Available today to catch up and update investors here in Australia and shareholders, of course, with this very important news. Before I hand over to Paul to run us through the update and the slide deck, just a reminder to everyone who's tuned in, this isn't meant to be an interactive session, so please take full advantage of the opportunity to use the Q&A tab on the right-hand side of your browser to log any questions that you have for Paul, and I'll make sure that we put them to him once he's finished running us through this significant update. Paul, thanks very much. Good to see you as always, and please run us through the latest from the Rogozna project.
All right, thanks, Nicholas, and thanks everyone for attending. Obviously today the topic of the discussion is around Medenovac. We released the maiden resource estimate earlier this week of 1.28 million ounces, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to be able to communicate with everyone and tell everyone why this is quite an important result, and obviously how this feeds into the broader project and what our plans are moving forward. I'll get stuck into it. Medenovac, you can see on this first slide, that's a picture of Medenovac looking east at Medenovac Mountain. It is in a mountain. Sitting underneath that mountain, there's a giant slug of metal, and I'm going to tell you all about it. Before I get into that, I still get asked a lot of questions about Serbia.
Strickland acquired this asset, completed the transaction last July, and we've been doing a lot of work trying to help the market understand what it's like to operate in Serbia. We've been running this project; the local team has been running this project for five years. Serbia is a major mining district. It's Europe's second largest copper producer. Large mines have been developed there, both in the eastern side of the country, up in the Bor District. Recently, Zijin have built the Čukaru Peki mine up there at a cost of about $1 billion. They've recently approved an expansion of that project, which is going to cost another $2 billion. Dundee are very active up in that neck of the woods as well. They've got a massive discovery up there called Čoka Rakita, also a skarn-hosted deposit, very similar to ours, very high grade.
BHP are very active up in that region. Down where we are in the Trepča district, this is one of Europe's largest zinc-lead silver mining districts back in Yugoslav times. Adriatic Metals has a project next to us. Newmont has a project directly adjacent to us on the other side of the administrative line in Kosovo. This is a massively endowed neck of the woods. It is the Western Tethyan Belt. It is basically the Andes in Eastern Europe. More recently, we have had Adriatic Metals up there in Bosnia develop the Vareš project. Certainly, we are trying to emulate what Adriatic Metals have done up there. The other great things about operating in Serbia are the people: highly experienced, well-trained workforce, really good quality infrastructure. At our project, we have high-voltage power and bitumen sealed roads all the way through the project.
From an exploration perspective, it's a very easy place to operate. Because it's a major mining district in Europe, we've got all the skill sets, all the contractors that we need, drill rigs and what have you, and it's a relatively low-cost operating environment. Certainly, from an operational perspective, I've worked over my 20+ year career all around the world, and Serbia is right up there as being one of the best places I've ever worked. Then there's Rogozna. I talk obviously about Rogozna a lot. It is a massive system, and recently we've been doing a lot of work trying to understand the various scales of mineralization and alteration that we have here. Obviously, when we're releasing results, drilling results, whether it be for Shanac, Gradina, Medenovac, we're looking at one scale. We're looking at the deposit scale.
Recently, we've had Dave Cooke, a porphyry expert, on site. He was just there again a couple of weeks ago, and we're really trying to pull it apart to find out what is really driving this system. We're looking at two scales. When we're drilling the deposits, that's one scale, but now we're stepping up higher than that and trying to find what is it that's driving this system. Because based off the surface alteration that we've got, which you can see on this slide or around the right-hand side, we've got that amount of alteration at each of the prospects. They've all been drilled to at least 1 km depth with some sort of scalp drilling, and it's altered and mineralized all the way through. What that equates to is about 30 billion cubic meters of alteration, and that is crazy big.
Basically, in the words of Dave Cooke, you don't get that scale of alteration without a massive porphyry driving it from somewhere. We've been putting a lot of work in recently trying to figure out where that might be. Immediately west of this alteration zone that you see around here, the geology goes under cover. We're putting in a fair bit of work now trying to figure out what might be under that cover. Regardless, just in the deposits we've got today, we think this is a world-class scale system. Obviously, four deposits. Now that we've got Medenovac in resource, we've got about 6.69 million ounce gold equivalent. We're reporting gold equivalent because gold is the dominant metal here. For this year, we've got at least 50,000 m drilling planned, of which about two-thirds is resource-related and about a third exploration.
The exploration is targeting two things: extensions and proximal deposits around the existing resources, and then also looking for porphyries in the center of the project. A little bit about Medenovac. Historically, Medenovac was recognized a very long time ago, back in the times when Yugoslav Geological Survey were exploring here back in the 1970s and 1980s. They plugged a few shallow holes around. With this image here, this is a geochemical image in the background. It's gold and arsenic in soils. The Yugoslav Geological Survey poked a few shallow holes where there was some lead-zinc anomalies. They got some sort of narrow, high-grade lead-zinc. Really strong alteration in the volcanics here, but they didn't hit the underlying skarn mineralization. Eldorado Gold, back in about 2017, poked a few holes around here as well. Again, they didn't go deep enough.
They got some nice mineralization on the other side at Čezme, but didn't hit the main game here at Medenovac. I'm going to jump out of here and share with you my Micromine to sort of give you a bit better overview of how it was discovered and the drilling that we've done since then, which have supported this maiden resource. Okay, this is greater Medenovac. What we're looking at, as I said, is the geochemical image. If we just zoom out for the whole project, this is what it's looking like. Medenovac's up here in the north, Shanac here, Copper Canyon here, Gradina, Obradov Potok, and Jezerska Reka. From Shanac up to Medenovac is not far. We're talking about 4 kilometers. If we zoom in on Medenovac now, we can see the scale of the system here.
The scale of the geochemical footprint is basically 2km long by about 2 km wide. You can see two key structural orientations here. We see a northwest trending orientation, which is the orientation of the geology, the stratigraphy, which runs northwest to southeast and is parallel to the major regional structures like the Vardar Zone. We see a very clear northeast to southwest trending structural zone. This is essentially the intersection of these two creating the permeability for these fluids to follow and create deposits. When we look at the drilling from Medenovac, if we just look at the traces, that's them there. How we came to find it in 2020 was basically off the back of Eldorado's good work.
Eldorado and their local team, most of which are still working for us, they had done a heap of really good work, the geochem, the geophysics. We had their geophysics reprocessed. One of the key things that came out of that was this gravity anomaly. This gravity anomaly is over 2 km long. One of the key things that stood out to us was in the center of this anomaly, you can see it necks in. This necking corresponds with this sort of northeast trend through here. We thought that this was very clearly an important structure. When we drilled our first holes back in 2020 into the middle here, that is where we discovered the main game. We discovered the really thick mineralization in hole 136 right up against the gravity anomaly.
We have been able to follow that now. We have now traced it over a few hundred meters strike. If we go back to plan view here, I will turn off the gravity. You can also see the IP anomalies. We had an IP anomaly sitting over the mineralization. We have also got an IP anomaly over here at Kotlovi. We have been able to track that high-grade mineralization. When I say high-grade, we are talking about those 50 m-100 m thick zones running roughly five grams gold equivalent. It is those zones of mineralization that have underpinned the basis of this resource. When we look at the resource model now in plan view, and we go into here, and we just look at it shaded. Let me turn off the geochem. That is the extent of the resource model that we have got.
Now, we've only classified the southern portion as inferred. Essentially, the northern part is too broadly spaced with us. Only got this one drill section up here in the north, but the mineralization obviously is open. We have hit some decent mineralization up there. There is a 200 m section of strike that we don't have any drilling, so that is not included. If we just show what's inferred here or inferred blocks, and we add Reška. All right. That shows the basis of the inferred blocks there, just at the southern end. That was optimized using sublevel caving mining stopes, which basically shows that area there. Essentially, that's the area of the constrained resource, and the underlying inferred blocks look like that. Most of the inferred blocks made it into the optimization.
With that, I'm going to jump back into the presentation and start talking a little bit about that. All right. Great tonnage. This is one of the really interesting things about Medenovac, and one of the reasons we really like it and why I think it's going to add a lot of value to this project in the long run, which is you can see it's been optimized at about a 1 gram gold equivalent cutoff. Within that, we've got about 21 million tons in that stope shape. At the higher grade cutoffs, we start looking at the one and a half. The grade starts getting up around two and a half, and at the cutoff of about two, it's up at three.
When it comes time to actually include Medenovac in the scoping study and mining studies moving forward, we're going to be looking at it at that higher grade cutoff. One and a half, possibly even two, trying to get two and a half, targeting the best two and a half to three gram gold equivalent. In the guts of that, it doesn't matter if you mine it with sublevel caving or sublevel stoping. You essentially get the exact same results both from a grade tonnage curve and also pretty much NPV related as well. Sublevel caving is slightly lower cost, but you get advantages with sublevel stoping where you get a lot more flexibility about how you sequence the mining.
Whilst there's a really nice 1.3 million ounce here at the moment, we're sort of probably chasing the best million ounces of that when it comes to mining. The reason why they do not differ between sublevel caving and sublevel stoping is basically because you've just got a massive slug of metal there, which is basically 200 m long, 200 m wide, and 200 m deep. The continuity of the mineralization in there is very good. Because of that, you get almost 7,000 ounces gold equivalent per vertical meter. For comparison, most of the things we look at in WA, the orogenic gold, a good one of those is about 3,000 ounces per vertical meter. This has basically got twice as much metal per vertical meter than most things you'll see in Australia.
The only things that sort of compare to this are stuff like Havieron and the big bulk tonnage deposits like that. Imagine 200 m of continuous mineralization horizontally, along strike and at depth. That's a massive amount of metal in a very small place. What I would say is across the whole project for Rogozna, this is probably the best or the most concentrated 10 million tons of mineralization that we've got in the whole place. That's why this will add a lot of value to the mining scenario. That's in plan view at 760 m RL. If we look in cross-section, this is what it looks like. The main part is the upper part of the ore body. The upper part is the best part because you've got the base of volcanics that sit above it, which form a trap.
As the fluids have come up, they've hit that trap and precipitated all the mineralization at the base of the volcanics there. You can see in this image, and it was in the previous one, the stope outline, but there's some blocks which sit outside that. Essentially, that's open mineralization. The software has modeled high grade in that position, but we don't have enough drilling to have included that as inferred blocks, so they haven't been optimized. There's some immediate couple of million tons of upside that we will look to add in the next sort of 6-12 months and update the resource again following that. As we chased it to depth, we did get some decent mineralization down here, sort of 20 m at 5g gold equivalent.
We drilled a deeper hole underneath that, got a couple of meters here and there, but nothing really strong. There is no need to chase it any deeper. The other comment I'd probably make here is we often hear comments and get asked questions about, "Oh, these drill hits, they're nice, but they seem pretty deep." You can see on this section where we're drilling is from the side of the mountain. When we do drill down here at Medenovac, the shallowest sort of bit where we hit ore is about 200 m, which sounds a bit deep. From an underground perspective, actually, the topography works in our favor because the actual access to the ore body will come off this valley to the west. That is only sort of probably 500 m of development that needs to be done essentially as an adit.
That is much cheaper and easier than doing a spiral down that you would get with an underground deposit in Western Australia. It is not deep. It is only about 100 m beneath that valley access. That will be relatively cheap to access. In long section, you can see here, again, we have these blocks immediately north of the stopes that show that the mineralization is open and we will chase those. As we move further north, the blocks are suggesting relatively low grade out there. That is one of the reasons we did not bother drilling through here. We thought, based off this section out here, we were not expecting really more high grade. That is why we did not drill that area there. In terms of upside around the region, we announced a really nice discovery at Kotlovi. I think it was around October or November last year.
Kotlovi is only 350 m away from Medenovac. You can see it here. We've only got a couple of holes into it, but we will drill another few thousand meters into Kotlovi this year to try and track it to surface and to actually test to see if it might even link up with Medenovac. That's a really important one. Imagine an access drive coming off the base of this valley. It's going to come this way first and then kick back towards Medenovac. If Kotlovi actually does come up there, like we think there's a good chance it will, the access drive will actually go through Kotlovi on the way to Medenovac. That's pretty important.
On the other side of Medenovac, we've got Čezme. Eldorado hit this body of mineralization here back in around 2017, hit over 100 m of continuous mineralization, including a nice 30 m high grade. It was a vertical hole, so we don't really know structurally what geometry, where it's heading. We'll drill a couple of follow-up holes here as well. Essentially, what we think, we think we've got three parallel zones of mineralization on the main zone. The gravity anomaly is 2 km long. We know at the northern end of that, we've got outcropping breccia with skarn clasts, which suggests somewhere at depth around there, there's another body of skarn. In summary, we think this is just the tip of the iceberg from Medenovac. When we start including Kotlovi, Čezme, and potentially any other discoveries, this will start to really grow.
In terms of what are the next steps from Medenovac, as I mentioned, Kotlovi is probably the main priority there, about 4,000 m of drilling planned. As I said, try and track that to surface, scope out the size of the system. We'll drill a couple of thousand meters at Čezme, see if we can figure out the geometry of that body. We'll put a few holes into those high-grade model blocks immediately north of the optimized stopes and try and get those into the resource as well. We've actually just about to kick off the next stage of test work for Medenovac. The samples have arrived in Perth at the lab. That will be starting in the next week or two, and that'll be ongoing through the year. The real focus for that one is optimizing the copper recovery previous work.
We've got really good recoveries of gold and zinc, and we just need to optimize that copper recovery. Lots to do at the moment. The idea being that by the end of this year, this will feed into the scoping study for Rogozna to show what a staged mining development here will look like. In terms of the bigger picture for Serbia and Strickland as a whole, 50,000 m at least of drilling in Serbia this year, that'll be about six rigs spread roughly two-thirds resource, one-third exploration. Looking to increase that 6.69 million ounce gold equivalent resource. I guess the big driver for that one this year will be Gradina.
Gradina will probably have about 20,000 m of drilling as we try and track that towards surface and get a maiden resource on Gradina, aiming to deliver that scoping study by the end of the year, which can then people can start to understand what we think the economics of this project will look like. We think all of this gives us fantastic leverage to both discoveries and resource growth in what is an unprecedented gold price. We think it is a very exciting year. We are very focused on really refreshing the register and getting the story out there and growing a really highly sustainable value company. We think with AUD 33 million of funding and these really strategic assets, not just here in Serbia, but with Yandal, we think we have got the assets to do it. Thanks.
Keep track, and I look forward to hopefully delivering some really good results throughout the year.
Thanks very much, Paul. That was a great run-through and well done on managing Micromine as part of your presentation as well. We've got lots of questions, so we'll get straight into it. I'll go to a question here online from an analyst. He says, "If you're thinking about using a higher grade cutoff in the scoping studies, why not present the resource at that cutoff today?" That's a fair question. I get asked it a lot and even ask myself that a lot. There are multiple scales. We certainly believe there are multiple scales that this project can work at, and it becomes a grade tonnage game. We have regular discussions with many major mining companies and mid-tier mining companies who have shown quite a bit of interest in this asset.
Certainly, when they've looked at the project and looked at the data, they're looking at it from that bulk tonnage perspective. We're talking to big guys. They want to be able to do 500,000 ounces per annum. When they're looking at this project, that's the lens that they look at it through. That's why we present it at the lower cut, because with the definition of resources, you need to obviously show reasonable prospects for economic eventual extraction. Certainly, the work we've done shows that we think it looks like it can work at both scales. We think it can work at the higher level at bulk tonnage. That's not what Strickland would develop it as, sort of 5 million or 10 million ton per annum scale operation.
But importantly, with the style of mineralization, we get that optionality with the high-grade zones where you can probably develop it as a 1 million-2 million ton scale operation, much less CapEx. Yeah, I get the question, why do not we just focus with our resource updates on just the higher grade bits that we are probably going to focus our studies on? At the same time, we need to take into account that there is a bigger audience here.
Great. Thank you, Paul. The next question is from an online participant. "Can you confirm that Medenovac is open in three directions, i.e., northwest, northeast, and southwest?" The second part is, "Are any of the Rogozna deposits closed off at present, or are they all open?"
Yeah. I can confirm Medenovac is open in all directions.
As I sort of said, apart from that immediate upside north of the optimized stopes, it does look like between that and the next drill section was largely kind of half a gram to a gram dirt. There was a little bit of high grade in one of the holes, about 16 m at 3 m. So yes, the mineralization is open, but we did not feel the need to drill, try and chase that sort of lower grade mineralization. I did not think it was going to optimize. I did not think it was really good bang for buck in terms of investors' funds. Similarly, we put one deep hole in. We got a bit of min. If we were chasing 2 m-5 m thick mineralization zones, we could go chasing that some more. I did not think that was the best value for money.
In terms of all the other deposits, they're all open. Shanac is open to the north, particularly. And at depth, Copper Canyon is open to the north. We've got Copper Canyon at south. Gradina is totally open as well. Yes, all the deposits are open. It just means there's lots of drilling to do if we want to increase or show the ultimate scale of the prize here. We're really focusing on bang for buck with our drilling. We just don't go chasing any bit of mineralization for the sake of it.
Sure. Thanks, Paul. I'll go to a couple of email questions now. One that came in overnight. You mentioned in the Medenovac announcement that Strickland has level access to the ore body. One of the comments that keeps floating around out there is that the drilling results are too deep.
Can you expand on the benefits of the topography and why the results, both at Medenovac and elsewhere, are not too deep?
Yeah. Actually, I'll share my screen again here for Micromine. It's a little bit easier to talk about it. Yeah. So there's the topography over Medenovac. If we sort of just cut a line through there, you can see this valley here to the west of Medenovac. That's going to be where the portal is likely put. As I said, the access for that is actually going to come down initially past Kotlovi and then back in like that. Below that actual valley, it's only what? To the top of the ore body, about 110 sort of meters. That's the access. Doing a horizontal or large, it's not quite horizontal. It'll be shallow angle up like that.
Doing that is a lot cheaper engineering-wise than spiraling down. That actually works in our favor. It's the same with every deposit. That's why I wanted to share it on my Micromine. We look here at Shanac, for example. We do the same sort of thing. Same thing with Shanac. You've got a valley just to the east of Shanac. This one's actually even closer. If you come in off the valley here to the top of Shanac, it's about 500 meters, maybe 400 meters to the edge of the ore body. That's not very far when we're talking underground development. Again, it's an access drive. It's not a spiral decline. The same with Gradina. Gradina at the southern end. If we look through here, we've got the valley this time to the immediate west.
We know we've got Gradina mineralization here. From the valley across here, it'll come down to somewhere around here. About 300 m access into Gradina. This is what I mean. The topography works in our favor. I know people, when you see drill results, that say, "Oh, these drill hits were starting at 200 m, but some hits are like 300 m or 400 m." That sounds deep, but you need to remember these are angle holes, and we're drilling on mountains. If we could drill horizontal holes from the valley, we would. Fundamentally, yeah, the topography from an underground mining perspective will work in our favor when it comes to access.
Fantastic. Thanks, Paul. I've got a couple of questions relating to Gradina here. Did the drilling in 2024, how did the results from Gradina compare with your expectations? Were there any geological or structural surprises?
What's the status of final drill results for 2024 from Gradina?
Yeah. This is a funny project when it comes to results meeting expectations because I think I've said to a few people around the place that as a geologist, it's very rare to actually get to work on these sorts of projects, particularly as a junior. You then start to get really high expectations when you're drilling sort of 2, 300 m intercepts. Me personally, I get disappointed if I only hit 100 m at Shanac or somewhere. Gradina, I think, was largely in line with expectations in terms of what we'd hit before. Gradina is a bit different. It's a gold or pretty much gold only. It's a bit more your classic gold deposit.
The ore zones there are a bit thinner, ranging from sort of 5 m- 20 m as opposed to Shanac and Medenovac, where you get up to, say, 100 m of high grade. Gradina, I think, generally, the best sort of thickest high grade we get is about 30 m. It is a bit more variable. I think probably the main surprise this year for Gradina was we saw that the geometry of the mineralization changed from being sort of quite steep at depth, and it has come up and sort of rolled over in what looks like an anticline. We were not necessarily expecting that. We were thinking that it was just going to keep coming up as steeply dipping lodes. That has had to change our thinking.
We have had to amend our plans for this year to adjust our drilling to chase that geometry as well and also change our thinking a little bit about how we infill various parts of it to get it to inferred, so.
Excellent. Thanks, Paul. Another question here. There has been a bit of discussion, and I think you have touched on this in previous webinars about a potential, I guess, overhang in the stock from people that may have been in Strickland primarily for the West Australian assets. Can you give us an update on that? And do you think that that overhang is sort of close to being worked through, I guess?
Yeah. It is still there. We can see from this week, we put out a 20% resource increase. We have got a bit of liquidity out of that, but still plenty of selling.
I'd say the overhang is still there. I guess it's getting less by the day. Trying to quantify how much of an overhang is there is a bit challenging. In December, we thought it was maybe still sort of 50 million shares or thereabouts. We're really trying to focus on that front, really trying to get new investors to buy in. I'm heading to PDAC this weekend and got a lot of institutional meetings there for that. Really just focus on all I can really do at the moment is just keep trying to deliver what we say we're going to do, deliver on that, keep putting out good results, and just keep pushing it pretty hard until we start to see the buying overtake the selling.
Yeah, I think that's a bit of a long-winded way of saying the overhang is still there, but we're doing everything we can to try and work through it.
Sure. I'm just going to deal with another email question here. The comment was that there seems to be some skepticism about whether the project is economic. Obviously, it's too early to comment specifically on any NPV numbers. Do you have a helicopter view on its economic viability? How does a project like Rogozna stack up against other projects that you've worked with in your career? Are you confident it'll be a mine one day?
I'll answer the last bit first. That's absolutely confident it'll be a mine one day.
The reason why I'm so confident in that is I've had a lot smarter people than me come to the site, and they take one look at it and go, "This is a mine." These are geos and engineers that have got 40, 50 years in the industry. Every time I'm there, I'm super confident. You look at the core and you see these zones and you go, "Well, this is a mine." How does it compare to other projects I've worked on? It is very different. I'm lucky that I've been able to work on some really good projects across the spectrum. Fortescue, we had a lot of massive projects in my early days at Anglo American, billion tons of PGEs. This is right up there.
It's got all the characteristics of all of those giant deposits that you want to see. In terms of NPVs, obviously, I can't talk too much, but the fact that each one of these resources has been constrained by mining shapes, by external independent consultants, that gives me a lot of confidence that we've got an economic project here.
Thanks, Paul. A question online here. What are the expected tailings issues in Serbia?
Certainly, when we're looking at it at this stage, certainly, and also from when we're looking at more of a selective mining, stoping side of things, looks like half the tailings can go back underground as pastefill. That's a real positive for the project in that sense.
The other things we're sort of looking at is, I think, in this neck of the woods, Adriatic Metals have done it, is you're going to be looking at d ry stack tailings in this area and to mitigate any environmental impacts from that. That is where we currently sit with looking at tailings.
Okay. Thank you. Next question here. Why is there a perception in the market that there may be a capital raise event coming and potential dilution when there is money in the bank?
Yeah. I've heard that. I'm not really sure why people would think that we'd be doing a capital raise, particularly at these prices, unless we absolutely had to. I don't know.
I think some people just like maybe spreading rumors or saying potentially the only benefit to doing a capital raise is to bring in some large funds that want to get in. But we understand that would not be a very popular move, so we'd be very reticent to do it.
Sure. That makes sense. Next question. What expenditure is estimated to get to an MRE at Gradina?
Well, we've got about 20,000 m planned for Gradina this year. In terms of expenditure, that's 20,000 m. That's probably AUD 4 million-AUD 5 million to get that, so.
Okay. And one final online question here. Is the company planning to pursue the porphyry target this year?
Yes. We've got another few thousand meters of drilling targeting porphyry style mineralization around Jezerska Reka and possibly Obradov Potok as well.
Okay. Fantastic. Next question.
Do you have a timeframe for the remaining 2024 drilling results from Serbia and Yandal?
Yes. We hope to put out an announcement in the next probably two weeks for the Jezerska Reka drilling and Obradov Potok. Yeah. Probably that is the last one. That is the last one outstanding.
Okay. Next question here. Did Dave Cooke give any comments regarding the Jezerska Reka, sorry, excuse my pronunciation, core? And can you discuss?
Without specifically talking about the intercept in the hole we just drilled, as I said, we are looking to release that hopefully in the next two weeks. We certainly can say he has confirmed we are in a porphyry system there.
Right. Thanks, Paul. We might try and sort of wrap this up fairly soon. I will just deal with two questions that came in via email earlier this week. They are ESG-related.
I think you did put a video out recently talking about some of the company's ESG efforts in Serbia. The gentleman says, "I understand that the new ESG standards are important in achieving permitting and partnerships, especially in Europe. Can you please explain the value of ESG in greater detail, what it comprises, and how you believe that meeting these ESG compliance hurdles will add shareholder value?"
Yeah. That's an interesting one and a good one. We actually had an ESG audit done by a group called Digbee late last year. Really, what it was about was I really wanted to see where we could improve. There's always areas for improvement. We thought we'd been doing a decent job for a few years.
Certainly, once I went from being a private asset into public hands, I thought it was really pertinent that we had an independent view and found some areas where we were lacking. It certainly did that. It certainly highlighted the stakeholder communication as a key area, particularly in Serbia, for where we needed to improve. We have since addressed that. We have been beefing up our team. We have recently brought in a really high-level community relations manager into our team. We have added a few extra people into our community relations team. We are building up our environmental team. That is pretty much front of our mind, actually, with what we are doing there on a day-to-day basis. In fact, I would argue or suggest that the ESG focus of our team is as much as a focus as what we are doing technically. That is important. What value does it create?
It's huge. Without a social license to operate, this project is worthless to our shareholders or to anyone. We have to maintain that social license, and we have to improve in everything we do. Down the track, when we hopefully get this project towards development, it opens a whole heap of doors for us in terms of funding, where a lot of institutions and banks, you have to have the best standards for ESG. It's as simple as that.
Excellent. Thanks, Paul. Final question here. Would an end to the war in Europe impact the Serbian project? In that vein, has it had an impact at all to date?
I don't think there's any direct impact there. Maybe on a perception perspective, I have been asked questions from people before. What's the likelihood of Russia invading Serbia?
I don't think, in reality, there's any practical impact on the project other than probably a bit of perception about the region.
Fantastic. I think we've dealt with all the questions pretty comprehensively. We might wrap things up. Paul, do you want to just leave us with a couple of thoughts about what's coming up for Strickland in the coming weeks? It's a big year for you guys, isn't it?
Yeah. It's a big few weeks. Hopefully, we'll start drilling in the next couple of weeks with the permitting in Serbia. Then by late March, hopefully, be putting out the Shanac resource and also updated Horse Well resource, which is actually really important and eagerly awaited as well. It should be a really good month or two as we kick things off and get some of these results out.
We will just knuckle down and try and deliver the next set of excellent results.
Thanks very much, Paul. That is great. We will definitely try and get you back on here perhaps late March, post that next resource update. Thanks for joining us. Good luck with your upcoming travels. Thank you to everyone for tuning in. We will post a recording of this webinar later in the day through all the normal channels. We thank everyone for joining us and wish you a good rest of your Friday and a good weekend. Thank you.
Thanks, Nicholas.
Thanks.