[Foreign language] Hello, Peter. How are things in Perth?
Good to see you again, Carla. Yeah, it's a little bit wet over here at the moment, so I do apologize if my internet starts to get a bit hacky, but hopefully we'll be all good.
All right. Looking forward for this presentation. So, Peter, take it away.
Yeah, great. Thanks very much, Carla. Look, I'm very excited to be presenting today. As per our announcement out last week, the potential upside for our Hennes Bay project really is massive. I strongly believe that we have a wonderful opportunity to bring the next Nordic copper and silver mine into production at a time where peak copper is really putting serious pressure on supply and price. I would go as far as to say that our timing is as good as it gets. Just moving on to the disclaimer. Sorry, Carla, if you could just go back one. Just quickly on that. This is the same one that I use on all of our presentations. Please take the time to download this, especially with regards to any forward-looking statements that I might make.
A quick comment on the board and advisory panel. I'm very fortunate to have such a group of highly driven and technically proficient professionals at my side. Some changes are proposed at this year's AGM, with the main one being that Peter Walker will be standing down as Non-Executive Chairman, and Robert Behets is going to be taking on that role. Do not fear, we're not going to be losing Peter's expertise. He's going to remain on the board as a Non-Executive Director. Having access to both of these gentlemen and their proven ability to add significant shareholder value is vital to our chances of success going forward. Of course, our advisory committee is going to continue on with the likes of Lars-Erik Aaro and Erik Lundström, both there based in Sweden.
With respect to the company itself, this slide pretty much sums up Arctic. We are a force in the Nordic exploration and development scene. We've built up a balanced portfolio of advanced and greenfield projects, all with the potential to add significant value to the company. With two advanced copper, silver, and gold exploration projects at Bidjivaggi, and of course our flagship Hennes Bay project, we already have a top five Nordic undeveloped copper project on our hands and plans to get these projects into production. We also have three greenfield copper projects that have drill-ready targets in some of the most prolific metal-producing regions of the Nordics. All of this at a time when I believe that we have reached peak copper. Peak copper, there's a lot of information to unpack on this slide from a perspective on copper itself.
I guess I could draw your attention to the diagram on the left there, projected copper supply versus demand. I suppose whenever I get annoyed when the share price starts to slide, I always bring myself back to this diagram and its main message. That is that as an industry, we have reached peak copper, which simply means that I do not believe we will ever be able to supply the world with the copper metal and silver for that matter that it requires. Older mines are in decline. We have the grades have drastically fallen, over 50% decrease in the last 30 years. We need to produce, sorry, we have only produced 0.7 billion tons of copper has been mined in human history up to this point in time. We need to increase that. There needs to be double that amount.
1.4 billion tons of copper needs to be produced to reach net zero by 2050. To meet an increasing supply gap, global mine output must increase by that 16.7 million tons a year over the next three decades, starting today. That new supply, we need new supply. The sheer scale of supply expansion required is daunting. The world either needs 36 new large-scale copper mines, and I'm talking about at least the scale of Arctics , sorry, or 759 small copper mines, or a five-fold increase in output from the world's top 10 producing mines. For those of you that don't necessarily believe in the great industrial revolution, those numbers that I gave you then, they really don't even take that into account. We have traditional markets such as transport, construction, electrical grid, and electronics. These are the main drivers for those requirements.
The green revolution, with the wind, the batteries, and the solar, that just makes it even tougher to meet that demand. I guess in summary, with Arctic Minerals, we have what the world desperately needs, and I do not think our timing could be any better. From a more regional perspective, the title of this slide says it all. 50% of EU copper concentrate is sourced outside of the EU. Okay, maybe it is not that bad on a world sense, because we import goods into the EU all of the time, but I can guarantee you that not everybody has actually thought about what this means. Copper concentrate is really only around about 30% copper metal. That means that 70% of what we are importing is waste, and often full of waste that we cannot use that has to be buried somewhere within the EU.
Not very environmentally friendly. On top of this, we import about a third of our copper concentrates from as far away as South America. Chile is 12,000 km away from the EU by ship. The shipping industry is a massive polluter of our environment. Again, not a very environmentally friendly solution. We thought we lived in a free trade world, but we do not. I think with COVID, the invasion of Ukraine, and the American tariffs, we have proven this. The EU manufacturing industry would be brought to its knees if it cannot purchase its raw materials from outside of the EU. Unfortunately, 50 years of underinvestment in the European mining industry has meant that Europe now consumes around 30% of the world's raw materials, but produces less than 5% of it.
We have somewhat deluded ourselves, I think, into thinking that we could save the world's climate by exploring and mining in someone else's backyard. I think that we all know that as Europeans, we cannot hold company executives in South America or Africa to account for poor environmental and safety practices. Lastly, but I think just as important, is jobs. I'd argue that a mining job is one of the best jobs to have. I've been in the mining industry for 30 years. Long-term, high-paying jobs in technically challenging roles is the best way to grow your communities and to provide security for your families. Our underinvestment in the EU has resulted in many of these high-paying jobs and technical capabilities being lost to other countries. An awful lot to think about there.
Moving from the macro and EU perspective, a quick recap on our projects before I concentrate on our advanced project at Hennes Bay. Our Bidjivaggi project has the potential to be world-class with Bonanza grades. An ex-Outokumpu mine originally discovered by Boliden. It was last mined in the 1990s and is in the Finnmark region of Norway. Granted, it has been somewhat restricted in its ability to move forward in recent times due to permitting issues, but we do not believe it will stay that way forever. With Bonanza grades of 18 meters at 2.2% copper and 33.8 grams per tonne gold, and another one at 27 meters at 3.1% copper and 0.6 grams per tonne gold, the prize of Bidjivaggi is too great to ignore. We will continue to undertake low-cost work at Bidjivaggi whilst working hard on the permitting issues in the background.
I'll come back to our flagship project at Hennes Bay in the following slides. We also have our greenfields projects, and these are very important to our well-balanced portfolio. Any one of these projects could be another top five Nordic copper deposit. All of them are drill-ready, and we are progressing our understanding of each of these projects through further fieldwork and geophysics so that when we are ready to drill them, we can get the best bang for buck out of them. The project that excites me the most out of all of them is the Swan Lake project. We believe that we are onto another copper-gold porphyry sitting in between Boliden's Arctic and Lava projects, two of the largest copper-gold projects in Europe. It is well known that if you're looking to find another porphyry project, go and have a look where there are others.
We see great opportunities there. On to Hennes Bay project and the exciting developments that we reported last week. Look, again, a busy slide here, but I'd like to draw your attention to a couple of things. Hennes Bay is a sediment-hosted stratiform copper mineral system. These types of systems are typically characterized as being very large with consistent mineralization. There are examples of these in production today that total in the billions of tons at similar grades to what we have at Hennes Bay. The best example of this within Europe is the Kupferschiefer. That straddles Poland and Germany. That has been mined for a thousand years or more at depth, well in excess of a thousand meters today. The Hennes Bay project has a starter resource of 55 million tons at 1% copper equivalent.
In relative terms to the big projects around the world, this is quite a small tonnage, but we believe we have only just scratched the surface of what we have here. We have tested less than 5% of the tenement package, which we believe sits on top of the best parts of the system itself. I will leave you to do your own sums on how big Hennes Bay could potentially be, but we have what we believe is the same mineralized zone popping up at surface over 17 km away from the resource with grab samples of 1.78% copper and 40 grams per tonne silver. This is potentially a huge system.
Not only do we think that the system is very large, we also strongly suspect that it has the possibility to hold positive bonanza grade, copper, silver, and also gold. Not to mention the extremely valuable byproducts of gallium, germanium, vanadium, and rare earth elements. I won't go into these today because they've not been considered within the resource. The bonanza grade pods, these are a work in progress. Having studied other similar systems around the world, we know that these pods exist. Given the rift structures that we have at Hennes Bay, these are the potential pathways for these bonanza pods to appear, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that they should also occur at Hennes Bay.
Then on to our maiden resource, or our starter resource, as we refer to it at Dingon Week within the Hennes Bay project. I guess it's important that I probably explain what I mean by the starter resource. As per the previous slide, SSCs are known to be very large systems. Not only do we have evidence from other projects on this, but we can see this at Hennes Bay as well. As we announced in March this year, we've delineated 55 million tons of 1% copper equivalent at Dingon Week. This contains a total metal content of 447,000 tons of copper and 37 million ounces of silver, which makes it a top five undeveloped copper project in the Nordics.
This project, sorry, this resource has been prepared in accordance with the strict rules of the JORC Code and has been undertaken by an independent, competent person. This is not our opinion. This is a third-party opinion. Dingon Week itself is geographically large already, but its mineralization is open for more than 10 km to the south and the east. We strongly believe that we can add significant and cheap tons to the resource just from Dingon Week itself. I will not go into a lot of the technical data here, but another typical characteristic of SSCs is that given their large size and consistent mineralization, their inferred drill spacing can be between 500 meters-1,200 meters.
If you apply this over the 10 kilometers of open and relatively shallow mineralized ground at Dingon Week, you can understand why we believe that we can add bulk and cheap tons, especially compared to other forms of the mineralized systems that are available. Dingon Week is but one of six projects at Hennes Bay. The other five prospects all have a significant amount of drilling in them, but we conservatively decided that we needed to put a few more drill holes into them before we could justify having them called or certified as JORC compliant. These five other prospects contain about 24 million tons of mineralization at an average grade of 1% copper equivalent. Very similar to Dingon Week.
Calling them prospects is also slightly misleading as they are all part of the same mineralization that are separated by areas of undrilled ground structures or glacial erosion. Hennes Week in itself is one of these prospects, and it contains already 6.1 million tons at a significantly high grade of 1.4% copper equivalent. Why Hennes Week has a 40% higher grade than Dingon Week, I don't think we really understand yet, but regardless, it is a massive bonus for us. Like Dingon Week, Hennes Week is open to the east and to the south with over 2.5 kilometers of open and shallow mineralization that could add significant tonnage to the overall resource at Hennes Bay. There are another four prospects that we have there.
I won't go into the details of those, but in total, these add around, as mentioned, 24 million tons of mineralization, about 1% copper equivalent. As also mentioned, these prospects, they are all linked together and part of the same mineralized system over the entire area. Again, less than 5% of the project or the tenement itself has been drill tested. Massive potential upside. On the forward work plan for Hennes Bay, we have achievable milestones and steady news flow ahead of us. Most importantly is our stakeholder engagement. We're investing a lot of time and energy into our stakeholder engagement. We're in discussions with the government at all levels, from federal into the communes. We're going to be starting talking to the local stakeholders as well as soon as we start to put in our applications for our drilling permits.
We have environmental heritage and cultural investigations that need to start in the near future. Of course, there is our resource expansion with drill testing of the peripheries of the Dingon Week and our other five prospects that we have, as I have mentioned previously. We are looking to test our exploration model. Of course, this is where our potential Bonanza area sits. We have geophysical surveys that we are planning to do and currently have Erik and some experts going out into the field doing structural mapping to try and work out where these rift faults sit within the system. On the project development side, we are looking to undertake mine design and scheduling and preliminary metallurgical testing.
We're already underway with our preliminary mining study and economic assessment with a combination of large tonnage, high grade, and predictable lode body geometry that SSCs makes it very attractive for large-scale mining operations. As mentioned, these bonanza grades allow for small high-grade operations in parallel. To recap on our projects, Arctic has a very well-balanced portfolio of projects with a focus on the Nordics, the heart of the European mining industry. I'll focus mostly on our advanced flagship project at Hennes Bay today, but each of our projects has the potential to add significant value to the company. We have a lot going on within all the projects, and each milestone that we achieve has the potential to re-rate the company.
This has been made very clear to us with the jump in share price and market capitalization achieved upon the release of the maiden starter resource at Hennes Bay. As mentioned, there's an awful lot more on that to go. On top of the technical milestones, we're also focusing on progressing our permitting milestones as well as working closely with stakeholders on all aspects of minimizing the impact of a potential mining operation on the area. Just to recap on Arctic itself, a very strong board and advisory committee with a track record of creating significant upside for shareholders. These are guys that have taken projects and companies all the way from very early stage exploration through to feasibility and into production and made significant profits for early shareholders.
A tightly held stock with significant ownership from the board, management, and the advisors, as well as institution and sophisticated investors. Today, a very low share price as compared to its producing peers. We have a clear pathway ahead of ourselves to achieve a much higher share price. On the investment proposition, right commodities. Our main focus is the copper, but we also have other critical metals where we have the gallium, germanium, vanadium, and rare earth elements in byproducts. Of course, we have the silver and the gold as well. Also very high-value metals. We are in the right geology, large-scale copper deposit types, sediment-hosted copper and porphyry copper gold deposit types. The right people, a multidisciplinary team with geology, mining, ESG, commercial, and corporate experience, extensive Scandinavian and Nordic experience, and a track record of discovery and shareholder value creation. The right jurisdiction.
I'm a firm believer in the Nordics, a tier one jurisdiction. The Nordics is leading the energy transition. Of course, we have the EU Critical Raw Materials Act to back us all up. The balanced portfolio, flagship project with the 447 kilotons of contained copper and 37 million ounces of silver at Hennes Bay. A second advanced project with significant copper-gold resource at Bidjivaggi and very strong pipeline of advanced exploration targets with Swan Lake at Tavast and Kusi. That's all for me. Thank you very much for your time. Hopefully, we received a few questions, Carla. If you'd like to know more, feel free to reach out to me on that email address below.
Thank you for that, Peter. Very interesting. This is a very hot topic.
I'd just like to highlight one of the things you mentioned in the start here regarding to peak copper. You referred at the end here of the presentation to stakeholders. Stakeholders, I would argue, would be not only yourselves and the shareholders and so on, but stakeholders would be authorities, municipals, and so on. What's the situation there? How much support do you feel that you get?
Look, I've been coming backwards and forwards between Sweden and Australia over the last 30 years. I have to say that I don't think I've seen the Nordics, and especially Sweden, as bullish towards exploration and mining. I've never seen it as bullish as what it is today.
I think a lot of that is there is a strong realization from government all the way from the top through to the communes that we have underinvested in the exploration and mining industry over the last 50 years. This has resulted in us really not producing any really new mines over the last 20 years, especially in the copper space. I'm getting a lot of support at all levels of government. I think that's also backed up in the EU with the Critical Metals Act that came into play last year. Of course, as we move forward and we start developing our story and we start exploring more, we'll be in there and we're talking more with the local stakeholders as well and on how we could be potentially impacting the local environment and the way of life there in Dalsland.
We have a responsibility to, I guess, do the background work to investigate exactly what the scenario is today and then critically analyze how a potential operation could impact on the way of life in Dalsland going into the future. Like I said, we have a massive responsibility to ensure that things are done in the most professional manner. I think that's one of the advantages that we have in the Nordics is that we have the capacity to hold our mining executives to the highest possible standards. Whereas I don't think that you have those sorts of capabilities in some of the Southern American or African states.
One could say that together with the authorities, you will work through red tape in order to get things going.
Oh, absolutely. Look, the red tape doesn't scare me.
This is a process that I've been through many times and the team has been through many times. In fact, we invite it because you need to go to, and sometimes extreme levels of detail to determine the current situation and how we could potentially impact. It is on us as executives to ensure that we do things in the correct manner.
Just for us who haven't been in the mining industry for all our lives here, could you just give us a feel for the time to get a mine operating? I'm connecting this question to the peak copper. From greenfield to brownfield, what are we talking about here? Five years or three years or?
I do have a slide on that towards the back there if you can find that for me. Look, activities, milestones, and risk mitigation at Hennes Bay.
I think, look, this is a typical timeframe. You talk about five years and, sorry, go back a bit, a couple of slides. Activities, milestones, and risk mitigation. I think what's important here is that in a scenario where all things go well, where the permitting goes well, where the drilling goes well, where all the technical studies go well, we could be realistically in a position where something like a Hennes Bay could be up and producing within five years. Now, of course, there's an awful lot of things that can happen in a five-year period that can slow you down. There's no promises on all of that. I think this is a reasonable timeframe based upon the best available information that we have today.
To reach that production phase, there are a whole bunch of milestones that we need to achieve as we go through this particular five-year or five to ten-year period, I guess we should say. Each time we achieve one of these milestones, the company should be re-rated in value. I think a classic example of that was when we put out the maiden resource or the starter resource at Dingon Week, our share price jumped to the moon, which, of course, we were extremely happy with. I'm sure most of our shareholders were as well. There's no reason why maybe we won't necessarily get those larger leaps as we go forward, but there will be re-ratings as we move through each one of these milestones. These are technical milestones as well as permitting milestones.
Of course, we have the exploration permit or the bare things to stone which we need to achieve. I hope to get that achieved in the next couple of years, which will then, of course, move into the mining permit or the, sorry, the environmental permit that will come later. That is where the requirement to do these high-level environmental and impact statements will come into their own.
The bottom line here is if you are a government and you really need to address the peak copper, we need to start yesterday in that respect.
Absolutely. We were seen by the number of small mines and large mines that need to be brought in production around the world to achieve net zero. I mean, I am actually skeptical that we are going to be able to achieve it, but we have to try.
I think having the support from government in being able to achieve this and not taking shortcuts because I do not think it is appropriate to take shortcuts, but to ensure that government puts itself under pressure and can deal with the permitting applications in a reasonable timeframe.
If we look then at Hennes Bay when it comes to infrastructure and let's say the support you will get there, what is the situation there?
I have another slide there in the appendix which deals with infrastructure. I think it is the next slide. Yeah. Hennes Bay is actually in a fantastic position. Dalsland is not renowned for being a mining jurisdiction, even though we have the base log in not too far away. Obviously, we have the Stora Strand mine going back into the beginning of the nineteenth century or 1900s, I should say.
Believe it or not, on our project here running through our tenement, we have two railway lines running through the tenement, one heading off to Gothenburg and another one heading off to other ports on the western coast there. We have a well-established road network connecting all of the towns and the cities. We have international and multiple domestic airports within close proximity. We've got two 400 kilovolt electrical transmission lines that give access to hydro, nuclear, and wind power. They run over the top of the tenement. We've got multiple freshwater sources on the tenement. Of course, labor itself. We're only two hours from the city in Gothenburg, even faster if you take the fast train. Having access to a very well-educated workforce within the vicinity, it's absolute gold. I've worked in operations in remote Western Australia where I have none of these things.
Having access to this is just a fantastic opportunity for us to get the project up even faster.
If we look a little bit at the valuation now of the company, obviously, for anyone in the management, the shareholders, the share price is always too low. I'd like to rephrase that question. I would argue that 99% of the current value lies with Hennes Bay, but you also mentioned Bidjivaggi with bonanza grades of gold. Would it be fair to say that most of the value now in the market is concentrated to Hennes Bay?
Oh, absolutely. I still would not discount any of these other projects. Bidjivaggi is actually a really, really nice project. It has got the potential to be a massive project in its own right. It has had some delays because of the fact that it is up in Finnmark.
Permitting is not as perhaps what we would like it to be. There are plans afoot to improve that. I hope that we can bring that back up to where it should be as far as its importance. Of course, we have our other projects. As I mentioned earlier, the projects up at Swan Lake in northern Sweden and our projects over in Finland. These are only one drill hole away from potentially demonstrating that they are projects that could also fit into the top five undeveloped copper projects within the Nordics. These are not projects to be ignored.
I'll take it first thing first, which would be Hennes Bay for the company. Could you just enlighten us here in the market? If we'd like to compare yourself or Arctic Minerals to anyone listed, who would you compare yourself to?
Look, I really don't like to compare ourselves to anyone. In some respects, we're quite unique given our setup. I guess if you have a look on the Stockholm market, on the big end, of course, you have the Boliden and the Lundin, very successful mining companies in their own right. I guess the next up-and-coming companies on this would be the Viscaria Copper below. They've been very successful. I guess looking at their timeframe from going from where we are today to where they're looking to get into production next year, I think it took them about five to seven years. They've been very successful at being able to finance their projects thus far.
I think if you have a look at the valuations for Viscaria, these are in the multiple billions of SEK as compared to our lowly hundreds of millions of SEK that we have today. I think it's a very good example for the pathway that we see ourselves on. As I said, once we achieve each one of these milestones, I hope to get re-rated.
Even if you do not like to compare yourself to someone, I would argue that some of your board members probably have because you have Erik Lundström, who I believe is from Boliden, and then you have Lars-Erik Aaro on LKAB then. These are pretty strong names in the industry. How did you get them on board?
Yeah, that history goes back a long time.
Myself and Erik, we both started as graduates in 1995 in Boliden on the same day. Erik's a geologist. I'm a mining engineer. Erik stayed on with Boliden for 17 years, I think. I was there for about six and managed to manage a couple of their large projects. We've worked together off and on over the last sort of 30 years, going from graduates through to where we are today and still get along extremely well. I value Erik's opinion probably over just about any geologist I've ever met. Given that his expertise in the Nordics and especially in Sweden is second to none, in my opinion. Of course, Lars-Erik Aaro, that goes back to a similar timeframe, going back into the mid-1990s when Lars-Erik was a senior executive within Boliden at the time.
Yeah, always got along extremely well with Lars-Erik, and we've kept in touch over the years. Of course, Lars-Erik moved on from Boliden and became Managing Director for LKAB and an extremely accomplished professional in his own right. When I told him what we were doing, what Erik and I were doing with Arctic, which, of course, started with the rare earth energy metals, which is when Lars-Erik got involved, that then turned into Arctic Minerals, Lars-Erik jumped at it and has been a fantastic support for me. Obviously, his contact network within the industry is second to none.
In a Swedish perspective, this is a fairly decent seal of approval. Being a shareholder here, would you consider a bid for the company at this stage?
I guess, yeah, that's an interesting question.
Look, you have to be realistic in this world and everything is for sale for the right price. I think that the current market capitalization and share price of the company is low. We have a pathway ahead of us for adding significant value. Put it this way, if there was a bid that came for the company today, it would have to have an awful lot of zeros after it for me to be interested.
The pathway here that will wrap up the question here, what is the next news flow we can expect from you? It's been a very hectic year, I would argue, for you as a mining company with all the announcements and all the things that you've been doing. What should we be looking forward to now going into next year?
Yeah. We're working hard at the moment.
Erik's on his way. He's probably in the car right now. He's on his way out there with a renowned expert in the structural geological field. They're going to walk all the way from Hennavik all the way over to Stora Strand, which is actually not sure how far it is. I think it's 20-odd kilometers. They're going to map the structures along the way, trying to work out exactly where these rift faults are, where these potential bonanza zones could be sitting. We do believe that we can see them sitting below the historical geophysical data that we have, but we need to confirm that with boots on the ground geology. That's where Erik really comes into his own. We're also looking to take advantage of some more modern geophysical techniques to really narrow down onto where some of these potential areas could be.
That will then lead into our applications for our drilling, which we are looking to get into the mines department in the next quarter. A lot of work there. That is also going to lead into the drilling, of course, which could well start this year, depending upon how we go with that permitting process. Yeah, like you said, an awful lot of work. That is just Hennes Bay. We have our other projects there, of course. I will leave that for another conversation.
Yes. As you said, that was just Hennes Bay. There is more to come, I would say. Thank you, Peter. It has been a pleasure. If anyone has any more questions, they are free to turn to your webpage and send you an email.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity to talk. Yeah.
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