magnetics and hole 1 showing that, you know, there's zinc and copper potentially. Let's wait for assays. Again, disclaimers, we haven't got assays back. We're only using a Niton gun. That, it, you know, it's showing that to be the case through here. That's the obvious opportunity, and then opening to the north up the other porphyry zones.
Look, the other gravity has been another good data set that we're using, and there is a lot of correlation between the mags and the gravity, but there's some gravity anomalies that we'd like to test as well because not all the skarns here are magnetic. There's some silica skarns. Zinc and chalcopyrite aren't very magnetic. We can't dismiss everything. Essentially, there's a lot to do. There's a lot to achieve, and we need to be efficient and systematically step through these targets as they present, and it'll be based on success as well. You know, we won't go and do any infill or drill holes around West Desert. I don't think that's gonna add too much in. You know? Let's get the incremental discoveries.
Let's make this thing, you know, if the hole, the next hole we're gonna drill is to the east of hole 1 along that magnetic trend, stepping out another 300, 400 meters, you know, if we can identify more zinc, copper out that way, then that really expands the potential of this system and, you know, puts it into that next level, which is what we want to do.
Yeah
as quickly as we can.
Thank you, Dave. That's a great answer. It's a very exciting project. Moving into the corporate section of the questions, there's just two left. Clint has asked, "What are your main concerns right now and how are you overcoming them?" Guess it's a bit of a broad question. Is there anything that is a potential objection that's holding things up or holding you back in what you're doing?
No, I'd have to say it's what affects everybody. You know, we've got the funding, we've got the metal in the ground, we've got fantastic support from government, and all the stakeholders at Storm and West Desert, you know. We were just at the Nunavut Mining Symposium. We got to meet the Premier, John Main, Tom Ullrich from Aston Bay and myself, the feedback from local government up there is amazing. It's a very small mining community up there and everyone's very eager to move things forward, same with West Desert and the local, the state government there, they've been fantastic. From a project level, nothing, but there's everything else. We haven't really been impacted that much on fuel costs.
A lot of our costs were signed prior to the tariff war, obviously. There's things outside of our control like tweets from, you know, the Trump administration and things like that, you know, putting the fear into local markets. You know, all we can do is try and be as efficient with the capital as we can. You know, being as technically astute as we can with the projects, and hopefully all the other stuff sort of sorts itself out. I'd say the biggest risks to what we're doing is things outside of our control. Everything else in our control seems to be going fairly well.
Okay, thank you. This is a question from Matt, actually about 5 different people. They want to know about the share price catalysts.
The key question. You know, what are the key share price catalysts over the next sort of 6-12 months? You know, if you have such conviction in the project, why is the share price remaining stagnant, and what is the company doing about that?
Yeah. I guess, you know, drill further and move things forward through and let the technicals do the talking. Obviously, we have a hit. You know, the price came back due to the raise and back to the, I guess the offer price, and that's, you know, I guess normal. Last time we didn't, we went up, you know, doubled in price, which was really, really nice to see. Look, yeah, like I said, there's things outside of our control which we have affected, you know, investor sentiment and things like that. Catalysts, we're drilling obviously at West Desert, so there's a lot more drilling to come.
Like I said, I think we've got some pretty the first hole is any indication, we've got a fantastic pipeline of targets to test that's there, and that's very, very exciting. It allows us to do the two projects at once, which is another thing. You know, give us that news flow where traditionally at Storm has been focused to generally that seasonality, which obviously we can, West Desert provides the opportunity to overcome that. Look, through Storm, we've got the development options and what's going forward, the exploration plan and you know, what we're doing this year's plan and then rolling into that. That will go obviously in the next few months. Also West Desert, that's, you know, how long does this program go for?
First assays due in the next, you know, few weeks like we talked about. We've got the infill sampling, assays to come out. We've got the dump, you know, work at West Desert and what opportunity that might provide for us and there's a lot in that. We're gonna be busy getting through.
Continuing discussions with the-
Exactly
U.S. Department of Interior.
Yes.
Lots going on.
Yes. Yep.
Okay. Well, I guess.
All of the above.
Very good. Thank you so much, Dave, and to all investors who stayed on the call this long, we appreciate it. If we didn't get to your question, as always, please feel free to email us. Both of our details are on the bottom of the ASX announcements. Dave, I guess to wrap up with, did you have any final questions you wanted to leave shareholders with today?
Just, look, it's a exciting time for American West. You know, we haven't had the 2 projects going for quite a few years. We've got a lot of money in the door now to see us just do that. Look, I think, you know, what we've achieved technically in the last few years has been great. It's moving the projects forward. I think there's a lot more to come.
Perfect. Well, thank you, Dave, and thank you to everyone who joined the webinar. We'll close it there.
Thank you, guys.