Tolu Minerals Limited (ASX:TOK)
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Mining Forum Americas 2026

Sep 30, 2026

Summary

Aggressive drilling and infrastructure upgrades are advancing, with gold production targeted for Q1 next year and full-rate output by 2028. Resource expansion at Tolukuma and other flagship properties is underway, supported by strong funding and an experienced team.

Chris Muller
Managing Director and CEO, Tolu Minerals

Strategically, it's the most well-located goldmine or mine, for that matter, in Papua New Guinea. There's been a lot of underground developments. We're active on several headings now, including ore headings, where we have exceptional grades of more than 5 oz per ton. We've got a very aggressive drill program. A 75,000-m approved program of which we're about 1/3 of the way through, and just from those results alone, we've encountered new vein systems. This is a sensational vein system, as you'll see. We've had two MREs out in the last fortnight. One for Tolukuma and one for another major project that we have called Mount Penck on New Britain Island. We've got some substantial milestones coming up ahead. Of course, with the drill bit continuing, we have seven rigs drilling full-time, so we're going to see a lot of exceptional intercepts coming forward.

We've got our processing plant well underway to being completely refurbished so that we'll be in gold production in quarter one next year. We're also starting a twin access incline into the deposit, very similar to that at Kainantu, where I've been prior to joining Tolu, had been for nine years. We'll also be commencing drilling on the Mount Penck property, the one I mentioned in New Britain, but ramping up to full rate production in 2028 at Tolukuma. In a nutshell, we have three major levers being the restart of the mine, of course, near mine growth potential, or not potential, but guarantee with all of the drilling that we're doing and also district upside at Tolukuma and on two of our other projects as well.

Now, PNG, I'm sure most of you will know, is one of the most endowed districts of the world for porphyry and epithermal systems, with some of the best deposits, highest grade porphyrys and highest grade epithermal systems. Mainly centered around or along the main central cordillera on the mainland, but there are also major deposits in the Bismarcks, as we heard in the presentation previously by Alex Heath. The three flagship properties that we have are Tolukuma, of course, the mine. Ipi River, which is a porphyry about 50 km to the northwest of Tolukuma and Mount Penck on New Britain Island. What I'll be discussing in this presentation is how we're getting all these ounces, how we're going through to production, and also financing and catalysts. So we're a fully permitted goldmine, ML104.

It's only 100 km from Port Moresby, so like I say, exceptionally strategically located. The mine had a peak annual output of around 87,000 oz per annum, but there was a decade there between 55,000 oz- 85,000 oz. It's an exceptional mine in terms of geotechnical properties. We've got all this infrastructure available to us, and you can see there the drives are extremely competent and well-supported. If we look at the mining lease, this is actually rotated about 70 degrees to fit on the screen, but it's a substantially sized mining lease. About 8 km in length and with only about 1.2 km of that has actually been properly explored and/or developed. There were previously 15 vein systems that were modeled in the actual vein for Tolukuma, the vein system. With the drilling that we've done and reinterpretation and so forth, we've been able to effectively triple that.

Now if we zoom into the central part of this license, the central zone, you'll see that the as-built infrastructure are the white solids there, surrounded by the yellow shapes, the yellow wireframes, which is the plan development. The key message here is that we have in our mine plan, we've basically got very ready access from the existing infrastructure to our mine plan. If we look at a long section through the deposit, this is, as I say, it's more than 8 km, in fact, if you include the areas just outside, north and south of the mine lease. This has only been quite sparsely drilled. The yellow points that you see there are examples of very high-grade veins that have been intersected at surface. There are many gaps, as you can see.

There's a lot of potential for expanding this resource right in the near surface environment. Not to mention all of the potential at depth. Coming from Kainantu, it's a very similar scenario where there was almost negligible drilling at depth, and that's what led to an order of magnitude increase at that deposit by being able to access it from deeper in the system. I'll talk more about this one in the coming slides. Looking at a plan view of Tolukuma, this is the mine lease in the black outline in its true orientation. The red lines represent mineralized quartz veins that have been mapped at surface.

You see the infrastructure is only a very small proportion of that mining lease within a huge vein field that actually spans within the Tolukuma corridors around 20 sq km, but if you include the surrounding vein fields, we're talking more like 45 sq km. Zooming into that part on the left, we see that this Tolukuma deposit, including the as-built infrastructure there, it's a classic dilational jog. I've seen a lot of systems in my time, researched many more again, and to me, this is the most classic textbook style dilational jog of all. Just within that environment alone, just within that tensional environment, we see that there are many, many more veins, like I say. We've been able to expand the vein list itinerary to effectively 44 veins, tripling what was known before.

What's really interesting about this deposit, like many others in the world, epithermal systems, we're actually looking at multiple phases of mineralization within the same structure. This is exactly the same as at K92, where it was originally regarded as a very narrow vein system, and then we obviously drilled that out and determined that there were many phases and that there are bonanza phases of mainly quartz pyrite. That's exactly what we have here, where we have a 40-g sample over a 1.5 m, an interval, a sub-interval. There's actually two quartz vein intervals around that grade in this particular set of core trays. Collectively, all of the stock work veins within the phyllic alteration that combine or mesh the bonanza shoots together, it collectively forms a very economic high-grade vein around about 3 m-4 m.

That's what we are going to be looking at going forward. With all of that veinfield, you can just imagine how many ounces are going to come from this based on that new interpretation. Where we inherited, where Tolu Minerals came in was after, as I say, 1 million oz had been mined. So we were basically left with 503,000, and we have added 400 odd with pure gold, so that we are, together with silver, up close to 1 million oz gold equivalent just for Tolukuma. With all of the work that we have got planned, all of the 75,000 m of drilling and some, this exploration target just within the mining lease alone is more like three times that. That is just, as I say, just in a very near mine confines, not including all of the peripheral veins, which are obviously exceptionally expansive.

Looking at the three other flagship properties, or the two other flagship properties, should I say, with Ipi River just to the northwest and Mount Penck on New Britain. If we zoom in on these, you will see that we have a huge license holding around Tolukuma itself, around the mine, and we have identified more than a dozen porphyry and epithermal targets just within 10-km radius of the mine itself. We have only just started to scratch the surface where we have teams on the ground there, but there is a lot more work to do. At Ipi River, we have got two teams on the ground doing geochemical work there, surface work. That has proven to be very rewarding so far. Mount Penck, we have also got teams on the ground there. It is an exceptional multi-elemental deposit, which is high sulphidation in character.

We have already approved up a resource there, or delivered a resource should I say, published one, in a very shallow environment, just 100 m. Within 100 m of surface, there is a resource there. The good thing about Mount Penck, or one of the many good things, is that it is so close to the coastline. It is literally, you can hear the waves from where the project is. Very, very accessible with the port there as well. So an exceptional land package, all of which we have flown Mobile MT geophysics over. So we have very high resolution, deep penetrating conductivity, resistivity, and magnetics over all of these flagship properties. That is really assisting us to guide the geochem, ultimately drilling and then resource definition and mining, of course. Back to the production side of things at Tolukuma. In this image, you will see a typical drive.

This is on Tolukuma vein itself, which was an initial discovered lode at Tolukuma in the complex. This shows that you have got the very high-grade quartz part component surrounded by very strongly altered and mineralized phyllic alteration on both the hanging and footwall. These are lodes of almost vertical. So they are exceptionally amenable and easy to stope with our sub-level open longhole stoping. As I said, we have got several drives. We are opening more drives as we bring on new equipment such as three new production drills, three new jumbos. So there will be many more ore headings coming online. From those headings, we have been able to get grades of sometimes more than 5 oz per ton just from these face samples. The plant, it is well on the way to being completely refurbished.

It was turned off about 10 years ago, put into dormancy, and we've got a whole team. We've got GR Engineering, Sun Engineering, all the professional engineers that did the stage three commissioning at K92. They're now over at our place doing exactly the same here. Fortunately, the major components in the plant were actually in very good condition. We've got the SAG mill, it works fine, as does the Knelson concentrator, the Acacia Reactor. We've got a few replacement parts that are underway now, such as dilution tanks. But the bulk of it now is just manual labor and actually just getting this running again. We anticipate being back up to that nameplate production, well over 200,000 ton per annum, as I say, by 2028.

Through 2027, we'll be ramping up, initially starting at about half the throughput, but we'll have gold production, as I say, in the first quarter. Now, this is my favorite slide because it's very much akin to the same slide that K92 often advertise, and that is, of course, that a twin incline access development enabled that throughput at K92 to be effectively tripled. We've got a very similar system in that our deposit is hosted within a mountain. Currently, you have to actually access it from fairly high up at 1560 level and therefore drive down declines to be able to mine effectively and also explore. Hence, the as-built that you see in the purple and the blue are the planned developments. That planned development will be updated very soon based on the new MRE.

One thing to particularly note here are the red points, and they represent intercepts that have been taken from drilling deep in the system, well below the planned infrastructure and the existing infrastructure. With a twin access incline collared at 1170 m RL, we're hundreds of meters below. This 2.5-km-long drive will be able to take us right into that far southern part. The south is on the right-hand side. That will take us into where those high-grade intercepts are, enabling us to drill out that zone, as well as the zone in the northern part, which has never been tested. The way this is going to grow is pretty obvious. It's all going to expand. We've got two major bounding structures that we can drill from both east and west from the twin access incline.

As well as that, it enables us to de-water the whole mine. Currently, the mine up to 1500 is flooded. We've been able to pump about 100 m already just mechanically. But ultimately, we want to have this mine completely dry, so that we can access all of that infrastructure for drilling, for mining, and also for backfill, for base fill. Also, once we have this twin incline in place, we'll be able to construct ore shoots, the ore passes, exactly the same as at Kora and Judd and K92. We'll be able to set those up. Our throughput will just go through the roof. There's a lot of opportunity at the portal itself. You can see with those two photographs on the right-hand side that it's a very large open area. It's several hectares as it is.

But we'll be able to expand that from the waste rock that we'll be pulling out from this new development. The opportunities are endless and conceptual planning is already underway. I've talked about the mine itself. There's also a lot of other infrastructure in place already, and this is the beauty about this deposit. It's already been set up, and there are hundreds of millions of AUD of equipment and infrastructure that's already there, such as a hydro power plant, which we're also refurbishing. We've got an access road, as I say, all the way from the capital city. The airport, you can drive right to site and you can see the condition of the road. Also, we have an exceptional mining camp where we have offices and accommodation to house 500 people, and that's expanding. We're building new accommodation. We've got the messes, the workshops.

Everything you can imagine is already in place. But we're obviously expanding all of this, gentrifying it as we go. As I mentioned, we're underground well and truly with several headings, active blasting, bogging, drilling. Three electric drill rigs underground, four at surface, getting exceptional productivity. This is going to see this resource grow substantially and we're expecting to put out another resource estimate for Tolukuma next year, this time next year. As I mentioned, the power plant is also well and truly underway to being completed. On the financing and catalyst side of things, we're looking at a market cap of around AUD 400 million. We've got close to AUD 70 million in the bank. So we're well-equipped, fully cashed to funded to production. Where we are today, just in a snapshot, just to round up.

We've had our MRE released to market for Tolukuma, as well as the other one for Mount Penck. We've got the access road fully functional. So we don't use helicopters at all, virtually, except for high-level personnel who need to come in for visits and so forth. We've also got the plant, as I mentioned, almost there. We're starting the twin access incline in quarter one, so that we'll be seeing production also in quarter one. So many catalysts over the next 12 months. As I say, excessive drill results to come. The plant and the mine plan and gold production together in quarter one and also full rate production ramping up through 2027 into 2028. I've got 10 seconds to go, so I'm just going to wrap up with some of the personnel that we have on site.

We've been able to amass an exceptionally experienced team who have vast experience in PNG. Myself, I've been there full time for 22 years now and I've worked on six of the major projects. I've saved the most recent and the best one until now, Tolukuma. We also have several people here that have joined us from K92 at their own accord. Very experienced people, including our COO and an exceptional board comprising two highly experienced national directors as well with experience in the mining industry, in particular the MRA, the Mineral Resources Authority. On that note, I thank you all for staying back for this one and happy to take any questions.

Moderator

I think in the best interest of keeping on track, Chris, we'll save the questions for afterwards. But thank you very much. It's a great presentation.

Chris Muller
Managing Director and CEO, Tolu Minerals

Thank you.