Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you have joined us for our three-day metals and mining conference. Our next presentation is from Novo Resources. 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 Kas De Luca, General Manager of Exploration of Novo Resources, which trades on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol NSRPF, and on the ASX and TSX under the symbol NVO. Welcome, Kas.
Thanks very much, Greg. Very happy to be here. Hello, everybody. My first time actually presenting at a virtual conference. Hopefully, this will all go smoothly and you'll all be a lot better informed by the time I've finished. Let me just quickly start. Okay, cautionary statement. I will remind people that this is on our website. If you want to see any more detail, we do have a much more detailed corporate presentation pack on the website as well. Please make yourself available to yourselves to go and have a look. I will remind everyone, once we talk about our Belltopper Project, which has an exploration target, all the compliance documentation is on the website. Okay, in a nutshell, this is where we sit with Novo. There we go.
Novo is dual-listed on both ASX and TSX , and we really trade about one-third of our shares on the ASX and the remainder on the TSX. We see ourselves as a greenfields project generator. We're a pretty diversified gold exploration and development portfolio. We're increasingly looking at copper now to try and grow our copper prospect portfolio as well. We have a mixture of assets. We have greenfields and developed our own greenfields and regional projects. We also have advanced stage exploration projects. Our goal is really, we're looking for big projects in Australia. We're looking for plus million-ounce or equivalent development potential. We've got a really experienced exploration team whom I've worked with for over 15 years, all over the planet, pretty much, and we're strongly supported by a management team and board. We've got a strong balance sheet.
We've got enough investments to fund both exploration and project generation. A good investment portfolio, as I said, with strong support on both ASX and TSX. We also have a dedicated project generation program, which is focused on identifying advanced stage projects to expand our exploration and development opportunities. We think we are aggressive in terms of our exploration potential. We think that we like to put drilling into the ground because we think that's the best way to test our project areas. In terms of strategy, we do have two elements to our strategy. I'm not sure if everyone out there is familiar with the Lassonde Curve, but it's basically an investment pathway from exploration to operations. We have two focus areas here. Our first priority is to the discovery of standalone gold and gold-copper projects that demonstrate a million-ounce potential.
Most of this is actually focused in our Australian portfolio. We're looking for a major discovery, as I said. The second part of the strategy is to utilize our investment portfolio to invest in more advanced stage projects and bring them closer to a decision to mine. I feel that we're very lucky that we have the capability and funding to run both of these strategies in parallel. In terms of corporate structure, we have a really robust corporate structure. We've got supportive ASX and TSX shareholders. Our biggest shareholder is Northern Star that came in as part of the Egina joint venture, recently took over De Grey Mining. It's a 13 million-ounce gold deposit in the Pilbara, which we'll talk about a little bit more as we go through the slides. We have, you know, Quinton Hennigh, who's our Co-Chairman. He's in there in the shareholding.
Mark Creasy, people like Mark Creasy and various other high-end prospectors and investors in Australia. We have a pretty robust portfolio that we can call on, particularly the San Cristobal mining shares. We see this really as our war chest to be able to go in there and actually do larger scale projects than just our exploration in Australia. This is the board, obviously, Quinton. Michael Spreadborough is our Executive Co-Chairman in Australia, based in Australia. The board's a pretty balanced group of people. We have great exploration experience, both commercial and managerial, and then, of course, technical with myself and my own group of geologists. In terms of our portfolio, we have developed our own greenfields project areas. We're pushing through, obviously, in this corridor to advanced stage greenfields and then advanced exploration. At the end of last year, we did spend a lot of time doing project generation.
The two yellow flags there are called John Bull and Tibooburra. These are two projects that we farmed into late last year. They're both in New South Wales. We've actually split our focus a little bit more, made it a little less risk-averse by being just in the Pilbara. Now we've actually got quite a few projects that sit right across Australia, not just in the northern Pilbara in Western Australia. Here's the spread of the projects. All the things that are highlighted in yellow there we'll have a brief chat about today. Balabala and Toolunga are two of our more district-scale emerging projects that we're developing from 100, and they're pretty much 100% Novo owned. Sherlock Crossing and Southeast Wyloo have got an antimony flavor. We've just finished drilling at Sherlock Crossing, a really high-grade gold and antimony project. The Egina joint venture we'll talk about a little more.
This is our joint venture with Northern Star, south of the fantastic Hemi project. Tibooburra and John Bull are over in the Eastern States, and they're our newly acquired farm-ins, which we'll talk about. Not to forget, of course, Belltopper, which is 100% owned. We're really confident with the geology there. We've actually put out in the last 18 months an exploration target that we're currently developing. Let's go back to our homeland, if you like. We have a large landholding in the Pilbara, around 6,800 sq km of quality ground. You'll see on the left-hand side there, Toolunga is our most recent project area. It's a joint venture. There's a farm-in in the blue there, and the rest of the tenements are 100% Novo owned. It's roughly 1,500 sq km that we've generated.
Over further to the right-hand side of the screen, to the east, it shows the Egina joint venture, which basically abuts the Hemi project of Northern Star. Sherlock Crossing is an area that we've just finished drilling. Balabala, we've also drilled earlier in the year. That sits up on the coast to the north a bit further. This is Egina. Northern Star is our current joint venture exploration partner. We actually originally did a deal with De Grey Mining, which was worth $10 million invested into the company, as well as a $25 million joint venture commitment, of which $7 million minimum has already been completed. Northern Star has the right now to earn a 50% interest, not a 70% or 80% interest, as most juniors have to kind of struggle with, but a 50% interest by spending another $18 million by the middle of 2027.
This was pretty much our keystone project area a couple of years back, where we generated some really good targets. We know that there are intrusion-related targets similar to Northern Star's Withnell deposit. We do have a lot of intrusion-related gold intercepts, multiple gold intercepts from drilling that we completed, and that De Grey followed up, which have the same chemistry, the same flavor as the Hemi deposit. Hemi is around 13 million oz, 14 million oz now and growing. Northern Star are about to jump in there and start their project. A little bit further to the southeast is the Sherlock Crossing area. We are awaiting drilling results from a program that we completed around the Clark Mine up there in the north.
You can see that there are some fantastic rock chip sampling from the spoils around the old mine that we sampled with almost 5% antimony and over 140 g /t of gold. The maiden drill program was reverse circulation, RC, and we completed around eight holes with just over 1,000 m of drilling. As I said, we're waiting for results from that program. In the meantime, we're also doing reconnaissance work to the south, where you can see there on the figure to the right. All of the pink results there are soil samples that sit over 20 ppm antimony in a really coherent, very large anomaly that, yeah, we can't wait to get onto and test a little bit more next year. The Balabala project is up on the coast.
It's an exploration project that was generated by Novo over the last few years, whilst we've been doing other things like the Egina joint venture work and so on. It's an early stage project, as I said, but it's centered specifically on the Sholl Shear Zone that you can see running there in the green hatch. We know this Shear zone is a fertile zone, and it runs all the way back to the Karratha district and has several copper and copper gold small deposits and anomalies that sit on the zone or associated structures with the zone. We know it's prospective for both intrusion-related and structurally hosted deposits. We actually just went out there and started on regional space lines to test a few of our ideas. This diagram on the right-hand side is around a 20 km zone that is shown there from Beaufort to Ramquarry.
Although we didn't get, you know, fantastic gold anomalies, it's a proof of concept here that we did hit a peak of 0.114 up at Ramquarry. It shows that the Sholl Shear is indeed fertile. Now we're pretty keen to get back there next year and do some additional work. Not only did we hit some gold, we hit some pretty unusual silver, antimony, copper, bismuth numbers as well, all of which for us indicate the fact that there's significant hydrothermal activity out there and potentially hosts a larger system than we really thought there was initially. We're pretty excited about this one. The Toolunga Project comes back a little bit further to the west, and all the ground is currently in application.
We're really hoping that before the end of the year, this ground will be granted so that we can get out there and get some boots on the ground pretty quickly early next year. We think it's a highly prospective area. It's underexplored. It sits on some major structural lithospheric boundaries and faults. It was actually explored way back in the 1970s by Western Mining, looking for IOCG and intrusion-related deposits. It contains several old mining centers, and there are targets already developed there that we're just pretty much ready to go and do some reconnaissance and drill tests. We are crossing our fingers that these tenements are going to be granted soon. Okay, let's trip across to the other side of the country and talk about our Eastern States portfolio. Up in the north, out of Grafton, near the east coast, is the John Bull Gold Project.
Again, an advanced-stage opportunity. It's in the New England Fold Belt of New South Wales where there are a few things going on at the moment. We'll talk about that a little bit more. Further west, and in fact, it's around 300 km north of Broken Hill, which you may be aware of, is the Tibooburra Gold Project, again a farm-in with Manhattan Corporation. A really interesting high-grade gold opportunity covering the old historic Albert Goldfields in northern New South Wales. Down in the south, in the Bendigo zone, some 50 km south of Fosterville, we have the Belltopper Gold Project, which we've developed an exploration target and which we'll talk about very soon. John Bull, as I said, is an advanced-stage exploration opportunity. When we generated this project last year, we identified it as a bit of a sleeper project.
Not much work had been done on it for a couple of years. It includes a really interesting high-grade with up to 10 g /t in the soils, 10 g /t of gold, really long coherent anomaly that has had some drilling in it. I'll show you a quick section from the drilling in the next slide. We've done a lot of work out there. We think it's an intrusion-related gold system. There's definitely some really interesting historical work that's been done there. We've been able to get out there and do two tranches of geological mapping and sampling. We're just waiting for all the final compliance to go and drill target those four key areas that I've put on the map there at Diggers North, the main area at John Bull Main, south of John Bull, and then Hills Creek West.
Here's the main section that was drilled by TechGen back in 2022. Some really significant numbers there. Only 17 holes were drilled, and the best results are 94 m at 0.95 g /t , including 66 m at 1.14 g in a really coherent intercept, and also 68 m at a gram from surface, including 23 m at 2 g. This holds together really well, and it's a really obvious pittable target. Let's move across to Tibooburra. The Tibooburra Gold Project, it's in that northwestern corner of New South Wales, obviously. It's about diametrically as far from Sydney as you can get. It covers an area of around 600 sq km in six granted exploration tenements. We've identified the fact that there's multiple mineralized trends, all with historic workings and delineated across some 22 km of strike.
You'll see on the image on the right-hand side that most of that yellow buff-colored looking material is actually cover. It's centerzodic cover, and there is very little outcrop to the north. Most of these trends do have, as I said, historical workings, and they dive undercover to the south for tens of kilometers. We did a maiden drill program at Clone, and I'll show you that one on the next slide. We were following up on intercepts such as 9 m at 6 g from a previous Clone drilling. In fact, most of the drilling by Manhattan Corporation has been done at New Bendigo, and they had some fantastic and high-grade results, such as 16 m at 13.89 g and including 3 m at 2 oz, basically. Really interesting area, lots of trends that have only been partially tested and certainly not systematically tested.
In Novo's way, we headed out there in February this year, did a whole lot of regional work to confirm the mineralized trends and to be able to target the work at Clone. Certainly, the drilling shows how well that has actually worked. The field program at the moment, the guys are actually out there right now. The field program actually includes some televiewer work. This is downhole camera work down at RC holes. That's for identification of the quartz veins. It's an interesting tool, but it almost, when it works well, it almost actually produces the equivalent of a core hole when you actually put it into some clever 3D tech and put it into our 3D modeling programs. That, coupled with some relogging work of historical core, both at New Bendigo and Pioneer further to the north. The whole thing is starting to come together now.
We've got another zone of another program of drilling proposed to follow up both at Clone and potentially New Bendigo and Pioneer. You can see here, this is the work that was done. The structures are very important. The maiden drill program of only 14 holes got some pretty interesting intercepts. The best ones there are on the screen. We know the high-grade mineralization is open to the north and plunges to the north. Potentially, the cover sediments extend for around 15 km around Clone itself. There's plenty of opportunity to do much more work on there. Here is a quick snapshot of our Belltopper Gold Project in Victoria. It's located, as I said, some 50 km south of Agnico Eagle's Fosterville Gold Mine in the Bendigo tectonic zone. It's a prolific area. There's over 60 million oz of gold produced historically in the Bendigo tectonic zone.
We've done some careful geology out there. We've done a whole lot of mapping and put together some really confident interpretations of the mineralized reefs out that way and come up with an exploration target, which we're pretty confident in. We've been pretty conservative, but also very confident of around 320,000 oz- 570,000 oz of gold between 6.6 g- 8.4 g. We've based this only on seven of the many reefs. In fact, we know of more than a dozen reefs, but these ones are the most prospective and certainly the most continuous from all of the data that we've managed to put together. We're still working on this project. It is tinkering along in the background a little bit, but since we've got these two new projects in New South Wales, we certainly haven't forgotten about it.
We're hoping to grow the target with potentially some more drilling as we go into 2026. I think there was a question. I'm sorry, I'm trying to keep up with the questions. I'm pretty new at this. With regards to our ESG, we are certainly very much aware and try very much to act sustainably. We're committed to delivering good value, good sustainable value. We deal with communities both in the Pilbara and in, of course, New South Wales all the time. Both native title and heritage issues, we try to deal with respectfully. We do look after our own people, obviously, as well, with health, safety, and well-being being a large part of our culture. Environmentally, we're trying to, as much as we can, make sure that we're operating with integrity.
We do our very best to try and make sure that all of our stakeholders are aware and are happy that we operate in both a responsible and sustainable manner. Okay, I put this one in at the end. I've gone for a bit longer than I expected, but I can see there are some questions. I will try and answer some of them, at least in the time that I have left. I just wanted to reiterate on this slide that our portfolio has a great mixture of exploration assets from greenfields to advanced exploration. We're looking for a plus million ounce or million ounce gold equivalents development potential. We have a strong balance sheet with cash of around $7 million at the end of these figures were at the end of June, and investments of around mid-$30 million.
We do try and have a really focused exploration approach, but we also like to drill, and we're pretty aggressive in our exploration targeting and drilling. We try and drill as much as we can within, obviously, our pool of funding. We have a disciplined but very robust project generation program. We really are looking for more of the same. We're looking for more John Bulls and for more Tibooburras. We need some more to fill our project pipeline in at the advanced stage, at the advanced end of the pipeline. We've got a very supportive board and shareholders across both TSX and ASX. My exploration team is fantastic. Okay, that kind of ends it for me. I'll just have a quick look at the questions. Okay.
Wow, I've got one here that says, "What have been the most encouraging assay results or geological indications from recent drilling programs, and how do they impact on the scale or economic potential of the projects?" I need about two days to answer that one, I'm afraid. The most recent work that we've done at Tibooburra has been sensational in my eyes. Those results show that there is continuity. We know very much that the extent of the work that we've done, we've only just started. We need to do systematic work across everything. That would be really what we need to do as soon as possible in our future programs there. "How does Novo evaluate and manage risk and rewards in its joint venture structures, especially with partners like Northern Star?" That's a great question.
I have to say Northern Star are very new at Egina, and we've been quite used to working with De Grey in that joint venture. However, as much as we can, we try and we do have a technical committee every quarter where we have some input with the guys at Northern Star. Also, we do go out there and do field visits. Our geologists are very collaborative. We're hoping that next year, when Northern Star really ramps up and gets back on the ground out there to do more work, then we'll have a lot more to do with them than we have done at the moment. What else? Crikey. So many questions. Let me just see one more. I think I can squeeze one more in. I think I saw one about John Bull. Yes. "So will there be any drills turning at John Bull this year?
Any news on permit issues?" Yes, I'm pretty sure it will be drilled this year. We've already got the program ready. The drill program is planned. We've just yesterday received what is called an APO, which is our approval from the government. We are close. We are very close. In fact, I'm hoping we will get there within the next, let's say, four weeks because we have to now source a drill rig. At that point, I think I'm going to run out of time. Thanks very much to everyone who has listened today. I'll try and answer all the questions that are in my inbox as best I can. Tomorrow, my time. Thank you very much.