Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is John Vigliotti. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for the first day of the Precious Metals and Critical Materials Conference. Our first live presentation 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 our first presenter, Michael Spreadborough. He's the Executive Co-Chairman and Director of Novo Resources Corp., which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol NSRPF and on the TSX under the symbol NVO. Welcome back, Mike.
Thank you very much, John. Welcome, everyone, a nd it's a pleasure to be back here to provide an update. As always, this is a bit of a subset of our normal corporate presentation, so I do direct you to our website to see the full presentation. I mportantly, given that presentation was done on the 25th of November, please do catch up with any of the news releases that have gone out since then. S ome of those I will cover as we go through the presentation.
But thank you very much for joining us. So there's the normal cautionary statement, and I'll leave you to have a read of that at your leisure. So where are we? So Novo, as John said, we're listed on the TSX, and we're also listed on the ASX. We completed the IPO September last year. So we trade on both platforms.
Definitely on the TSX, you'll see more liquidity, which is a great place for that, and also the OTC markets to pick up share traction. So we've got a very good balance sheet, and I'll talk about this later, but we've got about AUD 14.4 million, and we have a large investment portfolio sitting around AUD 38 million. We are a gold explorer. We're focused in Australia, particularly in the western part of Australia, but also over in the southeast in Victoria.
One of our really compelling projects we have is the Becher project to joint venture with De Grey. So I'll talk about that. De Grey is a very large Australian gold developer, and they're recently under a proposed takeover by Northern Star. So we'll cover that in a little bit of detail. De Grey's Hemi project is large, 13.6 million ounces, and we're right next door.
We've also got a very exciting project in Victoria over in the southeast, and we've recently put out an exploration target, which provides guidance on how we think the project will develop going forwards, and we'll definitely cover that in more detail. Finally, we are looking to expand our exploration portfolio, and we've been doing work over the last 10 months on that, and I'll talk a little bit about where that program is going at the very end of the presentation.
So I do always like to put up a picture of the spot gold price. We do always think on a daily basis, gold's going really well, but sometimes we kind of miss the trend, and so here we have, it's still a very remarkable story, gold. I think it's running somewhere around about 28% up for the year, which is fantastic.
I think where the world is in current turmoil, I think we'll continually see a very strong gold price. I think we're probably globally all interested in what will happen when Donald Trump gets into the presidency. But gold, I think, is still a great investment, and I always believe gold explorers is something that you should have in your portfolio. It's a good speculation against not only discovery, but the gold price going forwards.
F or us, based in Australia, obviously a Tier 1 jurisdiction that we're based, and so it's a great place to go exploring. So if I just cast back to what has been the last 18 months, it's been a very, very busy period. We completed this joint venture with De Grey, and as I said, we'll cover that b ut that also included a $10 million investment into Novo, which is great.
September last year, we completed the IPO on the ASX, which we raised AUD 7.5 million during that IPO. This time last year, we completed a AUD 10 million joint venture with SQM. SQM is a very large Chilean lithium explorer, developer, and operator. So we had some great assets or tenements that had potential for lithium and were able to do a great deal. We did the final part of the transition of Novo away from an operator.
The Nullagine Gold Project was sold this time last year, having been taken into care and maintenance because we just ran out of resources and it wasn't running economically. In March, we completed some drilling in Nunyerry North, and I'll definitely cover that. As I talked about before, we've done a great job, and the team's done a great job of putting out an exploration target for Belltopper, and we'll cover that.
On the joint venture, De Grey have recently completed their AUD 7 million minimum spend, and they're well and truly on the way to completing AUD 18 million. More recently, we've completed a partial divestment of our San Cristóbal investment. That brought in AUD 11.5 million into our reserves. That gives us a great portfolio to move forwards in the first half of next year.
We do need to pay some tax on that in February 2025, about AUD 1.4 million. Some of that AUD 11.5 million will be used to pull down the deferred consideration that we still owe IMC from the Nullagine Gold Project purchase many, many years ago. That divestment is very useful in making sure we can control our debt or deferred consideration, but importantly, provides us a good runway into 2025 to execute our aggressive exploration program.
Our key projects that we'll cover tonight, we'll talk a bit about Balla Balla. We'll talk about Nunyerry North. We'll talk about Egina Joint Venture. T hen over in Victoria, we'll talk about Belltopper and the project there. Here's our current picture balance sheet. We have 355 million shares trading at the moment. About 110 million of those shares are traded as ASX CDIs. Depending on the day, market caps are around about AUD 35 million.
As I said, cash AUD 14 million, and we've got this investment portfolio of around AUD 38 million. So if you look at that table at the bottom, very much San Cristóbal, even though we've now divested some 40% of that investment portfolio, that portfolio still runs at around AUD 15 million valuation. So that still provides us a great buffer going forwards a nd given the work that we've just done in divesting a portion, it does show that that asset is quite a liquid investment, and it's available for us to use going forward.
Elementum 3D is a 3D technology company in Denver, and we still hold a large position in that company, and that's valued around AUD 20 million. The share register hasn't changed very much recently. We've got very strong support from a large range of shareholders who like the story.
De Grey, as I've talked about, are major shareholders. Mark Creasy at around 4%. He's a billionaire Australian gold explorer, loves the story. Cresco Capital is based out of Denver a nd then we've got some other investors all the way through. So we still have good support across our major shareholders, and that's really good for our story as we go forward.
So here's our board. We completed earlier this year a board refresh. So as part of that, Greg Jones has joined the board. Greg is a very experienced explorationist. He's also been a managing director of a small exploration company, so he brings great experience to the board. Karen O'Neill joined the board. Karen is a finance background, so she brings experience working both as an MD, CFO, but also as a non-executive director on small explorers.
So we've got a very good board that understands the type of work that we're doing and how we progress forwards. O ur exploration team is led by Kas De Luca, a very experienced explorationist being chasing gold all over the world and Elza van der Walt rounds out the team as our CFO. So we've got a very small, tight team that is focused on delivering our strategy and w e continually work extremely hard to optimize the potential of Novo.
ESG, I do refer you to our annual sustainability statement. Even though we're a small explorer, sustainability and how we particularly work with our traditional owners and how we do rehabilitation after drilling programs are very, very important to us. I do refer you to our sustainability statement that's available on our website.
Let's talk a bit more about the core of our business. Here's a picture of the Pilbara, some 1,200 kilometers north of Perth. In green is our tenure package. It stretches over 400 kilometers in width from the sea in Karratha all the way through to Marble Bar. Our key focus will be in the middle, what's called the Egina Gold Camp. You'll see Becher up the top. That's the Egina Joint Venture.
You'll see Nunyerry North at the bottom, and we'll talk about that. Right up there on the coast, you'll see a circle with Balla Balla. We'll definitely talk about Balla Balla Gold Project. We're very excited about that. In purple, you'll see the tenements that form our Lithium Joint Venture, the Harding Battery Metals Joint Venture, and that's the joint venture we have with SQM.
That's quite a large tenement package that we are jointly working on in terms of lithium discoveries. Importantly, Novo still retains gold and precious metals and base metals rights across those tenements. Let's focus on the Egina Joint Venture. I think first up, as I said, De Grey has a market cap of well over AUD 2 billion.
Recently, Northern Star, which is an Australian-based gold explorer developer operator, has put in a proposal to take over De Grey in a AUD 5 billion proposal. We won't see that completed until May next year. As I said, we completed this joint venture in June last year. It's quite substantial. It covers a large tenement package, which you can see here in orange. Importantly, the light blue areas is actually the De Grey's Hemi Gold Project.
That is a project that is currently running at 13.6 million ounces. Very, very large. They have completed a feasibility study. In the current form, De Grey is planning to produce 400,000- 500,000 ounces a year. Very, very large project. Our tenement package is right up against that with similar geologies.
In this joint venture, De Grey, we're required to spend AUD 25 million to earn 50% of the joint venture a nd they've just completed the AUD 7 million minimum spend. So they have AUD 18 million to spend by the end of June 2027 to earn that 50%. So it's a very valuable exploration project for Novo. We did the initial discovery, and it's really led on with the work that De Grey is doing.
So very large area, the tenement package or the focus for the Becher. It's around 20 sq km. De Grey have completed lots and lots of drilling over the last 12 months. You'll see them restart drilling in February next year. The focus using aircore, aircore is a technique to drill through the surface cover, which is about 10 m -20 m in this area. But aircore is the technique we use to try to really locate the intrusion.
It's a gold-related intrusion system that we're looking for. We've done some initial RC drilling, so you can see some of the work here. The deeper RC drilling, see some of the results, 8 m at 4.74 g per ton, which included three at 12 g per ton. This work is starting to really define the intrusion below the surface. That is the thing that we're looking for that will lead to gold discovery. It's a very large system.
You can see this west-northwest trend in yellow in the middle of it. But again, it's a 20 sq km picture here. It's a very large area that we're looking across. All of those blue dots that you can see there, that represents the Aircore drilling programs that have been used. Drilling's now shut down for the year.
This part of the world in the Pilbara gets very hot and subject to kind of weather because of cyclones a nd we'll see De Grey kick off drilling again around about February. So please keep up to date with that drilling program's announcements in February. So south of Becher, if you remember that picture of the Egina Gold Camp, south of Becher, we have a tenement package, which is over 1,000 sq km.
This is a very interesting area. It's a very, we think, fertile area. It's based around the Tabba Tabba Shear Zone. It runs for over 60 km. That shear zone heads towards the Becher project. So obviously, we're looking for systems or gold fluids that are using the shear zones and other structures to bring the gold into it and to be deposited into programs, into mineralizations and deposits.
There's been very little work done in this area, but the work that has been done has really shown some high-grade assays, 8 m at 4.2, 5 m at 5. You can see here, 25 m g per ton and 32 g per ton in some of the rock samples. This area is very prospective. We've started early- stage work.
Importantly, the primary target, the first target off the ranks was Nunyerry North, and we completed the first program there in 2023. Here we are in Nunyerry North. Our great geologist team, they really delineated a very large surface soil anomaly, which you can see here. We completed a maiden drill program in 2023.
We drilled over 2 km of drill holes, all RCs, to really focus in, as you can see in that picture, that middle area where you can see the black dots were the focus of the program, so we're really looking for the core geology, and then more recently, earlier this year, we completed another 4,000 m of drilling spread over the whole area, so you can see the main area, the Aurora West, Estrid Fault, Porphyry.
So the 4,000 m were spread out of that, really looking for the lateral extent of mineralization, getting an understanding of continuity and understanding of depth, so that was a really exciting program. We completed that work. Some great results, 13 m at 2.7, 11 m at two, 17 m at 1.85, 9 m at 2.52, so really good results came through.
You'll see some commentary on what we think this project looks like going forwards a nd we'll keep seeing if we can understand the continuity of mineralization and what's the opportunity to do more work here. But again, Nunyerry North is the first of those projects that we've targeted across that 1,000 sq km of tenure south of Becher a nd you'll see us early in 2025 do some more on-the-ground work. R ecently, we've reported some of the results from that work.
H ere's a long section just showing the continuation of what we've seen in the mineralization. At the moment, it'd be fair to say that mineralization is quite tight, but we'll continue to analyze the data and see what the potential is going forwards. So I said I'd talk about Balla Balla. So Balla Balla is really interesting to us.
It's 1,200 sq km up against the coastline, so sitting here. It's tenements that we quietly accumulated based around the Sholl Shear, and the analogy is, if you can see here down the bottom, here's the Hemi project and the De Grey project based on the Tabba Tabba Shear Zone and the Mallina Shear Zone, so we're looking for an analogy there that has the Sholl Shear carried gold fluids into that area that have formed deposits.
This area has had very, very little exploration over the years, and we're the first to really do modern exploration, so we announced this week that we finally have all the approvals in place, and you'll see us start a drilling program. Sometime in the first half of next year, we'll go into Balla Balla and do some very early- stage drilling. This is exactly the type of projects that we like.
No one's been here before. We've quietly developed a tenement package. The team have been on the ground, built a really good geological story and model, and now we'll follow up with early scout drilling. Depending on the results of that drilling, we'll go and do other phases of drilling. Very much like Nunyerry North. Nunyerry North was a discovery by Novo. We did a first phase of drilling. That really gave us comfort to do the second phase of drilling.
Then that allows us to make very wise, disciplined decisions on how we continue on with exploration. Let's go to something a little bit different. Across on the eastern part of Australia is our Belltopper project. You can see Belltopper in the middle of the picture, but excitingly, it's surrounded by other core operations.
Fosterville, many people would know, Agnico Eagle's high-grade project. So in this whole region, somewhere over 60 million ounces have been produced historically. So very, very prospective area. Belltopper does display the characteristics of orogenic gold deposits similar to Fosterville, and that's exactly what we're looking for. We did a drill program in 2023, and we followed up with a program earlier this year.
Great results, 5.6 m at 3, 2 m at 15.2 g per ton. We're chasing high-grade, narrow-vein reef systems here, and the results that we got are absolutely fantastic. What was really interesting is from that work, the geological team went back to 11 historical diamond holes, relogged them, and from that, amazingly, they discovered or identified core that they thought was gold-bearing that had not ever been assayed before.
We actually reassayed some of that core, and you see great results here, 6 m at 4, 2 m at 7. I'm really excited by how the team over two and a half years has developed a great geological picture of Belltopper, and that's really good for our thinking as we look going forwards. Here's a great picture, a 3D picture showing the drill holes that we've done, the intercepts, but also the historical workings in the past.
If you look on our website, there's a fantastic video that I really encourage you to watch. It goes for about five minutes, but it really explains the Belltopper project, and our geology manager of Belltopper does a great job of explaining what we're targeting and what we're looking for. That's really, really good.
What was really pleasing is the flavor of this and the work that we did allowed us to put together an exploration target. So this is really guidance from us based on the seven reefs that we've drilled and our view of the prospectivity, what we think is a possible target for us to aim for. So if you look at this, the target's 320,000-570,000 ounces.
Importantly, grade's really good, 6.6 g-8.4 g a ton. So this is early days. It only provides guidance. I really do ask you to look at the website and the press release, the news release that went out. It has all the cautionary statements that define exactly how you should rely on exploration target going forwards.
The fact that we've been able to do enough drilling to get a good enough picture of the geology to put together a target is really exciting. So I talked before about our joint venture with SQM, so it's a really exciting program. They're busy looking for lithium.
What's really great is a lot of the tenement packages are around Azure, which was taken over at the early part of this year. That's a very high-grade lithium project that is now owned by the Hancock Group and Creasy Group and SQM. So we'll see that project advance, hopefully, going forwards. A s I said, Novo contains all of the non-lithium rights in that area.
So if we go back to the start, I think the important point here is we've been able to show that our divestment of SCM really shows that it is a liquid investment, and we've been able to divest that, and we're using that money not only for the forward-looking exploration program, but we're able to chip away at the deferred consideration that we have with IMC.
We are a classic gold explorer, greenfields focus, looking for projects that we can develop that really are substantial, a 1 million ounce size. The De Grey Joint Venture is fantastic. Someone's asked a question about what does it look like going forward. S o what is really great is that we see Northern Star as a great kind of owner of De Grey.
If that transaction is completed, Northern Star will take over, obviously, the Egina Joint Venture, and they will progress that project going forward. That's pretty exciting for us, and we do look forward to working with Northern Star. We don't see any change in that program as we move forward. I've talked a bit about Belltopper.
At the end, I want to talk about project generation. I said at the start. We've been looking all the way through this year for other projects to extend our exploration footprint. We're looking for projects that are essentially drill-ready, projects that we think have that potential with good geology to develop into a million-ounce project. We've looked at a lot of projects during the year, but we've really struggled to find things that are quality.
For those that are up to speed, you would have seen that this morning in North American time on the TSX, we put out an announcement regarding our Onslow project. So that's an area south of the Pilbara. It's a project that joins not only tenements that we have grabbed ourselves, but we've also taken an option over some tenements, the Cane River project with another group. So we'll progress that option. We'll do some work on the tenements.
So you'll see us do work through that project at Onslow, which is a new project. Project name is Tullunga, and you'll see us do work on that in early 2025. So this is really exciting for Novo. Our tenement package really being defined up till now based on the accumulation of the tenement package that was done three or four years ago. So this is really exciting for us.
It's a first move out of that Pilbara package, and you'll see us do some work in Onslow, and you'll probably see us down the track do other announcements as we look for other projects to expand our portfolio, but with a particular focus on drill-ready projects.
So if you look at who we are, great gold price really drives our focus on gold as a team. We've got a really great exploration team and a finance team and an ESG team that have got global experience, as I said, a good balance sheet.
That portfolio that we just talked about through project generation, today's announcement was really exciting. It grows that portfolio, and you'll see some guidance coming up over coming weeks and in early 2025 on drilling programs, so you'll see that guidance come through, but like always, we'll aim to be drilling at the end of February.
Once the weather improves in the Pilbara and Western Australia, we'll be back drilling somewhere in Australia progressing our exploration. So I think we're in a very good place at the moment. I think we're ready to really make a great success having moved out of the Pilbara. We've got a good team, good balance sheet, and I think we're in a great position going forwards.
So I thank everyone very much for your support. Please do look out for some new announcements as we get those drilling programs going forwards, and hopefully, I've provided a good overview of Novo Resources.
A s a reminder, please jump on the website, look at the full corporate presentation, look at the updated news releases, but excitedly go and have a look at that Belltopper video. I really commend it. Thank you very much, everyone, and look forward to catching up with you in 2025. Thanks, everyone.