Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor conferences. My name is John Vigliotti, and on behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for the second day of the Battery and Precious Metals Conference. Our first presentation of the day is from Novo Resources. Please note you can submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings through the Schedule Meetings tab found on the conference platform. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Michael Spreadborough. He's the Executive Co-chairman and Director of Novo Resources Corp, which trades in the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol NSRPF, and on the TSX under the symbol NVO. Welcome back, Michael.
Thank you very much, John. Absolute pleasure, everyone, to be back here to give you a very good overview, and in some cases, an update for people on Novo Resources. So thanks for joining us. Just quickly, this is a subset of our corporate presentation, so please have a look at our Novo Resources website to get a really good detailed overview of a few of the things that I'll talk about today. So let's get into it and give you a good overview of Novo Resources. So there's the normal disclaimer. I'll let you read that at your leisure. The important thing is, at the end of the presentation, I'm going to talk about an exploration target, and under the ASX rules that we're listing, there's a lot of disclaimers around that.
Please read that disclaimer for the exploration target on the website version. Who are we? We're a gold explorer, really focused on greenfields discoveries, looking for projects that have the potential to develop into a million-ounce projects. We've got a pretty good, strong balance sheet, which I'll talk about through the presentation. We are Australian-based, and we have a very large portfolio of projects across Western Australia and also Victoria, on the southeast side of Australia. I'll really go into detail on our Becher Project. It's a great project that we have. We have a great joint venture with De Grey, and we'll get into detail. Here's a snapshot. You know, De Grey are investing AUD 25 million on exploration in our Becher Project within four years, and they'll own 50% of that project.
That exploration area that we're working on is very close to the 2.7 million-ounce Hemi gold project. So absolutely great real estate, and we'll get into detail on that. Over in Victoria, we have the Belltopper project. We've just released an exploration target based on the work that we've done to date. A lot more work to happen, and we'll talk about that, but our exploration target is showing a range of 300-600 thousand ounces. So that's a really good start, and importantly, a very nice high-grade. The other thing is, you'll see that we've got a great investment portfolio. We really aim to use that portfolio to look for other projects to grow our portfolio in both scale and quality.
So gold price, I always like to put a picture in because we keep talking about the gold price going up, but we kind of lose track of it. But it's really gone up 30% over the last, you know, period since September this year, 30% this year. And most of the commentators still think the gold price goes up. So I think it is a great time to invest in gold. You know, we are an explorer. We don't hide from the fact that we are a speculative stock, but we always think that you should have a gold explorer within your portfolio. And why not have one in a great sovereign risk area, like Australia, where we could really explore and mine gold without any sovereign risk at all?
So it's been a very challenging and very exciting fifteen months for Novo. We did completed the De Grey joint venture, which I'll talk about in June last year. That was fantastic. De Grey also invested AUD 10 million in our business, and they are our largest shareholder. In conjunction with our TSX listing in September last year, we completed our ASX listing, and we'll go through some of the metrics of that, and that allowed us to bring AUD 7.5 million of equity to it. So if you look at the rest of the projects across the portfolio, we did some great deals on lithium. So overall, in the last fifteen months, we've brought AUD 22 million into the company to allow us to invest in exploration, and that's a great outcome for shareholders.
We haven't had to go back to the markets and seek equity funds, so that's one of our rationales. We do like to look for non-gold things across our tenements. If we find attractive commodities like lithium or nickel, we try to do joint ventures and bring in funds for our exploration targets, and in March we announced some good results from Nunyerry North that we'll talk about, and in September, just recently, we announced the exploration target of Belltopper, so it's been a very successful fifteen months. We are, as I said, very exploration-focused. We're looking for discoveries. We've got a great team. We're in a Tier One jurisdiction. We're trying to look for a larger portfolio, but one of our strengths is we've got a great exploration team.
They're globally experienced, we focus on technical excellence, and we're very disciplined in our approach. If we don't think a tenement or a project has the potential to grow, we'll quickly move on to other projects. So that is one of our strengths. Our DNA is exploration, but behind that, we're very disciplined with our focus. So I'm going to talk about our key projects today. We're going to talk about Balla Balla, Egina, the joint venture, the Nunyerry North project, and Belltopper in Victoria. So we'll go through each of those projects. Let's kick off with our corporate balance sheet. We've got 355 million shares on the market. About 100 million of those is traded on the ASX as CDIs. Market cap of around about AUD 40 million.
Good cash at the end of June of around AUD 12 million, but we've had an investment portfolio around AUD 46 million. And if you look at the detail here, and there's more detail at the back of the presentation or in our financial accounts, we have significant investments in two unlisted investments. One is Electrum 3D, which is a 3D technology company. This is a historical investment that Novo has. It's valued around about AUD 21 million, and the same with our investment in San Cristobal Mining. It's now a privately owned Bolivian lead silver zinc mine. A really good performance in that mine, but it has a valuation around AUD 24 million. So we do aim to monetize those investments over the next nine months and to use that to help us grow the portfolio.
You can clearly notice that at the moment, the market does not value those investments in our share price, so we clearly see ourselves very undervalued. We've got a great share register. As I said, De Grey Mining, ASX-listed, AUD 2 billion market cap company, around 10% of our register. You'll also see Mark Creasy. He's a billionaire explorer based here in Perth, in Australia. He's a great supporter of ours and has around 4%. Faircent here is an investment fund based in Australia. Crescat Capital, many of you would know, Kevin and the team there in Denver. They are great supporters of us and a few other people that are key supporters for us going through our journey. So we've got a great shareholder base that has supported the work that we continue to do.
Our board is very strong. We've got two great geologists. Both Quentin and Greg Jones have got experience across the world looking for gold projects, so very experienced directors that bring that experience to the board. And recently, Karen O'Neill joined our board. Karen is of finance background but has worked mainly in juniors and mid-tier companies, so she understands our business very well. And our exploration effort is really led by Kas De Luca. Kas has a global international experience across the world focused on gold. So she brings a lot of experience with our team, and a lot of her team have got that global experience looking at gold. So we've got a really good exploration team that really focuses on our strategy of finding those discoveries.
We're very focused, even as an explorer, on how we do our work. So, ESG is really important, and there's a couple key things for us in the way that we work. We work across in Western Australia, we work across nine different Aboriginal traditional owner groups. So the way that we work with those people and value their contribution and culture, and how we work with them on making sure that we work appropriately on the land, is really important to us. So that's one of the key ESG drivers to us. We're very focused on our water usage and our rehabilitation in our exploration, so it's really important. And I do commend you to look at our website at our 2023 sustainability report, and shortly, we'll put out a sustainability report for 2024.
Unusual to have such a report for a junior explorer, but that's one of our key values, is ESG focus, and as I said, have a look at the website and have a good look at our report. So let's kick off in the Pilbara. So this is a map of the Pilbara in northwest Western Australia. It's about twelve hundred kilometers north of Perth, so in about two hours' flying distance. In green, you'll see our tenements. Currently, we have about six thousand square kilometers of tenements. That's come down over the last twelve months as we complete good quality reconnaissance exploration. We've reduced the tenements. Again, very disciplined. If we don't believe the ground that we have has the potential to grow into a discovery, we kind of move on very quickly.
We're gonna mainly talk about the center portion of this picture, around the Egina Gold Camp, and you can see the little box for Becher. We'll talk about that. That's the Egina joint venture. Down the bottom, we'll definitely talk about the drilling that we've done at Nunyerry North. Later on, we'll talk about Balla Balla, up there on the coast, around the Port Hedland Karratha area. We'll run through that. We also have lithium joint ventures. On the left-hand side, you'll see purple up against the coast of Karratha and Port Hedland. We have a great lithium joint venture with SQM, and on the right-hand side of the picture, in kind of a reddy orange, you'll see our joint venture with a private group called Liatam.
So again, that's a really good outcome where we've found things other than gold. We've been able to joint venture them. Both SQM and Liatam provided funds into the business, and now through the joint venture, are continuing exploration for lithium. So we maintain that upside for shareholders. So here's that focus area on what we call the Egina Gold Camp. The Egina Gold Camp is about 80 km long. It's a continuous run of tenements that we accumulated. The top part is now part of the Egina joint venture. So you can see that green box there. What's interesting is if you look at that light gray area, that are the tenements owned by De Grey Mining, and let's talk about De Grey.
De Grey, as I said, Australian, listed on the ASX, a market cap of over AUD 2 billion. They have the Hemi Gold Project, which currently has a resource of 2.7 million ounces. They've completed the feasibility study, which has shown a long-life mine producing over 400,000-500,000 ounces of gold. So those tenements that we have at Becher are only 30 kilometers away from the processing plant at Hemi, and it's only 5 kilometers away from a proposed second processing plant. So these tenements are very close to De Grey. We'll talk about it, but we, in our work, we saw a similar geology and mineralization as De Grey saw in the Hemi project. So that's why I got interested. So this joint venture that we completed June last year, very exciting for shareholders.
De Grey are gonna invest AUD 25 million in exploration in the joint venture tenements, mainly around the Becher area, to earn 50%, and they have to do that within 4 years, and they've just completed the minimum spend, so they're very excited about that area. I find this great deal for shareholders. You know, after the 4 years, Novo will still have 50% ownership on the tenements. We all are hopeful of great discoveries of a resource, so there's significant upside from shareholders, and look at, you know, Hemi, 12.7 million ounces, and we're doing exploration next door, so you can see the numbers here. This year alone, De Grey have completed around 40,000 meters of RC and air core drilling.
They're really focused on accelerating exploration in this area, and it's now very much a strategic part of their business, this joint venture. You'll see in their presentations that they actually notice and talk about this joint venture, so it's very, very important to them. What is the focus of the joint venture? It is on this little patch of ground called Becher. I jokingly call it little because it's actually 20 square kilometers of tenure that we're focused on. Novo did a lot of work in early two thousand and twenty-three. A lot of air core drilling. We saw similar geology to Hemi, and so did De Grey. Same shear structures. Now the focus is on completing that air core drilling. You know, the shallow drilling across the area.
It's undercover, so you drill the air core to pick up samples of the bedrock underneath, and we're really focused on looking for the intrusions that carry the high-grade gold. In terms of high-grade, it's worth pointing, Hemi is a very large system. As I said, 12 million ounces, but it has an average grade of 1.5 in the reserve. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for the intrusions that carry that 1.5 or higher grades. In the case of Hemi, when they find those intrusions, they are developing resources of 1 million-2 million ounces.
So we've got a long way to go before we kind of really just find a discovery, but we're starting to really get a good feel geologically in this area, and that will lead to deeper RC drilling down the track, and we've already completed some of that. So if we now move to the southern portion of that Egina joint venture or Egina gold camp, this is ground that we own a hundred percent, or in the very southern part around Nunyerry North, we have a joint venture with Mark Creasy, who's a good shareholder. This ground is very fertile, very underexplored. Some of the shear zones that follow through from the Hemi area continue down.
While there has been some historical work, you can see here some great numbers based on costean samples or shallow percussion holes or rock samples. Really exciting numbers, but that's the limit of exploration in this area. Our team have been recently in this area doing reconnaissance work, camping out in those areas, completing mapping, soil samples or rock chip samples, and we hope to share those results with people over the coming months. This is really part of our DNA, an area that's underexplored, and it shows potential for gold, and we're out there looking. The first target that we've been really excited is Nunyerry North, and you can see that down in the lower picture. Here's Nunyerry North.
It's a very area that's very exciting to us that was delineated by significant high-grade gold from soil samples. We completed the first drilling program in 2023. You can see there, we drilled 2,400 meters of drilling focused on the central area. You see that in white, 2023 RC drilling program. So that focused on the center portion where we saw the higher-grade soil samples, and the program was really there to define the concept of the geology. We've now followed that up with a wider drilling program that extended all the way from the porphyry zone in the middle to the Aurora West and Estrid Fold area and to what we call the main area. So the 2024 program was about 4,000 meters of drilling.
We drilled 34 holes across that lateral extent and really trying to understand the full extent of mineralization. So we had some pretty good intercepts from that drilling completed this year. 13 meters at two point six eight, as an example. 11 meters at two point two, 17 meters at one point eight five, and nine meters at two point five two. So really, really good results. You can see in the picture, we're starting to be able to develop a map. We've still got a lot more work to do to understand whether this holds together and whether it's something that we can develop. But this is what we love doing.
Really early stage exploration, looking at a soil anomaly, mapping it ourselves, doing a discovery hole, and now we're working through the geology of whether this is something we can really grow and bring to shareholder value. And the work that we've done has really extended that strike length over 500 meters. So that's been a great result of the drilling program. We've been able to put together this long section. There's more details through the announcements we have on the website. And again, caution, it's early days. We've got a lot more work to get to do to understand really the size of the system and its potential. And you'll hear more about this in early 2025. So I talked about Balla Balla before. So here's Balla Balla.
We quietly accumulated 100 kilometers of tenements along the coastline. Now, why would you do that? This is an area that's very underexplored for gold. But have a look at the picture. Right in the middle of our tenements is the Sholl Shear Zone, and you can see here it runs parallel to the shear zones that form part of the Hemi program. And that's exactly what we're looking. So this is a geological concept. Does the Scholl Shear carry gold mineralization the way that we've seen at De Grey's Hemi project? So early days, we've completed the surface work. We now have approval from the traditional owners to go drilling, and hopefully, before Christmas, we'll go drilling. It really depends on the season.
As most people would be aware, the Pilbara gets extremely hot, and it's prone to cyclones, so we tend to shut down for three months. We'll keep people up to date, but we do hope to go drilling sometime later this year, or worst case, we'll do it early next year. Let's jump over to the other side of Australia in Victoria. If you look at the map on the picture on the right, we've got the Belltopper project kind of in the middle of that picture. It sits in the middle of what's called the Bendigo Zone. And why is that important? The Bendigo tectonic zone has contained over thirty million ounces of gold has been produced in this area in Victoria historically.
As you can see here, Bendigo sits south of the Fosterville gold mine, which is 3.2 million ounces, and people would have realized it's owned by Agnico. It's very, very high grade. So we're only 50 kilometers away from that. And then Castlemaine and Bendigo have been huge gold producers in the past. So we like this area. It's really, really in prospective country for gold mineralization. We've taken ownership of the joint ventures for the last couple of years, really built up a good geological story. We did some drilling last year, and this year we did a follow-up program. We drilled 2,500 meters of diamond core. Just some results here, more on the website.
You know, five point six meters at three point one four grams per ton and two meters at fifteen point two grams per ton. We're starting to build the picture here at Belltopper. What was interesting is from the work that we did this year, our geos went back and re-logged all of the previous core work that has been done. From their work in the past, they now could see areas in the core that hadn't been sampled previously that had the potential to be mineralized. So what a great outcome. Go old core, re-assay, and here you are, six meters at four point three seven grams per ton and two meters at seven grams per ton. We're starting to build a bigger picture here at Belltopper.
Recently, we put all that knowledge together in a geological model, and we've started to understand the concept and the potential. We've released an exploration target. As I said, 300 to 600 thousand ounces here at Belltopper. We now are in a position to start looking at what further exploration would be moving forward, both in defining this resource, but also understanding the mineralization at depth. And I do commend you to our website. Apart from the geological news release we've put on this project, we've put out a great video that explains Belltopper, and it's really worth everyone having a good look at that because you can see a good 3D picture.
So as I said, we've got joint ventures, two joint ventures, both in, you know, lithium, one with SQM and one with Liatam. One, we own 75%, the other 80%. So, you know, great potential for us to give us upside in the lithium, and they're really focused around high-grade lithium projects that are elsewhere in the Pilbara. So you can keep an eye on the lithium projects that we have. So just to summarize, before I hit some questions, you know, we are a greenfields explorer. We are looking for the potential to develop, you know, big projects. We've got a reasonable balance sheet at the moment, some good portfolios across Australia, both in Western Australia and Victoria. The De Grey joint venture is just wonderful.
It's a fantastic opportunity for shareholders. As I said, the Belltopper project has moved on really well now with an exploration target, and we really are focused on new projects. So, across Australia, we've been looking for those projects that add to our portfolio. We're looking for projects that we would call advanced exploration, someone that's done some initial work and needs our expertise up until somewhere where they might be pre-resource. So that's really, really important to us. So I'm just gonna run through a couple of questions. People talk about major milestones over the next twelve months. I think the key really focus between us, between now and say, mid-next year, is keep abreast of the information we put out on the Egina joint venture, De Grey, during their drilling program.
They'll shut down shortly because of the Pilbara season, but they'll start up again, so keep an eye on that. Keep an eye on the drilling from Balla Balla that we hope to do. We'll put out some more work on Belltopper. But I think the other key thing is, you know, we are looking for these projects, and hopefully you'll see some news flow of us being able to expand the project. Just referring back to one of the questions that we've got here. I'll see if I can find the slide that we can talk a bit more. The valuations on our, which is always a common question, our valuations on our unlisted portfolio. So if you remember, I talked about two of these. One being here we are.
One being San Cristobal Mining, and the other one being, Electrum 3D. If you go to our financial accounts and also the back of the presentation on the website, you'll see, the metrics and the valuations. But they're basically valued on the last, you know, unlisted or private fundraising that have been done, for both of those vehicles. So we're very comfortable with the, valuations of those projects because that's the company's, recent valuations by shareholders, coming in. You know, we are a junior explorer. It's a tough environment, I've got to say, to be an explorer. I think there has been a bit of structural change. It is hard, to continually fund your work, but at the end of the day, junior explorers are the really key to our business going forwards.
So, we continue with our work to look for those projects that'll make a difference. We're not about growing existing projects. We're looking for new projects that come on board, that have a great leverage for shareholder value. But really, junior exploration is the real benchmark of the, our industry going forward. So hopefully, we'll continue to see good support. And as you've seen for us, last year, we brought in AUD 22 million of funds into our business to help us explore without having going back to shareholders, because we've had great success, even though they've been non-gold. You know, someone's asked, "How easy is it to find other projects?" I can tell you it's very difficult. We're very disciplined in the type of projects that we would like to bring into Novo.
We've got a very good technical team, so we do very stringent, disciplined DD. And if we don't think those projects have the potential to grow and develop into a standalone, million-ton projects, million-ounce projects, we kind of move on. And we've also got a bit of fascination with copper. We think copper is a great vehicle going forward. So we'll keep looking for those projects. But two things, hard to find them because of exploration hasn't been happening, and two, we're really looking for projects where the owners have done great work. So everyone, thank you very much for listening. It's an absolute pleasure to join you here from Perth, and I wish you all the best for the rest of the seminar. Thank you very much.