Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks very much indeed for joining us. My name is Nicholas Read from Read Corporate, and on behalf of Strickland Metals, ASX Code: STK, it's always a great pleasure to welcome you to these regular investor webinars. As always, it's been busy times recently for Strickland, with the company delivering exceptional drilling results from its Rogozna Project in Serbia almost every week, it seems, with an eight-rig drill program in full flight. Just yesterday, the company delivered some spectacular numbers from the cornerstone Shanac deposit, including an exciting new high-grade copper- gold discovery. Strickland's also just completed the divestment of its Yandal Gold Project in W.A. to Gateway Mining. With all of this activity, we're absolutely delighted to have Strickland's Managing Director, Paul L’Herpiniere, join us again today for an update on all of these exciting developments.
Paul's just back from an international roadshow and a visit to site, and he's going to walk us through some of these developments and give us, more importantly, some insights on where the story is headed in the next few months. Just before we launch into that, just a reminder to everyone who's tuned in, please feel free to use the Q&A tab on the right-hand side of your browser and fire in your questions as Paul's talking, and we'll make sure that we cover off on those at the end. Paul's going to use his spectacular IT skills again, and he's going to flip between a PowerPoint PDF and a [Micromine] so that he can give us a 3D tour of some of the deposits as he's talking. Paul, it's great to see you again. Thanks for joining us, and please unleash your skills on the computer over there.
Thanks, Nicholas. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Not sure about their necessarily amazing technical skills, but I'll do my best. Thanks, everyone, for joining. It's an exciting day today. You know, obviously, the Gateway transaction has closed. All the Strickland shareholders should now have those shares distributed to yourselves, and you know, it's good to see Gateway performing strong out of the blocks today. I just thought it'd be a good opportunity this week with that transaction closing. We've obviously been putting out a lot of results since March, and I thought it'd be a really good opportunity to give everyone an update on what Strickland looks like now without Yandal. You know, what we've all got to look forward to for the rest of this year and beyond.
I'll just jump into a presentation, and as I walk you through that, I'll occasionally jump out and show you some things in Micromine to help maybe give you a little bit better understanding of what the results mean and what we're trying to do there. Just bear with me. Okay. Okay, so Rogozna exploration update. Here we are in August. You know, this year has actually flown along. It just seems like yesterday since we kicked off drilling in early March, and now we've got eight rigs on site. I was there, as Nicholas mentioned, I was there last week with the guys and girls on site there, and it was really something to behold with the amount of different activities going on. We've actually got over 100 people working on projects at the moment across both our staff and all the contractors.
It's all guns blazing at the moment, and you know, we're delivering, you know, every day a lot of cores coming down to the Raška operations center. Just a quick update. You can see in the bottom left there, over the last 12 months, our share price performance really was looking a bit bleak there up until about the end of February this year, and since then, we've managed to turn it around off the back of, you know, resource upgrades in March, Zijin Mining coming in in April, and now we've got liquidity up to a bit between $400,000 and $500,000 a day. To put that into perspective, a year ago, when Strickland acquired Rogozna, its average volumes were more around $100,000 a day. We've really increased that liquidity. We've got a lot of funds who have bought in now. We've got about 25% institutional ownership.
Importantly, as of the end of last quarter, we still had about $32.7 million in cash in Northern Star shares. So, we're still one of the better funded explorers on the market, and now we've got another $9 million worth of Gateway shares to add to that kitty. Really well funded, solid foundations in our market cap. We've got a big boy backing through Zijin Mining, and we think the next year or two is going to be really exciting to be part of the Strickland story. For those of you that don't know much about Strickland or Serbia, where our Rogozna project is, I will give a bit of a high-level overview. Serbia is at the western end of the Tethyan belt. This is a globally significant metallurgic belt that runs from Eastern Europe all the way through Middle Asia and down to Southeast Asia.
It's one of the most well-endowed mineral belts in the world. What we've got here in Serbia is essentially the equivalent of Chile or Peru in Eastern Europe in terms of the style of mineralization that we have here, which is dictated by mainly large, world-class porphyry-related deposits. Our deposit, Rogozna, is certainly that. It's a porphyry-related system. We've got 7.4 Moz AuEq in inferred resources. Because of the geology, plus the really positive regulatory framework and fiscal framework in Serbia, a lot of the majors are there. Other than us, we've got Zijin Mining, who are by far the most active in terms of their mining operations. They're currently producing about 300,000 tons per annum of copper and another 250,000 oz of gold. They've invested over $5 billion in the country over the last five years.
They love Serbia, and Serbia loves them in terms of what they've been able to do from building their mining industry, where currently now it produces about 2.5% of GDP. There's an active strategy within the Serbian government to try and see that increase to 10% over the next 10 years. Moving on to our project, Rogozna, where we are, is in the southern part of the country. This is the historic Trepca Mineral District. It was once one of Europe's largest lead zinc silver mining regions, and we are right in the guts of it. In terms of our project, 180 sq km of tenure across four licenses. The main license on the right-hand side, where our current resources sit, is called Shanac, and we've got three deposits with resources, the largest currently Shanac, then Medenovac, and Copper Canyon.
For this year, we've had a number of important goals that we wanted to achieve. Probably the number one goal was for Gradina. Gradina had historically about 20,000 m of drilling. It wasn't in resource because of the spacing of that drilling, but mineralization there has been tracked over a kilometer of strike, and it's the most gold-rich of our deposits. Each of these deposits has a slightly different metals mix, but Gradina is pretty significant because it's the most gold-rich. 90% of the metal there is gold. A really key focus for us this year was to get Gradina into resource. To do that, we've got about 20,000 m of drilling going into Gradina. We're a bit over halfway with that, and we're getting some really positive results. For Shanac, the key for this year was drilling on the western side of the deposit.
Last year, we got some amazing results on the eastern side of what we call the central domain, where we discovered a new high-grade gold zone where we hit 90 m at 4 g in hole [149]. This year, the goal was to improve the grade on the western side of the deposit, and you'll see shortly we've been pretty successful so far in doing that. Kotlovi to the north, this was the discovery we made last year. We put the first two holes in last year and both hit what looked to be economic sort of intervals of both gold and polymetallic mineralization. This is just a few hundred meters to the west of our Medenovac deposit. Kotlovi, the goal this year was to drill about 4,000 m across about eight holes to really scope out the size of this system.
Importantly, when we first discover these sorts of deposits, you know, they're all very big. You get multiple intercepts, high grade, low grade. You need probably at least 10 holes initially to start to get a feel for what is the geometry of the mineralization, what is the potential scale, and then we look to close the spacing on that drilling and start looking to get it into resource. For Kotlovi, the goal there was really let's start scoping out the size of this discovery. In terms of other exploration, currently we've got one rig at Jezerska Reka. This is a porphyry target. We've drilled three holes previously into Jezerska Reka, and we've definitely got porphyry veining and alteration there. We've just finished our first hole there, and we've currently got a rig on Obradov Potok. This is another early stage target. Previously, we drilled one hole.
We've just finished our first hole there. We're almost finished our second hole as well. A key part of the exploration strategy this year is deposits or projects like this where you've got such amazing scale of skarn alteration. This is really rare. Normally, when you've got this scale of skarn alteration and mineralization, there's often a porphyry copper- gold deposit lurking somewhere nearby that's driving this whole system. In the central part of our project area, the geology at surface is masked by a younger volcanic sequence. This volcanic sequence isn't necessarily thick. It's probably only 50 m to 100 m thick. Importantly, it masks the underlying geology which hosts the mineralization. That's why we don't see much geochemical anomalism. What it does do is it'd be very unlikely to have all of this mineralization all around the edge of that and not have something sitting underneath.
We've got a big program of geophysics underway in the central part of this project area as we speak, as we try to find some more targets for testing later in the year. On to Shanac. As I said, really the focus for Shanac this year was drilling more on the western side of the central domain. The central domain is the southern part of the deposit. The sort of greater than 4 g AuEq in high-grade intervals, and we've focused our drilling at the southern end and also on the western side where we look to test at the base of the andesite cover, where on the eastern side we tend to get better grade mineralization commencing at the base of that cover. As you can see from these drill holes on the left, the results so far have been relatively consistent.
We've been getting the sort of 200 m to 300 m thick zones of continuous polymetallic gold and base metal mineralization running sort of 1.2 g AuEq, 1.3 g AuEq . That's slightly higher than the overall resource grade. Importantly, within that, we've consistently hit the high-grade zones, basically 50 m to 80 m thick at roughly 2.5 g AuEq . Pretty happy with these results so far. Yesterday, we released some results, and we've also identified a new zone of high-grade copper- gold on the western margin of what we call the southern stock, which is this pink body here. We do have this high-grade mineralization further south. It is a slightly different style to the stuff immediately adjacent to it to the west, which is more of the copper- gold magnetite skarn. This high-grade stuff next to the southern stock is what's a replacement style.
These hot fluids have come into the carbonate and fully replaced the carbonate with massive sulfide, and this stuff visually looks very good. It also has very good metallurgical characteristics as well. You can see here on this section, it's a good summary. This zone on the western side, this is the central dike running through the middle. We've been trying to test that contact of the andesite and skarn. We have hit some nice mineralization there, but not as high-grade as what's on the eastern side of the central dike. This has confirmed to us that certainly the eastern side of the central dike definitely has the best mineralization. When we're looking at a development pathway for the project, it really is these high-grade zones that are our focus when we're looking at a more selective mining point of view.
We know currently in the resource model, this stuff makes up about 30% of the total metal. I'm going to just jump out of there quickly into Micromine. Hopefully, this works okay. Nicholas, let me know if this isn't showing up. All right. We're just going to zoom into Shanac, and I'll just turn off the [GCam] for a sec. These blue holes are all the holes we've drilled so far this year. I'll just turn off the southern stock. We've got the underlying resource model here as well. We started at the southern end. We actually started up in the northern end, and we've just currently finished these couple of holes targeting the high-grade gold zone within here. The results we released yesterday were on this section. Now I'll just cut through here. You can see here, if I put on the assays. All right.
194 down here, this was the high-grade zone here, and we got the high-grade copper zone here. I'll just turn off the resource and put the stock back on. This is that southern stock that I was talking about, and it really seems like either side of that is very prospective. As we get closer to that, this is the area in here where we hit the high-grade copper- gold. That was that really high-grade portion of 5.6 m at 2.7 gold and 4.4% copper in there. Basically, there's a target that wraps around that southern stock. If we put on these two things, particularly on the eastern side, on the eastern side, we've only got this hole out here. If we move to the north, we don't have any drilling into this stuff. That is going to be a focus.
We'll hopefully get a couple of new holes that we haven't drilled or planned up and drill that sort of target space over the next month or two before we cease drilling for the year. Currently, we've only got two holes left to drill. We've just finished hole 202 and 205. We've got three holes at the lab waiting to release for Shanac. Then we'll look to get the resource update hopefully out in November. Jumping back into the presentation, Gradina, as I mentioned earlier, has been really the key focus for this year. We had 20,000 odd meters previously. We needed to double that to get it into resource. It's really spread across two parts of the deposit: the northern part, what we call Gradina North, and the Gradina Main at the southern end there. There hasn't been any drilling in between.
We will drill a couple of holes shortly to see if it connects up. We think it probably does. So far this year, the results, highlighted by hole 182 towards the northern end, 60 odd meters at 3.5 g Au only, including almost 30 m at 6 g. Gradina, we do get really beautiful high grade. It is the most high grade of the deposits. It has the best metallurgical recovery at around 90% into a gold concentrate. It is pretty important when we think of a development pathway for the project. We are really considering Gradina alongside Shanac in terms of being the potential first cab off the rank. We've got a lot of scoping study work going on in the background, trying to figure out which of those two gives the best bang for buck. Shanac is obviously a lot bigger, but Gradina has a lot higher grade.
It'll be a bit of a balancing act there. Currently, we've finished the drilling at the northern end. We might go back and drill one or two extensional holes there. We've currently got three rigs at the southern end now. We should be putting out some results for Gradina in the next couple of weeks that will start to include some of the results we're getting at the southern end. We are aiming for a resource, hopefully by end of November or early December. A scoping study will follow that. In terms of cross sections, I said I'll jump out of here shortly back into the northern end, sort of clustered up near the top. It is still open up dip and along strike to the north and also down dip. At the southern end, we're really just focusing on the upper part.
We're not interested in chasing the deeper stuff at the moment. We're trying to track this to surface and infill some of these higher grade zones. I'll jump out of here again. Heading down to Gradina, all the blue is holes we've drilled this year. You can see we have actually drilled one out to the right. This is topography. There's basically a ridge that runs through here. Putting on the geophysics, you can see the gravity anomaly that is related to the mineralization. A key thing I would point out here is from this northern section, we've actually still got over 500 m of strike to play with to the northwest, which we'll probably put some holes in into that strike extent next year. Starting at the northern end, we can look at cross sections here. You can see this is the gravity anomaly.
Our previous block model that we were working off looked like that. You can see that that will extend a little bit further up dip. As we move south, it's been fairly consistent in terms of geometrically where we expect it. As gold deposits go, it can jump around a bit in terms of the grade. This is where we hit 182. That intercept, that's the 60 odd meters at a bit over 3 g Au. That one's totally open up dip. If we think of where the base of the volcanics are here, remembering at Shanac, the base of the volcanics tends to be where we get the better mineralization. If you think of the base of volcanics here, it basically runs up like this. Somewhere between that hole and that hole, it pops up and we've got limestone up here.
All of this space in here between about there and there is all prime real estate in 3D space for extending this 60 m at 3 g. Moving further south, still open up dip. This will extend the mineralization, this drill hole here. We start getting to that no man's land where we don't have any drilling in between. We'll get some drill holes in there. We've got some planned holes, which will be getting drilled in the next month or so. We've got three holes planned in that no man's land. Kotlovi, we've just released a couple of weeks ago the first result. You may remember we discovered this deposit last year with the first two holes hitting multiple styles of both gold only and polymetallic mineralization, similar to what we get at Medenovac, which is just 300 m away to the northeast.
The first hole we drilled is here, with a spectacular hole over 270 m of continuous mineralization. Importantly, within that, we hit a gold only zone, 160 m at 1.4 g. That included multiple high-grade zones within it. Remembering, the gold only mineralization at this project is really important because it does have the easiest metallurgy. To get that zone just a few hundred meters from Medenovac, the guys were very excited on site. Currently, we're drilling another. We've already finished one other hole. I'll just show you where we drilled those. We jump head up to the north. Remembering, all these deposits are pretty close to each other. Shanac to Medenovac is four kilometers. We go into Kotlovi here. I'll turn off the planned holes. We reported this hole just to a...
One thing I'd point out here, in this topography, you can see this valley that runs through here and this red dot here. This magenta dot over here are the big gold intercepts. You can basically see the surface projection of those gold only intercepts matches this valley. This valley is geochemically anomalous over at least 500 m to 600 m. You can also see we've got an IP anomaly running along this ridge line. There is a real potential we could get several hundred meters of this gold only mineralization directly beneath this valley. The question becomes, how close does it get to surface? We do a section through there and just open it up. That was the inset there of high grade, 33 m at 2.8 g on this inset. We've just finished this hole, this second hole called 206. Waiting for assays on that one.
We're currently drilling this one from a pad at Medenovac back underneath the valley. We sort of look at that section. We're drilling this one here to see if this mineralization can get up to, you know, up to here. We've got this IP anomaly sitting above directly underneath this valley as well. This is a pretty important hole. We've just started drilling it. We're about 100 m down at the moment. All of this is designed to figure out how good, how big could this system be? That's the cross section in the core of that based off bedding measurements and logged geology. It looks like we might have another anticline here at Kotlovi, in which case the best mineralization could be expected to be in that core up in here. Before I talk about porphyry exploration, I will just say one thing on Copper Canyon.
We hadn't really planned to do much on Copper Canyon this year to refresh everyone's mind. Copper Canyon is the most copper-rich of the deposits. We've got about 800,000 oz AuEq optimized in a pit there. Recently, we've been re-looking at it. To be honest, we hadn't actually looked at it for several years because we just had so many other targets that we wanted to test. We did start to look at it again recently, mainly through the lens of the gold potential, you know, the gold only. We know we had these gold hits at depth down here, what we call Copper Canyon South. We really started to re-look at Copper Canyon in itself to see, you know, what we could see. We have noticed that there is actually a gold zone sitting beneath the copper zone. This is what it looks like.
I'll just close the section here. This is pretty important. We look at the pit as a current, the optimized pit. The optimized pit, which was done at $2,000 per ounce gold, only captures the copper zone, the copper- gold zone in the shallow part. It doesn't capture this underlying gold zone. I said we do have this gold down here at depth at Copper Canyon South. What we actually think is happening here is the stuff that we're getting at depth is running pretty much subvertically up a structure. Then it hits a flat structure and then comes up through here. Why this is important, you can see to the north of Copper Canyon, there's no drilling up bit of this gold zone. This could actually be quite extensive.
The other thing to realize here with this gold zone, if I just turn off the bars for a second, we just look at the intercepts. We got what are 30 m there at 1.8 g Au. 10 m at 4.8 g Au . That's 2.1 g Au over 36 m. 12 m at 2.4 g Au . This could actually be quite a significant deposit of gold that currently isn't captured in the pit. One of the reasons for that is the block model for Copper Canyon is an MIK model. A lot of the grade is diluted. We're actually drilling three holes here. We've just finished the first one, this one, and, no, sorry, 214. We're just drilling the second hole. We're going to drill three holes through the copper zone into the gold zone to better constrain that.
We'll actually look, once we actually understand it a bit better, at testing it further up dip close to the surface where it's totally open. That's going to be quite interesting. The first results for that should be due next month. Just talking about the rest of the project, the exploration across the rest of the project, I might as well just stay in Micromine while we do that. Jezerska Reka, we finished the first hole for this year, which is 25,003. Assays should be expected for that one in the next month. We've just started a second hole to the north where we're chasing both IP and geochemical anomaly there. We've also finished the first hole for the year at Obradov Potok, and we've almost finished the second one. Assays for that should be due next month as well.
In the background, we're doing a whole heap of exploration through the central part of this, what we call the central porphyry target area. Through there, we have a number of large geophysical anomalies. Remember, as I said earlier in the presentation, the geology here has a thin cover of younger volcanics. What we're doing here is ground gravity and then magnetolytics. Basically, what we want to get is a secondary geophysical anomaly over these existing ones. When we get two geophysical anomalies, that'll give us the confidence to test those. Certainly, the current thinking here is if there is a giant porphyry, this is where it will be. That's what we're really working on. Hopefully, we'll get those targets in the next two months and then get some holes in November, December into this second or into this porphyry target there.
By the end of the year, what are we hoping to achieve? We're a bit over halfway in terms of the meterage. We started in March. We've staggered the rigs in. We had a few drilling issues. A couple of rigs broke down, so that's why we ended up getting the seventh and eighth rig. We're catching up now. The plan is to drill through till mid to late December. That's when we should have finished the 50,000 m. Hopefully, November and late November for Shanac and Gradina, respectively, their resource updates. That'll lead into the scoping studies that are going on in the background with the aim of trying to get a scoping study complete by sort of April next year. One of the key focus areas over the last 12 months since Strickland acquired the project is on the sort of sustainability side of things.
I'm really proud of this aspect and what we've been able to achieve over the last 12 months. It's been a big 12 months when Strickland Metals Limited acquired the asset. We had about 25 - 30 permanent employees within Zlatna Reka Resources , which is our local subsidiary. We've recently increased that over the last six months to 55 employees, so over 100% increase. 60% of that is from the local communities of Novi Pazar and Raška, and that's important as well. A year ago, we had no employees from the local town of Novi Pazar. We really pushed hard to try and increase our presence there and increase our, I guess, over the few months in getting some really high caliber people from Novi Pazar and Raška. Very happy about that. We've also increased our diversity over the last 12 months.
About a year ago, we only had sort of about 10% or 15% of our workforce was female. Now, we've been able to increase that to over 30% with some really key appointments over the last six months there. Of our workforce, 20% are actually working on community relations, environmental studies, and rehab, and also cultural heritage. About 20% of the workforce is focused on sustainability. We've recently opened an office in Novi Pazar, which is a community center, so people can come in and ask questions. We've also increased their commitment. We've invested in a number of community projects. We sponsor a lot of local events, a lot of local teams. We've been working with the forestry department to do reforestation on parts of Rogozna as well. Really happy with the progress we've made over the last sort of 6 to 12 months on that front.
We've also had an independent audit done at the company by a company called Digbee, which has helped guide us on the areas we need to improve. A key improvement area on that was to increase our community engagement, and that's what we've been doing. In summary for today, we've got a good, really strong foundation at the moment with obviously 7.4 Moz AuEq in resource. We're really aggressively trying to grow that as quickly as we can. We're very confident we will get to over 10 Moz in the next 12 months. A $320 million market cap, we think there's plenty of room to grow, particularly as we do grow those resources and that tangible upside becomes more apparent. We're still well funded. We're currently spending about $3 million a month, so we have plenty of runway to add value.
We have a lot of confidence by the fact that the world's fourth largest mining company, Zijin Mining, the most active company in Serbia, the fastest growing mining company in the world over the past decade, has backed us in. Now that we've completed the Yandal transaction, we have a very clear focus on growing this business over the next 12 to 18 months. That will do it, Nicholas.
Fantastic. Well-told story, Paul, and congrats on the progress since we last did one of these. We've got lots of questions, so let's dive right into it. First one, hopefully, is a relatively straightforward one. Can you please confirm the record date for the allocation of the GML shares?
The record date, my understanding, was the 25th. It was last Friday. Sorry, Friday, which was, what, sorry, 22nd.
22nd. Okay. Excellent. Getting into some project-specific ones. Next question here from an investor is, can you please comment about the rate of drilling broadly, meters per day, and also assay turnaround time? How long broadly does it take you from the time you drill a hole to getting a release out to the market?
On the drilling rates, it can be a bit variable, particularly by contractor and crew within contractors. When we've got seven rigs with one contractor, there's a bit of variability amongst crews, but across the board, it averages about 30 m per day, and that's double shift. One rig does 900 m to 1,000 m per month. That's without any breakdowns. We've had a few breakdowns this year, which has been a bit frustrating. On a good day, a good crew will do 60 odd meters in a double shift. So, 1,000 m per rig per month, we've got eight rigs. If a month goes well, we should get 8,000 m of drilling in that month. In terms of turnaround, we do assays in batches. It's normally 75 samples per batch.
We don't wait till a hole is finished and then send the whole 500 m or 600 m or whatever depth that hole is. We send batches weekly, often biweekly, and the turnaround per batch is generally four to five weeks, up to six weeks at times. We have noticed the lab this year is a little bit slower than last year as a function that we're giving them a lot more samples. Generally, four to six weeks is the turnaround time. We get them in batches. What we've tried to do a bit more this year compared to last year is, last year we were sort of doing ASX announcements on a hole by hole kind of basis, which I know some aspects, some parts of the market liked.
We've been trying to move away from that and do multiple holes because, firstly, when you've got this many drill holes, doing hole by hole announcements takes up all my time, and I don't have much time for anything else. Secondly, I think it just gives a lot better context when we can put out several holes together and you can compare them amongst each other, plus previous sections and what have you. I think it just tells a better story when we can put out multiple holes together, and that's what we're trying to do as well. At the moment, we've got three holes outstanding for Shanac. We've got about seven holes outstanding for Gradina. The next batch of results will be multiple holes.
Excellent. Thanks, Paul. It's probably a good segue into this next question. The investors asked if you could offer a comment about the market reaction to some of the big intercepts that you've been putting out, 100 m to 300 m at plus a gram gold equivalent. I mean, you've had good upward trajectory and momentum this year, but sometimes those announcements don't seem to get the reaction we had expected. Do you think the market's sort of becoming desensitized in a sense for those results?
Yeah, a little bit. A little bit. I mean, even last year when Strickland had first acquired the project, we put out some of the best results on the ASX for the year. I think we were only third behind [Spartan] and Southern Cross in terms of gram times meter intercepts. Even on a good day there, we'd get probably a 10% bump. You've got to remember, Strickland's got 2.2 billion shares on issue. It is a very liquid stock. Good results, we can get a 10% lift. These latest results, I'm guilty of it as well, where if I don't, I want 300 m at 2 g, 2.5 g like our best sort of result last year. I think it's important to note the bigger picture, which is the trajectory.
We know we're not getting the big 10%, anything more than a 10% jump on a daily basis, which may not be great for the day traders, for the long-term holders, the really loyal ones. We've got a couple of fantastic shareholders that, they've been buying all the way along. We're talking the Shane Bulls and Sally's of this world. They're happy as happy as because they were buying shares at $0.065. They were buying shares at $0.07. They're still buying shares at $0.13, $0.14 because they understand that the trajectory is the bigger picture. The other thing I would say is, there are a lot of companies on the ASX. If you had an asset like this, you'd be drilling director holes every other week. That's not what we're about. That's not what I'm about. The holes that we drill are being drilled for a reason.
That's a technical reason in that these are the holes that each of the deposits need for the resource model that in turn will feed the mine optimizations and guide us to how this project gets developed. We're not here to be a spiff company that just pumps, moves the rig 5 m away and twins the best holes.
We should remember some of the brokers have still got some pretty attractive price targets. I think Paul Howard from Canaccord's got $0.43. Yeah.
And Paul's been sharp, right?
He knows, he's seen it firsthand. Excellent. Okay. Next one here is investor says, "Gradina has a strike length of 600 m to 1,000 m. Drilling to date has largely focused on the north and south ends to depths of around 500 m with the update potential currently being tested. What is your expectation for the central part of Gradina between north and south?
Yeah, so that's a bit, as I mentioned earlier, there's a few question marks. We do expect that there is a fault through there, and that's why we get the volcanics at the northern end, not at the southern end. There's no reason geologically it won't. The actual mineralization or the skarn ore body goes through there. It's just what's the continuity of the grade through there, which, you know, it's a bit hard to have any expectations other than that it'll probably be similar to what we've got today, which is, you know, we do at Gradina get a sort of 100 m, 150 m wide broad mineralization zone with multiple high-grade hits within it that are sort of 5 m to 20 m true thickness.
I would expect more of the same, but whether it's sort of chopped up or moved about, that's probably the question we're not so sure about.
Okay, thanks, Paul. You haven't explained why you're now re-looking at Copper Canyon, so I'll jump over that one. The next question is, "Metallurgical testing mentions pyrite but not pyrrhotite. Any comments?
Yeah, that's just a nomenclature. The metallurgists just call it pyrite goldcon, but it's predominantly a pyrite goldcon for Gradina.
Okay, thanks for that.
Now, whereas Shanac is more of a, you know, the goldcon that we get out of Shanac is a pyrite goldcon.
Yep, okay. Next question here. "Could you do a compare and contrast of the Shanac intrusives, central dike southern stock, and the Medenovac Kotlovi intrusives?
You mean on Micromine? I don't have the Medenovac loaded, but what I will say, I'll try and clarify that. At Medenovac, there seems to be just two big intrusions, one either side, with very little intrusion in the middle. On the other side of that intrusion, we basically start going into Kotlovi. There may be a big stock between Medenovac and Kotlovi. The next couple of holes will tell us whether there's actually space or a big stock between Medenovac and Kotlovi. Shanac has multiple sort of dikes running predominantly northwest through it. It really seems that central one, which is obviously, we don't know if it comes off the southern stock or is just next to it. I'd say they're related. That central one seems to be the key where today probably 70%, if not more, high grade sits either side of that central dike.
The other dikes are there and we do get some zones of high grade up against them. That central one seems to be the key for 70% or 80% of them in. If I was to talk about dikes at Gradina, it's a different story again. The dikes at Gradina, we have two orientations. We have a northeast trending set which runs through to Copper Canyon. It's the same controlling dikes as Copper Canyon, but we also have a northwest trending set which runs along the bedding of Gradina as well, which seem to control a lot of the high grade there.
Okay, excellent. Next question here from an analyst who asks, "Do you plan to drill holes at Shanac a bit deeper to test the eastern side of the southern stock, or do you need to come at it from the other side? What is the depth limitation of your drill rigs?
Yeah, so literally just this week we've generated some target volumes for the potential mineralized space around that southern stock. You're right, like it's mainly, you know, at the southern end of the deposit we do have a few hits into that replacement style min. On the eastern side we've only got that one hole. We will look to drill that position. We would drill it from the other way, from the eastern side. You're concerned about that. These rigs can easily drill 1,000+ m if we want to. Not that we'd necessarily need to go that deep if we're coming from the eastern side. No drills. We'll hopefully get a couple of holes into it, into that prospective space now before the end of the year.
Fantastic. I've got some questions here about drilling costs. I might just combine them into a three-part question. I'll channel my inner Keith Goods here. The question is, "What is the cost per meter of drilling? What's the budget for the drill program and the lead up to the resource qualification? What is your current burn rate?
Yeah, so just drilling costs, drilling on its own, just the drilling cost is about $120 a meter. When everything's going well, if we're drilling in winter where things are a bit slower and you need more support gear and personnel, it goes up to about $150 a meter, but $120 on average. You know, to put that in the context, that's a bit under AUD 200 a meter, and that's all in. It's quite a bit cheaper than here in Australia. Assay costs are about $55 per sample. We generally do two meter samples, so $25- $30 a sample. That's probably slightly cheaper than what it is here. In terms of our budget, the budget for this year was AUD 20 million. As it currently stands, we're pretty much on track with that.
We're currently spending about AUD 3 million a month on the drill program. You know, it's also important to remember it's not just the drill program. We've got environmental surveys happening. We've got on-cultural surveys. We've got metallurgical test work. We've got resource work. We've got mine optimization work. We're looking at infrastructure options. There's a lot of work going on here in the background.
Yep, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for that, Paul. Just one more geology question here. Can you elaborate further on the significance of expanding the search space at Shanac?
Yeah, I think Shanac is an interesting one because up until this year, the drill spacing was basically across the board, roughly 80 m by sort of 40 m to 80 m on section. As we saw last year, when you start to improve your understanding of the controls, and particularly when we think of controls, we're talking about controls on the higher grade zones, which are our focus. Once you actually start to understand those controls and then close the spacing and test those features, you can hide some quite nice bodies of high-grade mineralization between two sections that are 80 m apart. Individual pods of mineralization could easily be 1 or 2 or 3 million tons of good grade. When we think about selective mining scenario here, we're really looking at sort of that 1-2 million ton scenario.
Every time we hit some stuff like we did, like we released yesterday, that could be an extra year or two of production. Whilst it might not be overly significant on the global resource for Shanac, which is 150 million tons, locally, and particularly given our focus on wanting to demonstrate the economics of a selective mining, these zones are really important.
Thanks, Paul. One more quick exploration one. Has Red Creek been drilled?
We have drilled one hole into Red Creek earlier this year, and we'll drill a second one probably in November.
Excellent. Quickly jump into some more sort of macro political type questions. There's a question here from an investor about the involvement of the Serbian government, if any, and do they take us, have a stake in Strickland, or do they take a stake in the project? Is there any mechanism for that to occur? What's the tax regime like in country?
In terms of government ownership, no, there's no scope at this stage. It's not in the mining code that the government gets a free carry 10% like in Ghana or up to 30% in Mali or what have you. No direct government ownership and no ownership in Strickland. The Serbian government's actually very good. I think I'm on the record for saying I've worked all over the world for 20 years, a lot of Africa, a lot of Asia, and Serbia is definitely the best by far in terms of the government framework. What I mean by that is mining is a big contributor to Serbia's economy, and the Serbian government is actually smart. It's not like some of these governments where they have very short-term vision around, oh, let's raise the royalties and let's increase government ownership.
The Serbian government understands that you need a stable fiscal framework to encourage the investment. As I said earlier, they're on the record for saying that they want to increase mining's contribution to 10% of GDP, and they know the only way to do that is by having a stable regulatory and fiscal regime. I think the way they manage the industry in Serbia has been, over the six years that I've been operating there, first rate. The second question in terms of the fiscal regime, it's very good. 15% corporate tax. I can't think of too many countries around the world where mining occurs, we have such a low corporate tax rate. Again, that is to encourage investment because they understand that to do that, you need to make yourself different to your competitors.
How do they encourage explorers to come in there and mining companies to come in there? That's by offering what on surface seems to be very attractive fiscal terms because they know that the geology of the country is such that these deposits are multi-generational deposits. Our project, if things go well, we could see 30+ years. To do that, you need fiscal, attractive, but also stable fiscal terms. That's what they give us.
Thanks very much, Paul. There was another question here about whether you could offer a comment on political risk, but I think you've probably just done that. Unless there's anything you'd like to add about operating in Serbia.
I think my view on political risk, and it might be a bit different, but there's all sorts of different types of political risk. I think a lot of people just think of political risk in terms of, is the government going to take the license off us one day because they decide, no, we'd like to have that. That's kind of an extreme thing, but that can happen, but not in Serbia. Then there's the other kind, a little bit down the spectrum where you get stuff like Mali, and I've seen it firsthand in West Africa where governments come up with these pretty interesting tax bills, not based off much. Just ask Resolute and Barrick and a few others about that. In those countries, that happens a lot. Again, I wouldn't see that happening in Serbia. There's probably the lower end of the spectrum, which is Serbia.
Rio Tinto have had a few issues, and they're pretty well documented. NGOs, the Yandal project isn't overly popular amongst the anti-mining regimen over there and the NGOs, which aren't necessarily large by number, but they're pretty loud by voice. On that front, I don't think necessarily Serbia is any different to Australia. Look at New South Wales, what's been happening over there. Victoria, have fun opening a mine there. I think the key for Serbia in operating, knowing you've got the NGOs in the background and environmental lobbyists, is you just need to make sure that you do everything well. That's why we have really increased our commitment on the sustainability side of things. We don't want to make the same mistakes as Rio. That's why we are going really strong on that front.
In summary, that was a bit of a long-winded way of saying I think Serbia is actually on the lower end of sovereign risk.
Yeah, thanks, Paul. That's well said. Just one more online question here, which I was going to throw at you. The question is around the logic in, this gentleman says, welcoming a group like Zijin Mining onto the register. He says, as you point out, they're the fastest growing gold company on the planet. Why would you, you know, what's the logic in having a group like that come onto the register at a time when you don't immediately need funding?
Good question, fair question. Zijin Mining is the largest mining company in Serbia for starters. That in itself has a lot of value because they've built a mine recently. They've had a mine permitted recently. We wanted some help at some stage in terms of how do we do this. There's probably no better person to speak to than Zijin Mining, given their experience in country. The second thing is, and I talked about it earlier, Rogozna obviously has a pretty unique scale. Most people would understand that with that, and because of that grade tonnage optionality, as I've mentioned plenty of times, we are focused on the high-grade zones and demonstrating a pathway to development here that is at the smaller end. Why is that? At the bigger end, the CapEx is probably $700+ million .
If we wanted to build a big sub-level cave at Shanac, even a block cave, you're talking over $1+ billion . Obviously, a company the size of Strickland, the capital to do that, we've got no chance of, even though I see good growth in our valuation over the next year or two while we grow the resource and de-risk it, to go and raise $500,000,000 or a billion dollars of capital to do that, without the skills of having ever built a sub-level cave or whatever before, like no chance. If you think of what's the pathway for this project, if you wanted to maximize value, it involves a partner at some stage. What better partner to have than the world's fourth largest mining company, who's the biggest mining company in the country you're actually trying to do it.
Makes sense. There's a follow-up question here. The investor says, "Thanks for the outcome with the Gateway transaction. Will Strickland now focus solely on Serbia, or do you have any interest in other assets?
No, we're going to solely focus on Serbia, and you're welcome for the Gateway transaction. It's generally been received pretty positively. We still own the Bryah Basin project here in Western Australia. That's an early stage project out near [Degrasa]. We'll probably look to monetize that in the short term. Yeah, we are now solely focused on Serbia and going as hard as we can at that.
Excellent. There's just one more that came in via email. We might just deal with that quickly and then sort of wrap things up. I think we've set out with all the online questions. It's an interesting one. The investor says, "If you were an investor looking at Strickland Metals Limited from the outside, what would you want to know about the company right now and why?
Yes, that's a good question. I kind of do put myself in that position where, you know, when I went and looked at this project six years ago, what were the questions I asked myself when I did due diligence? You obviously have the technical side, which was what could the scale of this eventually be? I emphasize scale because that scale is what the majors want. The major mining companies want assets that they can mine for 30, 40, 50 years. That's why really scale is so important. I focused on metallurgy. Back then, there wasn't actually much metallurgical data at all. We've got a lot more metallurgical data now, which shows, as we put out recently in the case of Gradina, some really positive results. I'm a bit less concerned about metallurgy now. Environmental and social is probably the other key risks.
We've done a heap of environmental work over the last few years, and we're expanding that now. As I said earlier, we're really putting a lot of effort into the social. The only other question now, if I was a new investor coming in, is, you know, what does the next couple of years look like? I talk about the next six months, but I don't necessarily talk about the next two years or what the ultimate end game here is. I do get asked a lot, is Strickland Metals Limited going to mine Serbia? The answer to that is we're doing everything we can to end up on that path.
We're trying to emulate what Adriatic Metals have done, but I would be very surprised if either someone doesn't come along in that meantime and either acquire Strickland Metals Limited or at the very least, partner with us to develop this project to its ultimate potential.
Fantastic. We've got to wrap things up, Paul. We really appreciate your time, and that's been a tremendous run-through. Thank you also to everyone who tuned in. Some great questions there and some great engaged attendance. Just a reminder that this recording of this will be available later today through all the normal channels, social channels, and website. We really appreciate your time. Paul, thanks. Great to see you, and thanks for running us through the Strickland story again.
Thanks, Nicholas, and thanks everyone out there for tuning in. Hopefully, you found it informative.
Thanks very much, and thanks everyone for dialing in. We look forward to catching up with Paul again, hopefully with some more good news before the end.