Hello and welcome to Virtual Industrial Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are very pleased you have joined us for our three-day Metals and Mining Conference. Our first presentation of the day is from Amaroq Minerals Ltd. Please note, you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Eldur Olafsson, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Amaroq , which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol AMRQF and on the TSXV under the symbol AMRQ. Welcome, Eldur.
Greg, thank you. I hope you can all hear me today. My name is Eldur Olafsson, and I am the Chief Executive Founder of Amaroq Minerals . With me here today, we have Mr. Edward Westropp, who is Head of Corporate Affairs, who will be taking Q&A towards the end. I'm going to start by telling you what Amaroq is all about. We are a company that is focused on four different sectors. It's gold and gold exploration, it's critical minerals, it's then services, and then building up hydroelectric facilities. We are in Greenland, which could be seen to be middle of nowhere, but it's actually middle of everywhere. It sits there in between Europe and the U.S. It's strategically important from a defense, from a mineral and an energy perspective.
I'm located here in Iceland, which has very good routes in and out of Greenland, either through air or via sea. That is a key thing to bring both materials but also people as well as other services to the country. Amaroq is a company that provides an exposure to Greenland. We are one of the largest private investors in Greenland. We've been operating there ever since 2017 as a listed entity. We are the only one who has built a mine in that time frame, and we operate about five different exploration programs as well as building up these other businesses. Our cornerstone asset is the Nalunaq Project. It's a past-producing goldmine that was in production from 2003 - 2013. We took this asset over in 2015. We spent several years exploring, developing, and drilled more than 40,000 - 50,000 meters underground.
The mine currently has a processing plant on site. We have a camp for roughly 120 people. We have a headcount of 150 people working for us. The mine has a resource currently at 484,000 ounces at 30 gram per ton, so really, really high grade, and an indicated resource of 150,000 ounces of gold. The plant has a 3 ton per day throughput in terms of scale, but could be relatively easily increased to 450 ton per day once we open up more mine fronts. What you can see here on the picture is that the yellow part here is where the gold deposit is. Where the arrows are, it emphasizes where the deposit is still open upwards to the mountain, and that's what we call an exploration potential. That is almost more than 2 million ounces in terms of potential.
It's not in the resources, but there's a strike extent for that. During this year, we're also drilling in the South Block, which basically continues underneath the valley. We drilled over here, and we drilled a strike extent of 250 meters down the valley as well. The deposit has potential to grow in all directions, both upwards and downwards. The current mine life is 10 years. We are working rapidly to increase that every year and to increase the throughput to continue generating good cash flow so far. Within our portfolio, we have built up a portfolio approach in South Greenland and have acquired all of the known gold potential within South Greenland. We own the whole belt in South Greenland. This means this belt is more than 200 km long.
It is somewhere between 50 - 100 km wide, and it contains our Nalunaq Project, which is only 30 km away from the town of Narsarsuaq, and we're only about 2-3 hours away from an airport in South Greenland. South Greenland is ice-free during the year. It does have some pack ice that goes into the fjords, but generally, it is ice-free. To put this into perspective, this is the same latitude as Oslo or the most northern part of Britain. This is more south of Iceland, actually, where I reside. This whole belt is absolutely glowing with gold, as we say. A lot of the gold that we see in the system is exposed rocks on surface where we have known gold deposits.
The most advanced asset after Nalunaq is the Nanoq asset, which we drilled last year, first 150 meters, and discovered very high-grade gold through two, if not three, veins, so-called saddle reefs. We drilled 600 meters strike off that vein, more than 5,000 meters that has already been drilled. We already found parallel structure. The Nanoq asset is something that we think could be considerably larger than Nalunaq. It is very large and good geology, so the geological model from a geophysicist and what we drill is proven to be very good. We expect high grades and we expect high nugget impact, which means that some of the holes will have a very high grade, some of the holes won't. The scale there is very, very large.
During the exploration program next year and going forward, what we can do is take bulk samples and test the ore there, move it over to Nalunaq. This is approximately 300 km distance by moving it on a part, and we can increase the production from our throughput here. The idea here is to build a district scale company where we have initially a Nalunaq Gold Mine, which is doing 300 ton per day. It has, on a 15 gram per ton, that's about 50,000 ounces a year, and we continue to increase that. Very good cash flow, which we can look towards there, and to then use that cash flow to continue to develop areas like Nanoq, Vagar Ridge, which is one of the highest grade gold exposure in Greenland, more than 2,000 gram per ton, and has already been drilled as well.
There is a lot of gold showing in a country like Greenland. The key thing there to unlock all of that is to have the services, to have the rigs, to have an operating mine, to have the people. That's something we alone have built in Greenland. No one else has that operatorship in Greenland to date. If we go further, we have quite recently acquired what we believe to be the second mine we intend to build in Greenland. It is the past-producing mine in Black Angel zinc-lead-silver, which is important to us. Black Angel sits within the base metal district here in northern Greenland, and it has very good neighbors in both cobalt, Anglo-American, and others in this region. This geology here is seen to be similar to what Norilsk Nickel is in Russia, so very, very rich in base metals.
The mine was mined by Cominco, it's now called Teck, later called Eaton, over 17 years, more than 11 million tons combined, up to 15 %- 20% zinc leads and silver. Currently, it has a mineral resource of 4.4 million ton. It has a huge amount of potential due to the fact that the glacier has retreated there, and big layers of zinc leads silver is now on surface. This is very much the story of Greenland, both in Nanoq, in Nalunaq, and in Black Angel, where you have effectively the glacier is retreating more and more, and we're finding more and more minerals. As you can see, our model here by acquiring Black Angel, you have effectively the resource, you have various different infrastructure facilities such as hangars and ports and so on.
Therefore, we see this as something we can continue to drill, bring up bulk samples, start cash flow from this operation because most of the things that are known because this was a past-producing deposit. Kangerluarsuk is similar to Nanoq. It is a SEDEX place, something that could be much, much larger. We intend to drill that next year and build effectively a cookie-cutter model similar to what we had done in South Greenland. What is important, where we are situated in South Greenland, you have the gold belt, you have the copper belt, you have the rare earth. We sit in the middle of what is important in Greenland there. In the north, we sit where the base metal is. What is important in Greenland is to have a base where you have infrastructure such as the one we, for example, have either in Nalunaq or in Black Angel.
Just to build a camp like that can cost you somewhere between CAD 3 million -CAD 5 million, a hangar, an airstrip, a port facility, etc . These are all in place and give us an opportunity to have a low upfront, both exploration and CapEx in terms of developing these kinds of mines to create a foundation not only for this mining district but also for services to other players such as Anglo or the rare earth players and others. This works very well in tandem there. As for Cadillac, which is kind of a high-impact exploration, we have a joint venture which we own 51% of, a group called GCAM and More Capital owned with 49% stake. This is to discover and explore for elephant deposits in other copper rare earth, call it strategic minerals.
We made the deal in 2022, and we put our licenses, our time and efforts into the mix, whereas the funding partner brought in CAD 30 million . We've been undergoing now the third year of exploration with our partners there. We discovered a whole new copper belt, which was overlooked because this is Archaean geology. This is older than your typical porphyry or epithermal deposit you would find, for example, in Latin America, but it's very much what we have seen also in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia. This is a similar age, and it's very exciting. We've also found something, drilled the Stend alen, where we have found nickel, copper, potentially cobalt deposit. We already drilled through disseminated nickel copper there over more than 140 meters. We are continuing to drill that and to identify where the massive deposit is.
This again is something very similar to what Vale has in Voisey's Bay in Canada. Voisey's Bay used to sit right here. Around Narsarsuaq and Qarqotoq, you have critical metals. You have Kvanefjeld, which is a large uranium and rare earth. These deposits sit here. We hold rare earth licenses here and here, and these are very interesting from a rare earth perspective. Our operating position also allows us not only to develop our own licenses, but similar to this venture, we can joint venture and we can co-invest and we can operate exploration program, build mines, all of these things we are very good at. If we look at Suliaq, when we started in Greenland, we had to acquire everything. There's no leasing, there's no mining equipment services or leasing partners. There's no logistical partner. There's no consumable other than for the government itself.
We had to build all of that ourselves. What we have now done is that we moved many of these assets into a service company, which is now owned 100% by Amaroq. We intend to bring on an investor into that entity to allow that entity to grow, not only to service us but to service all mining and infrastructure projects in Greenland, leveraging off the experience of Amaroq. That experience is not only to say, here's the equipment, here do we maintain, this is how you maintain it, but it's also to help newcomers or others to develop how to get permits done, how to get various different things done within Greenland. We see it as a positive that more mines will go into operation because then it's going to be less expensive to operate. It's going to be better on the logistical front.
This is one of the initiatives we are taking up. This also helps our current service provider. We have more than 15 local service companies who might not have the balance sheet to buy the ships or the machinery, but they can rent it from us. This is very much needed in Greenland. Due to the fact that this is a jurisdiction that is remote and you need to understand how to operate, these are one of the initiatives we're taking to build up in country. If we look at then fourthly, which is our fourth, Greenland is the largest undeveloped hydroelectric resource in the rest of the world. You see this big glacier here, and in every single part of the coast here, you have a fjord and you have a river coming down, similar to what you see on the pictures here.
Due to the fact that in Nalunaq, which is our initial producing asset, we have a river that goes past our processing plant and a drop of 70 meters. There, we've already gotten all of the licenses in terms of environmental and mining licenses and social impact licenses. We built the harbor, we built the road. For us to put in place something that is a very simplistic turbine and a pipe and actually utilize the river to make electricity for our mine, we can reduce every year cost of up to CAD 2 million a year. We will then be the first private developer of hydropower projects in Greenland. Publicly, there have been some built, but we will be the first private one.
What we see here is that this can benefit Greenland greatly, not only in the fact that we generate something that has a long-term impact on their energy security, but when the mine will close, hopefully in 30, 40, 50 years, this electricity could be a source for new business, but also to be moved into the town of Nanortalik close by. This has a dual purpose for us. Also, there are thoughts about data centers in Greenland. There are thoughts about various different opportunities. Do remember, what are we good at in Nalunaq? We're good at building harbors, roads, tunneling, mining, everything the same thing you need logistics for any infrastructure project in Greenland. That's why what we're leveraging up because these are all industries that will support our gold production, which is going to be generating the cash flow we need.
The key highlights of a company of Amaroq. We are approximately CAD 700 million in market cap. We've increased already last year our resources in Nalunaq by 51%. We are drilling upwards and we're drilling downward. We're going to continue increasing the resources because it's quite clear that the deposit continues. We not only have one deposit called Main Vein, we also have 75 veins. There is a huge potential for growth in the resources. It'll just take us time to drill it. We've been doing a commissioning year this year, but currently the gold production is ahead of expectation. We've already mined 5,000 ounces to date and sold by the end of the third quarter. This was our plan for the full year.
We will have a revised update to the market in our quarterly update on the 14th of November to tell you how much we will produce until the end of the year. What are we saying here? The facilities, the mining, everything is getting into good shape and the commissioning is going really, really well. We have a strong liquidity position. By the end of last quarter, we had CAD 84 million in cash and more than about CAD 9 million in underwriting credit. We're net debt-free as well. We finished our drilling in Nalunaq. That result is just coming into the market in this fourth quarter and all of the results from Nalunaq and all of the results from the Cadillac exploration we did this summer on our copper and rare earth, as well as other satellite exploration over gold.
This will be a very busy season where we are focused on increasing the resources. The specialist service company has been set up. We're in the process to fund that, finalize contracts, and look for new customers to operate there with us. The hydro pre-feasibility study has been completed. We'll go out for final permits next year. We've acquired this new hub in West Greenland, making us the largest license holder and the most active license holder in all of Greenland. Our focus is to evaluate to go on the main market in London next year, either spring or autumn. We're in the process to update the market on that as well. That will give us even more access to institutional investors, to indexes, and to internationalized investors outside not only for the U.K., but also in the U.S. market.
As a company and in terms of shareholders, more than I would say 90% of our shareholders, probably more, are long-only shareholders. Obviously, we have private investors, gold funds, critical mineral funds, but the bulk of our shareholders are pension funds and sovereign wealth funds in the Nordics, as well as in Europe and the U.S. Also, both in the management, we hold about 11% stake in the company. We participated in every single round. We have more than 40% of our shareholders are actually strategic investors. The company is really well held, and no one holds more than 4.7% in the company. This will include Danish sovereign fund, Greenland sovereign fund, the largest and only pension fund in Greenland, Danish pension fund, et c . You can see the tickers here on the right.
Both we're listed on the AIM, which is hopefully soon to be on the main. We're listed on the TSXV, and we're listed in the Nordic market here in Iceland as well. We are in one index here in Iceland, OMX 15. Our liquidity has been increasing in the past few weeks as well as elsewhere. We would see that we should be hitting other indices both in the gold sector and in London as well. Again, the cash balance is very strong, and we're generating revenue now, and we will be continuing that from 14th of November to end of the year, focusing on having our guidance in the end of February next year to kind of have commercial production from a minimum three quarters next year. As a team, the team itself, we have our CFO here based with me, Ellert Arnarson here in Iceland.
Eldur Olafsson is our CEO, and Edward Westropp, Head of Corporate Affairs. We have a strong board of individuals with various different experiences. Graham Stewart is our Chairman, former CEO and founder of Faroe Petroleum that got sold to DNO. Siggi has extensive background in banking. David is a U.S. investor, investor in Amaroq, obviously, and is Managing Director of Livermore Partners. Warwick Morley-Jepson is a former CEO of Kinross as an example and other large mining companies. Lina Fredriksson is a Greenlandic individual who is also a CEO of Air Greenland. The rest of the management team, they all come from different various backgrounds, both Jim Gilbertson, Anna McGraths, Anna Solder, and Edward Wyvill.
All in all, this is a strong and capable management team who have to date built up the biggest success in Greenland so far, both in terms of their amount of investment, in terms of access, in terms of production, in terms of permits, in terms of anything you need to do to operate within Greenland. Therefore, we feel that our company is one of the best-placed companies to give you, as an investor, exposure to Greenland. Thank you. I'm going to give Ed Westropp the floor. Thank you.
Thanks, Eldur. Thanks very much. We have a few questions from the line. If it's okay with you, I'll just read them out and then you can come back with an answer. The first one is, what are the expected cash burn rates for upcoming exploration and development projects? How long can the current liquidity position support these operations without an additional capital raise?
Apologies, Ed. I'm not sure you can hear me. I'm sensing some connection issues here. Do you want to repeat the question? Ed, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Okay. Let me just focus on the question. I can see here, apologies, for some reason I've lost your ability to hear you, but I hope you can hear me. If you can give me a thumbs up for that, then I can read up the question.
How come?
Anyway, the first question there on how to prioritize resource expansion targets like Vagar Ridge and Nanoq compared to ongoing operation in Nalunaq. What we focus on, the closest ounces to be produced are obviously in Nalunaq, right? Therefore, our focus is to increase the resources there as quickly as possible and also to expand the resources so we can increase the cash flow, right? That will allow us to generate very healthy free cash flow next year, we feel. In terms of then how do we, when we look at Nanoq, we drilled that last year. It cost us CAD 200,000 or CAD 300,000 to hold, and it gave us a very, before that we had done geophysics on it. It gave us a very, what you have to kind of put in your mind is that these are all resources on surface.
We see a vein over 1 km on surface, like a faulty vein. Effectively, we just drill this systematically. How we allocate the capital, we allocated about CAD 5 million this year to drill that, and that was all. The scale there is enormous, and it can also mean that we can actually, relatively soon, once that has been identified where the high-grade parts hopefully are in the resources, we can move that material to Nalunaq. It works with it. Whereas V agar and these other areas, that's more satellite, that's more sampling on surface, understanding the geology.
We go with this in a way that as soon as we understand the geological model, and we test that with drilling, as soon as we feel that's the case, we then start drilling it quite extensively and allow these operations to support each other, so to say, to build not only 150,000 - 100,000 ounce mines, but hopefully multiple of these and scale.
Okay, super. If you can hear me, Eldur, the next question is, what are the expected cash burn rates for upcoming exploration and development projects? How long can the current liquidity position support this without additional capital raises?
Right, on the second question from Matthew Oshley, I assume, right? Apologies, I can't hear you still, but on that one, Edward, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Yeah, for some reason, the sound doesn't come through, but I assume you have a question from Matthew Oshley, right? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so the cash burn currently, what we are forecasting, we have a, currently we have an OpEx and CapEx. We're closing, we are effectively on the CapEx. We are finalizing phase one with the gravity, so plugging that in by, that should be all finished by mid-November. We will be finishing our flotation circus from December all the way towards the end of March, right? That is the kind of a CapEx. We don't have much left in CapEx. This is only time of 40-50 people there on site who are finishing that CapEx.
In relation to OpEx, what we're targeting in terms of cost per month for OpEx and call it all-in sustaining cost for the whole company from next year is in around $5 million per month once the CapEx has finished. In our current plans, we don't foresee that we would have to do any capital raise to support the ongoing operation at all.
Okay, if you can hear me again, Eldur, the next question, what are the principal operational or regulatory risks associated with developing assets in Greenland? How long does management plan to mitigate, and how does management plan to mitigate them?
Yeah, on what are the principal regulatory risks associated with developing Greenland? I can now hear you, Ed, finally. I would say they are low compared to other regions. Let me give you an example. We had developed environmental impact and social impact assessment effectively over two to three years, right? That process went really well. We get our drilling permit every year sent in in the spring, and we get those processed very, very quickly compared to what you see in Canada and/or Scandinavia. There is huge support from all political parties here to develop mining because they see it as a source of income to help them become economically independent. Those risks are low compared to other jurisdictions, we feel. Where the risks are, I would say, are more on us.
Those are typical things which you see here in Greenland. There is a logistical risk, how you bring people in, visas, and more various different things, which is just part of operation, and you need to learn and know how to do to be successful. Once you have that support and connection to the government, then you know there is less risk of anything happening together with the government, we feel, or any jurisdiction for that matter.
Super, okay, thank you. Next question, what are the main milestones or catalysts that investors should watch out for in the next 12 - 18 months related to resource growth or new discoveries?
I would say Nalunaq, our focus will continue to grow that and move more of the input into indicated. I think that has a huge potential. Literally, we can see the vein continuing upwards, and it's quite clear. We're just scratching the surface here with what we're drilling. That's number one. The second one is the drilling of Nalunaq. We are drilling here to hopefully identify resources and build up a drilling program for years to come. We left all of the equipment there to give you a clue. We feel that that could be an absolute winner for us and a huge scale. With Black Angel, we intend to focus on doing a drilling program in one of the already drilled deposits there to expand the resources from the 4.4, hopefully up to 10 million tons before we would then do a bulk sample and restart operation there.
In Black Angel, again, this is a little bit like Nalunaq. The resources that are on surface and the scale is enormous. We will then do initial drilling in Kangerluarsuk, it's about next year, which would mean that to test if that SEDEX play exists there on the anomaly. If that's going to be the case, we're going to have a similar position on both sides. This is going to be a very active season in terms of news flow-wise in this quarter as into first quarter next year. We are obviously targeting guidance towards the second half of first quarter next year.
Okay, super. I think our time's up. Eldur, thank you very much. If anyone has any other questions, please move on offline, and I can help or answer anything you need. Thank you very much.