Morning, everybody. I'm just going to give this another minute. We're—we have a pretty tremendous turnout for this. So we're just going to give everybody another minute or so to get logged in. We have a kind of a constant flow of people still joining the meeting. So we'll do our best to keep up with that. I want to thank everybody for joining us today. This is an exciting time. Of course, you generally hear from me, and this is going to be a little different scenario. We are going to have Kevin Bonyai and Adrian Karolko present today. And really, what it comes down to is we want you to hear from them directly. Want to give you a chance to ask them questions and see just why we are all so excited, which is pretty incredible at this point.
This thing is moving forward very, very quickly, and it's about time we gave them a chance to do that, so pretty exciting stuff. Just give me one more minute here, and then we will get underway. Hey, everybody. Let's get underway. I'm going to turn things over to Kevin Bonyai and Adrian Karolko in just a moment. First of all, just want to really welcome everybody here today. Thank you all for joining in. This is a pretty exciting moment for us. We're hosting this technical webinar to give everybody a chance to hear from Kevin Bonyai and Adrian Karolko directly. Give everybody an opportunity to understand just what we're seeing, how things are progressing at both Dumbwa and Kazhiba, and see exactly why we are all so excited, and let me tell you, we are over the moon.
These two individuals are doing an absolutely extraordinary job. And this is a very exciting time in the progression of Midnight Sun and the projects that we are working on in Zambia. Very, very exciting time, indeed. So without further ado, let me just quickly go through a couple of things. Again, this is going to be a technical presentation, so we're going to be digging into the technical details. We are super excited to have both Kevin and Adrian Karolko on the call today that are going to be presenting. I'm going to go through something really quickly, not to belittle the point. I'm sure everybody on this call understands, but this is a technical presentation. We are still quite early in the progression of Dumbwa and, of course, nearing a resource at Kazhiba. But we are going to be covering many things today that are forward-looking.
The reality is we are moving this forward very quickly. We want to give you a view as to what we're doing, what we've accomplished, but we are going to be discussing visuals in core. We're going to be discussing what we're seeing. We're going to be discussing the potential based on volume, based on size of what we see out there, and the reality is this is forward-looking information. This is stuff that we are still in the process of developing, moving forward, moving as quickly as we can, but just want to make sure that everybody understands that this presentation is going to be full of forward-looking statements today. Please keep that in mind as we go through these things. These are potentials. These are what we see.
We're going to give you a really good understanding of how Dumbwa is shaping up, how we've moved this forward, and just where we think this is about to go. Again, very exciting times, but a presentation that is going to feature a lot of forward-looking statements today. Please keep that in mind as we move forward. I want to quickly go through a little introduction for the two individuals that are going to be doing most of the talking today. Let's start with Kevin Bonyai, our Chief Operating Officer. Kevin, anybody that's been through my presentations is well aware of Kevin, Kevin's experience, Kevin's involvement with Midnight Sun. But let me quickly just give him a quick introduction. Kevin, of course, joined us a couple of years ago now. He has over 25 years of experience in the Zambian copper belt in sub-Saharan Africa.
He is the former exploration manager at both Barrick Lumwana Mine and for Freeport-McMoRan when they were in sub-Saharan Africa. He did lead the team at Lumwana during their expansion phase, taking the Lumwana deposit from 900 million tons to 1.62 billion, making it the largest deposit in Zambia currently at 0.52%. That gave them effectively 62 years of mine life and over eight million tons of contained copper. A tremendous, tremendous success, so we have Kevin here. He's going to be discussing what he's doing, but he is taking the exact same approach to Dumbwa that he took at Lumwana. He understands these deposits incredibly well. He spent his entire career in this belt working on these types of things, and of course, what we're looking at is something that at Dumbwa is analogous to Lumwana. It is a basement dome-hosted system.
Kevin's going to explain it in full detail. But let me tell you on behalf of the Midnight Sun team how incredibly pleased we are to have Kevin on board. And what he has done in the last 18 months is rather incredible. And joined, of course, by the next fellow I'm going to talk about, Adrian Karolko. Adrian Karolko joined us last year. Adrian is heading up the work we're doing at Kazhiba and, of course, collaborating with Kevin at Dumbwa. And Adrian Karolko has over 18 years of experience. Interesting sideline. Adrian is the geologist that accompanied our team to Zambia over 12 years ago to select this project and move it forward. So Adrian has rejoined our team and is now back to finish what he started. So very excited to have Adrian part of the team.
Not only does he have a great name, but an incredibly good geologist, and he's going to be driving this thing forward with Kevin. He's going to cover everything we're doing at Kazhiba today: where we're at, where we're going, what we found, and where we think this resource is going to come out timing-wise, etc., so quick bit of experience with Kevin or with Adrian, sorry. Adrian was a member of the pre-feasibility team for the Cangrejos gold-copper porphyry, but I think one of the more exciting things to talk about today is the work that he did recently for Ross Beaty at the Miedzi Copper Corp, which is a privately held company. They have an asset in Poland that has become a brand new world-class Kupferschiefer deposit, copper-silver strata-bound deposit in Poland.
And of course, his experience is incredibly vast, really familiar with the types of deposits that we're working on. And again, very lucky that we have him on board, and we're very pleased to have him on our team. So you are about to hear from these two individuals. Again, from the Midnight Sun team, let me just tell you how pleased we are to have these guys on board. They are top tier. And I want to make the point really clear that we could not have two better people running these projects. And they are the right guys for the job. So without further ado, I'm going to first throw the floor to Kevin, give Kevin a chance to talk about what he sees at Dumbwa, where we're going. And let's get into this. Give me one second. I'm going to stop sharing this.
Allow Kevin to bring his deck up on here, and we can get underway. Kevin, you are currently muted, so you have to just give yourself an unmute real quick.
Okay.
You got it. You should be on board there.
Okay. Can you hear me now?
Absolutely.
All right. I'm just trying to find where I've shared the, okay, you should be able to see the title page, Dumbwa Project Webinar Discussion Notes, December 17th, 2025.
You got it. Yeah. We can fully see what you got there.
Hello, everybody. It's a pleasure to be talking to you today and having this meeting and taking you through some of the technical aspects of the Dumbwa project and one or two of the issues we're facing, particularly with assays, explain that to the stakeholders, but also why, even minus only having a few assays in, we remain committed. I'm very, very excited about the potential of Dumbwa to be the next big discovery in the Zambian Copperbelt and the Central African Copperbelt as it stands. I think we'll start off with a quick snapshot of where we are before we dig into the geology and potential of Dumbwa and the mineralization and the styles and comparisons with Lumwana. At the moment, we are 88 holes in with four ongoing and the rig ramping towards a fifth.
So you could say we are around 93, 94 holes in. We've drilled 17,800 m so far over the first about 1.7 km, going up to 2.5 km on some scout ahead holes to help us target the mineralization a little bit better. We've broken the drilling up into three blocks. Don't worry if you don't know where these are geographically. They will be shown to you in a couple of slides later. We have what we call the Sondashi Farm Block , which is the Southernmost extent of the Dumbwa opportunity. We've completed our drilling in there.
The rigs and the camps are out, and they've been moved over to what we call the West River Drill Block, which is where the five drill rigs we have going and a sixth rig joining us in January to keep accelerating the program as we continue Northward along the Dumbwa ore body, and then finally, I'll be showing you the Dumbwa Central and North Blocks, for which the drilling plan is largely complete, and by the time I'm done, you should be able to understand that we've got to the stage with the geology and the mineralization where it's very predictable over virtually the entire 11 km of strike that we will eventually drill test and put in as we move towards a formal resource declaration, hopefully towards the end of Q3, Q4 2026, so we're about 12 months of a lot of work left to do.
In terms of where we are with logging mineralization structures, we are 90% behind where the drilling is. We've put together a very, very good team of junior and mid-ranking geologists who handle the core logging, rig management, drill hole siting, and database input. We have a functional database, a single-source database where we enter all our data. And so far, we've got 52 of the 88 holes drilled already with the lab for assay, which represents 59% of the drilling done so far. However, to date, we've only received 10 holes back, 14%.
So as much as I would love to dwell on sort of meter percents and significant intercepts, we're going to have to rely a lot more on our observations on the geology and the down-hole mineralization, although the results that we have had back so far from the first line and the first 10 holes are very, very good indeed, as you'll see a little bit later on. So by far, our biggest bottleneck in the resource definition pipeline at the moment is assay reporting. Everything else is very, very up to date as a result of the team efforts. And we are considering bringing in a second lab in order to try and help us catch up because the backlog at the moment is starting to affect our ability to put together the full story, the full story, of course, including the assays.
And one of the main reasons, and I was asked to go into this in a bit of detail, why the lab is sitting on so many of our assays is that at the moment, we are using SGS in Zambia. They're ISO Accredited, and they've had some instrumentation issues over the last two or three months. And the reason why they're delaying is because we keep rejecting the assay results. QA/QC is an essential part of what we're doing at Midnight Sun. We need to be able to trust and believe the results we're getting back from the laboratory. If the laboratory is routinely under-reporting by a few percent, then that's going to translate to undervaluing the eventual resource by a few percent. And it becomes a multiplier effect on that.
If they're over-reporting, of course, that can have effects down the line when we come to our actual resource calculation. So it's very important. And we QA/QC the entire process, but probably the most important is the QA/QC on the laboratory that we can believe and defend the assay results when we get them back. And at the moment, we are routinely failing them. We submit three different types of standard: low, medium, and high. We do that to measure the accuracy of the laboratory, that if they're saying something is 1%, it really is 1%, not 1.1% or 0.9%. And they're outside of our parameters on their reporting at the moment. They are working on it. The recent ones have been a pass. So certainly, they're getting better.
We're hoping in the next few weeks to get a whole slew of assay reports in, processed, and then published to the market to demonstrate our onward progression with proving Dumbwa to be what I believe and what Adrian believes, AK believes to be a tier-one opportunity. We also insert duplicates. Duplicates are there to measure precision, that if it measures 1% twice and we put it back in, it's going to measure 1% again. So we test for accuracy and precision. And finally, we use blanks as well to make sure that we give them barren quartz clean, we give them fresh copper-free cyanide. All these testing is done blind. The laboratory doesn't know what our standards, blanks and duplicates are when we submit them. It's all blind testing. And if they fail, we go back and demonstrate their failure to them.
They rerun the samples at their own cost. That for the layman is a very, very quick explanation of the reason why we are behind with the assays. It's mainly because we keep failing the lab on QA/QC, but the lab is improving. We do expect to get a lot of results back in the next three to four weeks. One of the questions I was asked to address when I was putting this short presentation together for the stakeholders was, "Look, if the laboratory is failing QA/QC and delaying assay results, why are you so sure that Dumbwa is a tier-one opportunity?" There's a lot more to a drill program, a large drill program like this, than just the assays because copper sulfides are recognizable easily enough, maybe with the exception of chalcocite, which we definitely have in the core of our ore body.
But certainly, bornite and chalcopyrite, it's possible to log them accurately, and put a more or less in-house visual estimate. We're looking at 0.1%, 0.2%, 1%, 2%, and so on. Then we measure the structures. To date, we have nearly 3,000 structural measurements on the holes that have been logged to date. We acquire our own data. We're doing our own PXRF soil surveys ahead of the drilling to really nail down where we want to be because one of the things we've demonstrated, certainly to our satisfaction, is that the Dumbwa ore body is very, very predictable. There is a powerful and intimate relationship between the Dumbwa soil anomaly, which goes back 10, 12 years. We've known about it for a long time, but it's never been properly drill tested, and the presence of underlying bedrock-hosted copper sulfide mineralization.
The preliminary drill testing we wanted to do was really to demonstrate the relationship between the bedrock sulfide occurrences, copper sulfide occurrences, and the overlying soil anomaly. Now, that sounds like a pretty obvious thing to do. But more often than not, soil anomalies are transported away from the source, particularly if there's a bit of topography, and there is a little bit of topography in Dumbwa. And what we found is that because the overlying soil is relatively thin between bedrock at surface, no cover down to 3 to 5 m, that the soils are truly representative of what's going on in the bedrock beneath the feet.
So much so, in fact, that we know if we drill within the 500 PPM contour, and again, there's maps of this coming up that you can enjoy, we know that we're going to see bornite, chalcocite, and cuprite in the core of the Dumbwa mineralization, and once we move outside of the 500 PPM soil anomaly, and the anomaly can get up to 7,000 PPM within the high-grade central core, we know once we go out into the 250 PPM soil anomaly shell that we're going to start seeing the surrounding chalcopyrite zone, and grades will be distinctly lower than what we're drilling in the heart of Dumbwa.
Considering the drill-proven in-situ relationship between the soil anomaly and the underlying copper sulfide mineralization and our understanding now of the zoning within the deposit, and further that the soil anomaly continues unbroken for another 12 km and appears wider in the North, then our confidence has to be very high that Dumbwa is a large tonnage, near-surface, low-grade. I think overall, it's going to come in at less than 0.5%. It's got much higher-grade intercepts, but we're talking about something which is going to be near-surface, open-pit minable, a bit like a porphyry copper, I guess, in some ways, although the geology is quite different. Copper deposit that is extrapolated to reach and probably exceed one billion tons of ore.
And I will be putting together there's a table of the possibilities that we're trying to prove at Dumbwa when we finally cover the full 11 to 12 km strike length of the mineralized zone. So simply put, again, for the layman, if the soil anomaly is drill-proven to be due to its significant and substantial copper sulfides in bedrock forming frequent economic intercepts, which is exactly what we're seeing in our drilling to date, then why should the yet-to-be-tested soil anomaly in the North be any different? And that really answers the question as well as I can, that even though we've only got a restricted number of assays in so far, we believe Dumbwa to be a genuine tier-one copper opportunity in the heart of the Zambian Copperbelt. So just quickly to some geology and some structure.
Again, we've made a lot of structural measurements on the core that we've had to date over 17,000 m. One of the things we've realized is that the Dumbwa mineralized unit is hosted by a North-South trending shear zone. North-South structures are very common in the Zambian Copperbelt. For example, the vein systems at Kansanshi are at right angles to the anticline axis. Of course, Kansanshi is 20 m N orth of Dumbwa. It probably shouldn't be a big surprise to find out that the Kansanshi vein system is North-South oriented. Like I said, if you take the Dumbwa North-South mineralized unit Northwards, you crash straight into Kansanshi. Certainly, we've got the same mineralization trend, North-South, as Kansanshi. You've got to remember that Kazhiba is also a North-South oriented structure.
North-South oriented structures, during the time that these deposits developed across the copper belt, appeared to be important controls on the location and sometimes the intensity of copper mineralization pretty much across the belt. One of the concerns we had to begin with when we got the first structural measurements in was that the gneissic banding were inside the Solwezi Dome, were inside the oldest rocks in the area. It's not a classic copper belt-style deposit. It's not a Konkola or a Nchanga, which is hosted in the younger rocks that tend to flank these older islands of basement material in the copper belt. The gneissic banding that we were measuring is actually striking East-West. It's at right angles to the mineralized trend. This came as a little bit of a surprise. We had the old geology maps.
You can see there a strike and dip that was measured by the 1:100,000 geological interpretation, and we weren't sure to begin with if that was an anomaly or an unusual measurement because we were pretty much expecting everything to be North-South in terms of the gneissic banding, which is pretty much what you see at Lumwana, and what we found was that the mineralized trend was almost perfectly at right angles to the gneissic banding, so at a very early stage in the drill program, when we got our first structural measurements in, we needed to start rethinking this, and now here we are, 80-odd holes later and a lot more measurements.
What we can actually see, and the geological model we are working on, for which is now getting to the stage, is very, very defensible, is that the mineralization is hosted in a North-South trending shear zone. What you can actually see in parts of it where the structural deformation is very intense is that the Gneissic banding actually deforms and rotates into the North-South shear zone. It's a very, very nice piece of geology. One of the things we decided to add to that to try and test for the maximum shear extension direction was to take mineral lineations. That's the map you're looking at on the right. What we discovered was that the minerals in the core are elongated in a North-South direction, and they will naturally form and follow the path of most intense deformation.
Within the core of the structural measurements where the gneissic banding and the mineral lineations are really starting to go at right angles to the East-West general strike and dip, it dips gently to the South, but that can change to the North because of the gentle dips, is where we get the most intense soil anomalies. So the dotted lines you're looking at behind the structural measurements is actually the outline of the Dumbwa soil anomaly. And in the core of it, you're seeing over 2,000 to 3,000 PPM. And then over a distance of about 150 to 200 m either side of that high-grade core, the soil anomaly falls off to the 250 PPM shell. And that's where in the drilling we're starting to see the disseminated lower-grade chalcopyrite mineralization. It doesn't tend to favor a particular unit within the Dumbwa gneissic gray gneiss and pink gneiss sequence.
It kind of blasts through everything. It does seem to be a bit better inside schists where schists have developed, but any unit within that shear zone can be mineralized. So you've got to start imagining this in terms of the model as an almost upright vertical feeder or pipe or sheet of mineralization, which is where the original hydrothermal fluids passed along and through a North-South oriented structure sitting within East-West trending gneissic banding. And you see the same thing at Lumwana. Within Lumwana, although Lumwana is a lot shallower dipping, and I have a comparison slide for everybody to consider in a bit, within Lumwana, they have these North to NorthEast oriented, what they call ore shoots , which are structurally controlled higher grade, higher thicker sequences of copper mineralization associated with the classic Lumwana ore schist.
And although we don't see a classic Lumwana ore schist relationship, what we do see is thick, high-grade mineralization in the core of these North-South oriented structures. Another very good and very positive association with what we see at Lumwana. So to take a step back into history, when I took over the exploration at Midnight Sun about 18 months ago, this is what I was presented with. This was historical soils. We've done our own soils now. I prefer to look at my data instead of other people's wherever I get the opportunity. And you can see really the kind of 12 km long, very narrow, 300 to 750 m wide high-grade soils, copper in soils. Excuse me one second. I'm going to take a drink. And that's really where the story needs to start. What is that soil anomaly? What's causing that soil anomaly?
Can we relate the soil anomaly to significant bedrock sulfide occurrences? What's the geology? What's the structure? And these are the questions that the drill program is starting to really answer very, very well. So the central one, again, I've taken the old gridded copper. I've turned it into contours, and those will be important in the next couple of slides. That's why I did it. And then finally, a bit of a close-up to the area where we've actually been drilling at the moment to sort of show the sort of, you know, the East-West constraint is very, very good, is very, very strong. It is laterally extensive in the North-South, and that more than anything else is now guiding our drill fences as we progress drilling Northwards along the Dumbwa opportunity.
On the left shows the current drilling, the drill plan, and, well, the holes that have been drilled and the drill plan. You can see in the South, we've pretty much done the first 1.5 km in the South. Those are the blue dots. It's what we call the Sandash farm block. A little bit North of that, the purple is where we're drilling at the moment, steadily progressing Northwards along the Dumbwa opportunity. And again, we're seeing a lot of mineralization in the core. We call that the West River block. And then finally, we go North into the green dots, and that's what we're calling Dumbwa central and North. And if anything, it looks better than what we're drilling in the South. The South is already very good.
But what we're drilling in, what we will be drilling initially in the North is probably the most intense copper soil anomaly. And the central image, the central figure there is really to show how we're starting to see sulfide zonation within Dumbwa. So you can see, again, the copper soil contours are very, very intense in the center of the North-South trending anomaly. And the blue is bornite that we're observing in the core, and quite often significant amounts of bornite. And you can see how that sits extremely well in a very predictable fashion, the soil anomaly, the high-grade soil anomaly at surface and where we're drilling subsurface and seeing 5 to 10 to 15 m of disseminated to quite coarsely developed bornite mineralization. That's what we call, that's what we refer to as the central corridor, the high-grade central corridor to the Dumbwa ore body.
We find bornite, we find chalcocite, we find cuprite, all occurring within that 10 to 15 m wide centralized, very high-grade core of Dumbwa. Then what happens in the right-hand image, this is chalcopyrite observed in drill core projected to surface. These are all projected to surface at this stage. It's not a section, and again, you see a sort of fall away in grade either side of the central core towards the West and towards the East, down into the 0.1s, 0.2s, and 0.3s, and chalcopyrite becomes the dominant copper sulfide phase. So it's beautifully zoned. You have a high-grade bornite, chalcocite, cuprite core to this thing, and either side of it, it fades away to chalcopyrite, and that's obviously following it as we're drilling up towards the N orth.
What we've learned very, very quickly is to trust the geochemistry, that the geochemistry can be used in a very predictive fashion, and it can be extrapolated at least another 8 km N orthwards. As you can see in the image on the right, so far we've drilled two and a half Ks. Don't be put off by the lack of chalcopyrite in the North. That's simply where our logging hasn't quite caught up with the drilling. This picture will become more complete as time progresses. In terms of sections, again, we can see very clearly this high-grade centralized, strongly deformed shear zone, which is very richly mineralized with bornite, chalcocite, and cuprite, which then fades into a chalcocite zone on these sections in the West. It's cut off fairly sharply in the East. We have drilled to the East of DBW 25009 and not found very much.
So we're happy that we've constrained this Eastwards, although there remains possibly a little bit more work to do towards the West. But I think in terms of nailing this down, you know, to where it occurs, subsurface and surface, these drill fences at about 50 m spacing are getting it about right. And like I said, because of the predictive nature of Dumbwa, at least in this part of the mineralized system, you know, we're able to go and drill bornite at will. We know if we stay within the 1,000 or the 500 PPM contour, if we put a shallow 60-degree hole into the heart of the shear zone, we're going to see good mineralization. And I see no reason for that relationship not to continue for quite some distance towards the North. In terms of the potential, I need to explain this image.
It's a bit of a difficult one to understand. It looks spectacular, and I think more than anything else, it really shows what Dumbwa is all about. This is a South-to-North section along the shear zone, along the core of the shear zone and going out either side for about 150 m either side, and what it shows is what I'm basically doing is I'm standing East of Dumbwa and I'm looking towards the West. I'm looking through the ore body. I've kind of turned the ore body transparent and I've made it into a section, and that's where you can see the consistency in the mineralization, at least over the 2.5 km that we've drilled out so far to date, so yellow again is chalcopyrite. I wish I had assays to refer to, but in the meantime, we'll go with our visual observations. Yellow is chalcopyrite.
You can see the patchy, but occasionally very high-grade and very thick pieces of bornite, chalcocite, and cuprite, which occur in the heart of the Dumbwa structure. So that's 2.5 km of drill-proven disseminated to semi-patchy blebby copper sulfide mineralization. And I think the assays will refine this quite a bit. But in the meantime, on a visual basis, I think in the Zambian copper belt, that's probably about as good as it gets. And remember, this is only the first 2.5 km . We think this is potentially more than 10 km long, maybe as much as 11. To go back to assays now, for the limited amount of assays that we got, some of it is very, very well- graded.
When you consider that, you know, 30 to 40 m at 0.3%, 0.4% is a minable intercept at Lumwana, which sits 65 km West of us. And of course, as Adrian introduced me, give me one second. In Chimiwungo, which is mined at Lumwana, it's typically 40 m thick at about between 0.3% and 0.5% copper. We can go a bit thicker where we get those North-South structures that I mentioned in my preamble. But certainly on the first line, Line 100, which is the Southernmost fence that we drilled, this is right at the bottom of Dumbwa, which is within our concession. We do have some very, very significant intercepts: 39.7 m at 0.51%, 15 m at just under a percent, 38 m at 0.63%. And what I've said in this image is, look, you know, we can draw a rough envelope around this.
We're still waiting for assay results for DBW 20, which might expand the envelope a bit more to the West. So it's definitely going to be a lot wider than 100 m. We know DBW 14 is mineralized with chalcopyrite as well. So we're expecting this to be about 200 to 300 m. But what's interesting is it's not the erratic way that it's mineralized, although it does seem to be erratic, you know, from the three or four holes that we've actually managed to punch through it. I think the key thing to understand the potential of Dumbwa is that it's got these higher-grade intercepts. It's certainly got economic intercepts. You know, nearly 40 m at 0.5% is directly comparable with what they mine at the Lumwana right now. 15 m at 1% is about the same copper content. 38 m at 0.63% is fantastic.
If you take the fully diluted intercept that we have in Dumbwa just from three of the holes that we've got assay results back, we have 136 m at 0.26, 60 m at 0.4, and 80 m at 0.36%. Those are significant intercepts. Although they are low grade, the one thing to bear in mind when you're seeing grades like this is, boy, it'd better be at the surface. We don't want strip, and the answer is there's no strip. You get through the 3 m of soil that overlies Dumbwa and you're straight into mineralized bedrock. Literally, your first scoop goes to the mill, and that's another thing that excites me about Dumbwa. It's so shallow. It's right at the surface. It's predictable.
We can advance the drilling with a very high degree of confidence, fully de-risk drilling that we're going to keep on intercepting this thing as we progress Northward. I think we're going to keep on seeing intercepts. You can take the one side of the fence, extremely thick intercepts at low grade, or you can go in and high grade this thing at 40 m at 0.5%, 15 m at 1%. All the options are there. Moving on to a comparison between Chimiwungo, Lumwana, and Dumbwa, the geology is the same. I could dwell on the geology if anybody would like me to. It's a, you know, a sequence of 1.4-1.8 billion-year-old gneisses, schists. We break that up into gray gneiss and pink gneiss.
In the case of Chimiwungo, which is the main deposit at Lumwana and Lubwe, which was my discovery when I was working for Barrick, which actually dips off to the East. Chimiwungo is a shallow dipping, very kind of the ore schist hosted mineralized unit. It varies between sort of 40 to 50 m thick. It grades about 0.5%, which is almost exactly the same as what we see at Dumbwa. But where the differences come in is that the strike of Chimiwungo is 5 km . We believe we have up to 11 km from the geochemistry, which makes it over double the length of Lumwana. The width at Lumwana is 4 km2 . We're dealing with something a bit narrow in terms of width. We're at 300 m to 1 km wide, again, based on extrapolating the soil geochemistry. The thickness of Chimiwungo varies between 40 to 50 m.
It can be thicker where you see the Roan shoot and the Equinox shoot , these North-South structures that bang through Lumwana, but generally speaking, our thicknesses at Dumbwa are much higher. Just from the few assays we've had back, we're looking at 60 m to 136 m thick, and that's all going to feed into a significant and comparable resource at the end of the day, so in direct comparison, Dumbwa is more than double the strike length of Chimiwungo. It's a bit narrower. That's mainly because it's steeply dipping, but with substantially thicker mineralization. The average grade is comparable. In terms of geology, I've already mentioned the geology is very much the same, so the only difference that I can see looking at Dumbwa, looking at Lumwana to the extent that I have is the dip of the mineralized unit.
If ours was shallow, it would look pretty much like the cross-section of Lumwana, Chimiwungo that I've put onto the slide. So they are directly comparable. I was also asked to brief, for the benefit of the audience, what's the difference between a, you know, what's the difference between what we have and with a porphyry copper? Well, porphyry coppers are magmatic deposits. They tend to be quite restricted in their horizontal dimensions, usually less than a kilometer, sometimes bigger for the very biggest ones, but they can be very deep over 2 km . You know, porphyry coppers usually have bonus metals like gold, something we don't have at Dumbwa. It's a pure copper play. We don't have the cobalts. We don't have the silvers. We don't have the golds, at least not so far in our assays.
Grades of a porphyry copper can exceed 1% in the very best, and they'll be less than 0.3% in the very worst. It's a different geology and style. However, if we're going to start talking about 1 billion+ near-surface, you know, copper opportunities, then at least we're comparable in scale, if quite different in terms of geology and style. So the final slide I have, I know I've gone through this very quickly, and I'd love to spend hours on the geology with you all, is I've done a little bit of modeling on what the potential size of Dumbwa could be on the upside and on the low side. I mean, you've got to consider both. So what this somewhat involved table shows is kind of best case, worst case, and everything in between.
Dumbwa almost certainly is going to be one of those in-between deposits. I don't think there's a chance of reaching the upper sort of upside potential of Dumbwa. Definitely, we're going to exceed the low side potential because I really did lowball it on the estimation. What I've done is I've modeled Dumbwa at a range of different strike lengths, different widths, although I've kept the depth fixed at 200 m. That's as far down as we've drilled this thing so far. The SG is 2.7 from routine measurements that we make every day on our Dumbwa core. Again, I've given a range of estimates at different grades as well.
So for example, if we are successful in proving that the copper anomaly is associated with significant copper sulfides in bedrock along the full 11 km depth that we're considering at the moment, at a width of 300 m, you're up at about 1.7 billion tons, 0.2% copper. That equates to 3.5 million tons of contained copper. The same dimensions, at 0.5% contained copper, gets you up to 8.9 million tons. So potentially, you know, along the full 11 km at a 300-m mining width, you're at, sorry, 1.78 billion tons of near-surface exploitable ore. At the very best, the upper end there is shown in bold, the ninth row down.
If we do have 11 km, if we take it out to 500 m wide, which I think is reasonable on the basis of what I'm seeing in terms of mineralized width, as an average, sometimes it'll be wider, sometimes it'll be narrower. I like that as a kind of rule of thumb or thumbsuck number. Down to 200 m, just down to 200 m, that's when we get into the really high numbers. So the absolute upper end, I think, at Dumbwa, because of the East-West constraint on the shear zone, is 2.9 billion tons. If we do manage 0.5 billion, I think 0.4 billion, 0.3 billion is a more reasonable number.
But if we do manage 0.5 billion, we're looking at 14 million tons contained, which is, you know, with very, very low strip, which is absolutely, I think, as far as I'd be willing to push the Dumbwa resource potential right now. In terms of lowballing it, in terms of the low side, it's still significant. The worst we're going to see is if we stop drilling after 4 km . We're two and a half Ks in at the moment. So to get to this number, assays dependent, I think our first resource estimate, and I really am lowballing this over the first 4 km , over a width of a mining width of 300 m, 200 m deep, you're still in the 648 million tons. At 0.2 is going to give you 1.296 million tons contained copper.
If we can get that resource up to 0.5, then you're looking in much better space. So the first 4 km , upsiding it, 500 m wide pit, that's where you start seeing a billion tons again, 1.08 billion tons. At 0.5% copper is 5.4 million tons contained. Now, like I said, that's kind of the low side and the high side of what I think, or what I believe we're looking at in terms of the opportunity that Dumbwa represents. I like Dumbwa geologically. It's predictable. The mineralization, 100% is there. Adrian's going to show you some of the more advanced 3D modeling that we've managed to do on the ore body and the geology so far. And I think I will leave it at that. If that doesn't demonstrate the potential, I'm not sure what does.
Well put, Kev. I think that was excellent.
You know, I think a couple of little things, just that we talk about this right now. I mean, we're focused on that Southern 11 km where we've carried out dipole-dipole IP. We still have 9 km to the North. And we're focused right now on that Southern 11 km. That's where Kevin's putting his effort in. That's where we're modeling this. That's what we're going to look at today. But we still have almost half of the original geochem to look at and address as we move along. And at this point, I think everybody's starting to get a sense of why our team is quite as excited as we are. This is incredible. And Kevin's done just an absolutely bang-up job on it to date.
And so what I'm going to do now is, Kevin, if you want to stop sharing on that part of the presentation, we will have Adrian Karolko pull up his slides. And we've been working on a three-dimensional model, as Kevin just mentioned. This is something we alluded to some time ago. Obviously, hoped that we would have more in the way of assays to share with everybody. But this, I think, starts to draw a very, very clear picture as to what Dumbwa actually looks like, what we're working on, what it looks like, what we're seeing. And, you know, for the first time, we can start to give everybody a real view of everything Kevin was just talking about potential here. So, Adrian, are you fully there and clear?
Yeah, I can hear you very well. Can everybody see this screen with the entitled Chalcocite, Chalcopyrite?
Yep, we can see them up there. None of the actual slides shared yet. You can just see the thumbnails across the top, but we can see them clearly.
Okay, so sorry.
Yeah, you might have to click them open like an image type thing is my guess.
Is that better? I don't know.
If there's any trouble, I can also pull them up. Are you double-clicking them to full size?
I am, yeah. Sorry here. Yeah, because you're probably sharing and reshare.
Yeah, you'd probably have to share each image individually as you go along, I think, Adrian.
Understood.
Unless they're plugged in, and otherwise, I can pull up a PowerPoint version of those same slides for you and do that.
Give me one more chance. Sure. Did that pop up?
There you go. We got it, man.
Okay, great.
Good to go.
So we've enlisted the services of a resource modeler who's working hand in hand with us. And we're giving them weekly updates as the drilling progresses, which is really beneficial for us so that we can actually visually see how things are evolving with what we're seeing in core. And what we recently had the modeler do was create a few images of the mineralization we're seeing at Dumbwa. And again, just to drive home the predictability, the North-South trend of the mineralization that we're seeing. Now, all of these images here, they allude straight back to what Kevin showed earlier on, but they're all based on visual mineralization observed in core. Again, we don't have a lot of assays yet. However, the assays that we do have are one-to-one basically comparable to what we're seeing in visual mineralization.
So what's really interesting about these images is that you can really see the North-South lineation of the mineralization. And then if I pull up the bornite, it's also doing the same thing. Now, the fun one here is, and again, this really goes right back to what Kevin was showing in his other slides, that we have this bornite core followed by a chalcopyrite halo. Now, again, this does not show the geochemistry superimposed on the visual mineralization, but you can see that there are pods of high-grade bornite mineralization. Now, the last image I wanted to show that we had the modeler pull out was we went through the logs and we added up all of the copper percentages that we see in core. And again, we had them sum that up and model it in regards to grade.
This shows you the chalcopyrite, bornite, and chalcocite total copper grade %. Again, the North is here to the North to the top right of the screen. You can see this beautiful North-South trending lineation of the mineralization. Again, our drill holes probably go down to about 250 m. To give you an idea of depth, this is roughly around to 200 m down. Really, really exciting stuff having him along. What we're also doing in-house is as results come in, we're going to be doing an in-house resource modeling. As opposed to just using qualitative values like you're seeing in these images, we're going to start quantifying this and watch the Dumbwa target just start to grow. I'm really excited to have that come in.
Like right now, again, with only 14% of the assay results back in hand, which is just something we can't do as of now. The correlation that we have right now between the visual stuff we're seeing in core and the assays that we have received is phenomenal. It's just a nail-biting time for all of us right now. Everyone's just waiting and waiting for that email to come in with more assays. Everyone wants to look at mineralization. I pulled up a couple of quick photos of some of the mineralization we've intercepted here. This will give you an idea as to some of the really rich chalcopyrite mineralization that we've intercepted. Visually looking at this, this is between 5% to 10% within this interval here of chalcopyrite mineralization.
Now, this is a really good photo showing we have chalcopyrite and bornite mineralization just coarsely disseminated within the gneissic rocks that we're intercepting. This one here, I really love this photo. This is a really good representation of chalcocite after bornite and chalcopyrite. And these are in these what we're calling quartz blowout areas where you have dilation of rock, a lot of porosity, permeability, and mineralized fluids are able to permeate through there and then precipitate out. So absolutely love this photo. This should be a backdrop on my laptop, in fact. So the last one here, again, some really nice bornite and chalcopyrite mineralization, as you can see. We typically call this clotted. It's disseminated mineralization on steroids, really. It's coarsely clotted. So we love seeing that. And again, within that 500 ppm soil anomaly, this is what we commonly see.
It's very predictable that this is what we see. And then I guess the last little one here I have, again, just really nice chalcopyrite and bornite in one of these quartz blowouts. So that's all I have to finish off the amazing presentation that Kevin gave. I'm very thankful that he took the reins on that one because I could not have in my wildest dreams explained all of this that's going on at Dumbwa. He did it very eloquently. So I'm going to switch the page and start talking about Kazhiba because before drilling Dumbwa, Kazhiba was the name of the game here for the Solwezi projects. Now, everyone's been hearing about it. Everyone's been seeing assay results and some of the press releases. So this is just a very quick image that shows the Kazhiba Main drilling area that we focused on starting in 2024.
And Kevin Bonyai was a part of that. This was prior to my return to Midnight Sun. Now, in the image, the red dots show all of the drill holes that we finished in 2024. The black dots are all the 2025 drilling that we wanted to use to properly outline and define the mineralization we identified in 2024 and to also see if there's extensions to the South based on what we are seeing in the geochemistry, which you see in the backdrop here. So this program was finished probably middle of November, and we've been waiting on assay results since then. But in the interim, while we started, when we first started drilling in 2025, we took another look at all of the results that we had from 2024.
Within a lot of the drill holes, we identified what we were originally calling cavities, void areas within the rock or within the soil horizon. Now, we did a quick in-house resource estimate just to get a ballpark idea of what we could potentially be dealing with both in grade and tonnage. The results made us really rethink as to the validity of these cavity intervals. We took it upon ourselves to test two areas where we had visible mineralization at some point of a drill hole. However, the hole also had a large quantity of cavity intervals. Unfortunately, I don't have a better zoom in, but I don't think it's really required. These two little clusters of holes here, we did a test program, a due diligence diamond drilling program, where we focused four holes at 5 m intervals surrounding previously drilled holes from 2024.
All of these eight holes confirmed that there were no void or cavity spaces within the soil horizon. The important part to that is now we're dealing with a solid block of material. We're not dealing with any karst topography or any open void space. Modeling that completely changed the game from having to isolate mineralization from hole to hole because originally it was assumed that there was a void space there and we could not connect the mineralization from one hole to the other. Now with the confirmation of the soil being continuous and having no void, those previously intercepted holes to the East and West or left or right of any of the other drilling is now able to be connected. After we drilled these first initial eight drill holes, we wanted to be very thorough in our drilling here.
So we went back and identified all the drill hole locations, which are shown in blue, that we wanted to retest and redrill via diamond drilling processes as opposed to going back through RC. And this program was the real bottleneck in the Kazhiba Main drilling program due to water for the diamond drilling process. The timing of it just delayed us more and more. But thankfully, the drilling is completely finished. We've rushed the assay results. And as of yesterday, the final results for the Kazhiba Main drilling programs, both the 2025 RC and the 2025 diamond redrilling, have been received and are in our hands. So the next step right now that I'm working on is we're just concluding our in-house due diligence on the QA/QC, making sure that everything conforms and it's all passable.
Once that gets finalized, we're going to send out the final data to our consultants who are doing the resource estimate for the up-and-coming 43-101 on Kazhiba Main. So this is very imminent. We're shooting for end of year, and that's our goal. And I think it's very plausible, even though it is Christmas season and everything like that. In speaking with the modeler, he's happy to work over Christmas, which is a comment you don't usually hear from people. So I'm really excited for this. Now, in addition to the drilling we did at Kazhiba Main, we also identified additional targets to the SouthEast of Kazhiba Main that looked as though they could be copycats of what we were seeing with the Kazhiba Main area. So what we did in the background, I guess I'll explain this really quickly.
In the very background, the isolated circles are historical partial ionic leach samples that were done on a very regional scale. Now, we identified some areas that we wanted to focus on because they seem to be most plausible to be an analog to the Kazhiba Main area, and I just named them the Kazhiba East-Central and the Kazhiba East-Southeast area. We went in on a 50 by 50 m, very densely spaced partial ionic leach grid to help focus in and hopefully identify possible drill target areas, and we were successful in identifying two really good areas here in the SouthEastern corner of the Kazhiba East area and in the Southern half of the Kazhiba East-Southeast area. We immediately thought, "Okay, well, the RC drilling is almost finished at Kazhiba Main. Let's go over to the other targets.
These are very valid targets that we need to test," so we infilled these areas, which are shown in the red polygons, with a 50 by 50 m RC drilling program. Now, this drilling has also been recently completed. As of five, six days ago, the drilling has been completed. Now, with our focus mainly on Kazhiba Main, we have also asked the lab to focus all their energy on providing us results for the Kazhiba Main RC samples that we've submitted to them, and subsequently there has been a delay and backlog on the results that we've been obtaining for the Kazhiba East stuff, but those results are starting to trickle in, so we're happy that we're getting progress on that. However, we're still waiting on the final results to see how things have turned out for the Kazhiba East-Central and the Kazhiba East-Southeast areas.
Now, I guess lastly, everyone loves looking at mineralization. This is one of the first diamond redrill holes that we drilled to debunk the void myth that we thought was invalid, and this was hole 029 East, I believe, if I'm working off of memory, and we had 2 m at over 20% copper. Now, we are at the lab. We're doing acid-soluble copper digestion. So this is exactly what you would expect in a mining scenario. We're not doing total, so we're not measuring the sulfide count of copper minerals, which we did in 2024, and what we've seen is there is very minimal to trace amounts of copper sulfides. This is almost entirely, and I would just say it's entirely malachite. There's nothing else there, so this here was 20%+, like 20%, 20.5% over 2 m from this drill hole here.
This has greatly increased what we previously had with the results from the 2024 drilling. Being able to redrill these areas that were originally called void areas and have results like this come in, absolutely phenomenal. A total game changer for the Kazhiba Main drilling. Yeah, that's basically the drilling story for Kazhiba. It's all in soils. As soon as we hit bedrock, it's competent dead carbonate. We've never encountered any mineralization in the bedrock. The drilling, the predictability of how deep we have to drill is known. It's really interesting. What I love the most about it is the proximity to Kansanshi, the fact that this is in a very close area, very easy to access. It has all the hallmarks of being easily extractable and ready to go. This is very near surface. Mineralization goes from 15 m to 40 m depth.
We're not talking any strip, really. This is one of these postcard opportunities that we also happen to fall upon. So yeah, that is all I have to say about Kazhiba right now.
Excellent.
Adrian, you want to take it back for now?
Yeah. Yeah, that's great, Adrian. Thank you. So what we're going to do is we're going to open this up to Q&A. So I'm sure there's lots of questions out there. But to make this the easiest, what we're going to do is have you submit questions through the chat directly to me. And I will pose those questions to Adrian and Kevin. And we'll make sure we get everything answered here. So that'll be the easiest way to ensure that we have a good flow of these questions coming in and that it doesn't get overwhelming with people trying to speak at the same time.
Please do feel free to send your messages in. We'll give this a minute or so for people to do that. We'll start addressing those questions directly to the guys. Right off the top, Adrian, we'll throw this one to you. Pierre Vaillancourt is asking about the best estimate of a resource at Kazhiba. Certainly at this point, maybe we can talk just in terms of similar to Dumbwa more about the sort of basement and ceiling type of scenarios. I mean, it's a little early. We don't have a good sense of the size yet without the material in and off to the resource team. But I think we have an idea of at least grade and kind of the scale we could be dealing with.
Yeah. I think grade-wise, what we've always been projecting is in the realm of 2% to 4%.
That's fully diluted. That's basically from surface down to the fresh bedrock. Now,
so that's a real acid-soluble grade, right?
That's what that is, correct. Yeah. It's very mineable, for sure. Now, again, there's going to be very, very high pockets in between that as well. Like I said, we've had over 20%. Now, in terms of tonnage, that's a hard one for me to say. I just don't know how big of a footprint this thing's going to be. But we're bouncing around ideas like 100 million ton.
Yeah. I think that's fair to say. I mean, really, at this point, it's all about the grade.
It's all about showing kind of the fact that this is going to at least exceed our base case that we set out with at the very beginning of this and puts us in a hell of a position to move forward at Kazhiba. Certainly, I think we've smashed our hopes of what we thought we were going to have there. We've moved far beyond that, which is pretty exciting.
I agree. I think before we debunked the cavity void issue, we were targeting that 100 million number. I think we had that at that particular point. With the subsequent drilling or the debunking of the void cavity holes, I think that gives a lot of potential, as shown by some of these intercepts I just showed you, that can increase. It could increase handsomely as
well. That's excellent.
I had a question from Peter Holbek. He's asking if any column leach tests have been done on Kazhiba and saying that it looks like percolation may be challenging and wondering if it's been tested for carbon, in other words, plant detritus. Any thoughts there?
No, we haven't done any metallurgical work on this at all. And I think that's largely because of the fact that we have Kansanshi next door as a model. So we haven't put the energy into that at all at this particular point.
Okay. Totally fair. I just want to make sure things are addressed as we go through these questions. I don't want anybody feeling like they're ignored. Did have a question regarding First Quantum talks. I think everybody probably understands there's really nothing we can say on that. We're not in a position to comment right now.
But obviously, we do have a technical alliance. We've made that very clear. And at this point, the goal was let's get the resource done so that we can go forward with a really good idea of exactly what Kazhiba is, kind of tonnage and grade we're sitting on, to put us in the best position to monetize this asset. So hopefully, that kind of at least gives you a sense of where we're sitting right now. Another question here about immediate need of FM. I think the reality is we know that there is a lack of material stockpiled that's acid-soluble. And right now, we know there's a need. So we have something that could be really great for everybody and puts us in a good position to be a win-win situation with Kazhiba as we move forward. Another question from Pierre.
Once we get the resource at Kazhiba put together, what is the timeline with respect to engaging First Quantum, Kansanshi? I think it comes back to the same thing we were just talking about. We've put everything on hold in terms of moving everything forward outside of building a resource. Let's find out what this thing actually is. And then we can move everything forward very quickly from that point. But the key is let's put the resource together. Let's get it in hand. Let's know what we have. And then we can progress with this situation. And it is pretty exciting. This is clearly something that has a lot of value. It's very easy to move forward. So I think the timeline from there should be nice and quick. Let me go quickly through these and moving on.
An update? A question as to what is the update on Mitu? I think it's a really good question, actually, because looking back over the last 18 months, even my own presentations, we talk a lot about the opportunity to have four targets, have a property that actually has four major targets. But I think it would be an absolute disservice to Dumbwa not to say that it is truly the flagship that we have. I mean, it is an incredible target. I always say in presentations, this is a once-in-a-career type opportunity. It very well might be just that. And we need to put an absolute laser focus into the two things that have the biggest value driver for you as shareholders. Those are Dumbwa and Kazhiba. So what we've done is basically taken Mitu. We've taken Crunch. We've taken additional sulfide targets at Kazhiba.
We have put them on the shelf. We're going to leave them on the shelf for now. That includes the Swishy, and we are going to focus absolutely zeroed in, complete laser focus and complete conviction on the plan that Kevin and Adrian have just shown you for Dumbwa and Kazhiba, and let's drive these to the finish line. We have ideas about how to create the best opportunity for Mitu and the Swishy and, of course, Crunch as we move forward towards sort of the end goal we have, which, of course, is selling the project and M&A being our goal, but the point right now is we have something incredible at hand that we have now, as you have seen, pushed very quickly toward the finish line, and we are absolutely laser-focused on doing that, so we're going to stay focused there.
Keep MeToo, Crunch, and the Swishy on the shelf for the time being. Maybe, Adrian, you can address this. A question here that I think goes back to the reporting, the lab result stuff, and just a question saying, what level of confidence do we have in the lab and the results we're getting based on the fact that there has been the QA/QC stuff? So maybe just giving a bit more clarity to QA/QC and what that means, either Kevin or Adrian K, whichever one of you would like to answer that. But maybe just explain a little more about what QA/QC is because we have total confidence in what we're getting in terms of results. But just so that people understand that a little more clearly.
Yeah.
With respect to that, what we do is at the lab, if any of our internal QA/QC inserts fail, we send in a sequence of numbers, a sequence of samples above and below the failure areas and have them re-acid. What that allows us to do is to verify that, A, the lab may have made a mistake and to give us proper results. What we've noticed with the lab, and these are not major failures by all means. They're not failing by a large scale. What we do with our certified reference materials is we have a + or -2 standard deviation failure line. If these results come in below that, we automatically have to resubmit that standard and samples above and below that interval. The majority of the failures that I've been recognizing are slightly there.
They're usually reporting a little bit on the low bias side. But they're ever so slightly below that minimum threshold of the two standard deviation amount. So it's not as though that they're failing by a large value. But based on our statistics, we have to rerun these. Now, everything that we've had the lab rerun for us, the certified reference materials come back, and they are within the two standard deviations. Now, additional to that, what we do is we are going to be sending out to another third-party laboratory a bunch of random samples as well so that we can then have a third party verify our results that we are obtaining from SGS. So it's a two-factor system as well. So we're not solely relying just on one lab all the time.
We're also sending out randomized samples to other laboratories so that we can verify and have the repeatability of the numbers to have that confidence.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the key point is for people to understand that this is a case of doing our job extremely well and making sure that our reporting is bang on, that it's accurate, that there are no discrepancies, that we have a really crystal-clear view of what we're developing as we go, and that none of those numbers are skewed in the bigger picture. So that's why we put QA/QC in place. I think we've all dealt with this throughout our careers at different labs and different jurisdictions. This is a positive thing. It means that our safeguards that have been put in place are working perfectly.
Yeah. Yeah.
Super important.
You're right.
At the end of the day, this is the most important thing: making sure that the numbers are correct. Without that, everything else is useless.
Yeah. Absolutely. Moving on to the next one here. We have another question. How much cash do we have and how much do we spend in 2026? I'll throw the budget question over to someone else in a second, but we're currently sitting on about CAD 38 million, CAD 39 million. Of course, we raised CAD 30.5 million at CAD 1.35 recently, bought deal through Haywood, which is fantastic, so we are very well cashed up and fully funded to attack Dumbwa and all the work we're doing at Kazhiba, so really in good shape. But maybe, Adrian or Kevin, maybe you guys want to address the budget. What is our spend looking like here for the work we're doing out there?
I can tell you this because I recently finished a cost projection table. Going to about 70,000 m of drilling into 2026. So let's say end of Q2 will yield us probably around 8 km of strike length drilled. That's around CAD 16 million.
Yeah.
All in everything.
Awesome. Yeah. It gives you an idea. I mean, we're looking at very, very inexpensive drilling. I mean, it's CAD 1.60 a meter or sorry, CAD 1.60, CAD 160 a meter all in. That is incredibly cheap. And people are surprised by that when I'm in meetings and presentations. We talk about the cost. This is cheap. This is cheap work. That doesn't include the RC drilling that Adrian's been doing at Kazhiba. And that falls, if I'm not mistaken, around CAD 80 a meter. Is that right, Adrian?
It's CAD 50, CAD 55.
CAD 50. Sorry. There you go. CAD 50, even cheaper. Yeah.
But that's completed now, right?
We're not projecting to do any more RC in the upcoming year. So it's solely on due.
That's awesome. Awesome. So looking forward to M&A. I do have a question here about M&A percentage of deposit value for acquisition price. I think I'll give the answer I generally give to this, which is that at the end of the day, we are very, very clear about the fact that we see this as driving an M&A opportunity, that it is a really remarkable opportunity with the optionality of Dumbwa and Kazhiba having that near-term production scenario coupled with the exploration upside that Kevin has so beautifully laid out now for people to see. We look at it as it's very hard at this point to really pin a number to what M&A could look like on an asset like this.
And I always throw it to the same thing, which is that if you look at Lumwana, Lumwana was purchased 20 years ago from Equinox for $7.3 billion. That is an incredible price. It was a 900 million ton deposit at 0.5 that quite simply did not hang together until Kevin and his team came in and fixed what Lumwana was, managed to find Lubwe and Malundwe, straightened out Chimiwungo. And at the end of the day, that was at $1.50 or $1.80 copper. So when you look at that $7 billion price tag or $7.3 billion price tag, the offer that came in prior to that was $5.5 billion. That was Barrick coming over the top. It gives you a sense of what these systems are worth. But we're talking about something that now we're at $5 plus copper.
We're looking at an asset that is similar or potentially larger in terms of scale of the target. This is an incredible opportunity for M&A, and it's only getting better and better as we go, so really, I think that that kind of gives you some context, at least to the kind of scale we could be looking at, and the other part of this question was around whether we look at this as a piece-by-piece thing. I think we have to look at it as a company in terms of how do we create the most value out of all of the assets, whether that's Dumbwa, Kazhiba, Mitu, Crunch, the Swishy? Do we sell everything as one big package? Do we break it up into pieces? Do we do a spin co and put some of those assets into a new company?
Those are all things that we have to look at. Suffice it to say, every single one of those decisions is going to be made with the goal of creating the most value we possibly can for shareholders. So right now, the real driver for M&A is Dumbwa. Certainly, Kazhiba is the cash optionality and the opportunity for near-term production that can drive work with no dilution and certainly gives us a nice re-rate and a nice backstop to our valuation currently. But the time to make those decisions is over the next little while as we push Dumbwa forward. But I would say that no option's off the table. And right now, the focus is to drive this thing forward using Dumbwa as the flagship. It is really the biggest opportunity and then bring each of those other opportunities forth as we go.
So hopefully, that answers your question about M&A. Moving forward on the technical side here, another question from Peter Holbek. Understanding that we are using four acid digestion, how does the matrix of the standard compare to your rocks? Adrian, that's a question for you.
Oh, geez. I don't know how to answer that, Peter. I'm sorry. Let me mull it over, and I'll circle back to you. Let's just keep going. I'll think about this.
Yeah. You're definitely beyond my technical side here. And for everybody listening in, I'm not speaking in third person. You do have two Adrians on the call. So
I'm sorry. I think I know what Peter's asking here with respect to the QA/QC standards. Is that correct, Peter?
I would think that we're talking about Kazhiba, actually. I could be wrong.
No, no. Actually, Dumbwa.
Oh, Dumbwa. Okay.
Are you asking about the standard of the matrix for our QA/QC standards?
Yeah. I was just wondering. You alluded to the fact that they seem to be systematically low, and I was just wondering if that's something not many people look at as the matrix of the standard material.
I actually did look at that prior to purchasing standards here. And we are sourcing our standard material from the Central African Copper Belt. So it's like-to-like material. It's not stuff that's from here in Canada or South America. It is Central African Copper Belt material. So it is like-to-like comparisons. I wanted to make sure we had that so we had an apple-to-apple comparison as well.
Yeah. That's good. Okay. Great. Thanks. Yeah. Very good question. Awesome. Thanks, Peter. We had another question here. This is a slightly different one, so I'll grab this.
Just asking about with the stock trading at CAD 2, why do we do the deal at CAD 1.35? Let's just say that we raised money in May 2024. We raised CAD 10 million at CAD 0.22. It was the largest financing that Midnight Sun had done to date. Going into the financing, we did it at CAD 1.35. We had the majority of that CAD 10 million still in the bank. We were in really great shape cash-wise. The timing was perfect. CAD 1.35 is a seven-times lift from our previous financing price and a very, very fair valuation given where we were at. The run to CAD 2, I think that was a momentary blip. I don't think it was necessarily a fair valuation for where we were at with no resource and no assays. I think that doing a deal at CAD 1.35 was pretty well bang on, good valuation, good opportunity.
And the book that we brought in and that Haywood put on the table is a. I would refer to as a who's who. We brought in some of the best fund managers in Canada, some of the best people in the business, and we have fantastic shareholders as a result of that deal. And most importantly, we have given Adrian and Kevin the funding they needed to go out and do the job that they've just shown you today. And there's no better place to be than well-funded and driving a project like this forward. So we're in really, really good shape. This is a technical question again, guys, from Gavin. They're asking about any deleterious elements at Dumbwa, mentioning that there had been some uranium contamination at Lumwana. But any deleterious elements at Dumbwa? My understanding is no. But feel free to throw that out there. Take that.
Nothing. There's no uranium, no cadmium, no arsenic. There's no bonus elements either. There's no gold or silver or cobalt. It's straight pure copper play.
Yeah. Excellent. There you go. There's a nice simple answer for you. The next one coming from Sean, asking about whether we're signing CAs with respect to the Dumbwa data. We do have a data room set up.
Hey, Adrian. Yeah. Hi, Matt MacKenzie. I'm going to jump in just to understand.
Yeah. Go for it.
The nature of CAs are that CAs themselves are confidential.
Exactly.
Who we've signed with and the details of them, of course. So I think best we just leave it at that.
Yep. Perfect. That's, I think, the perfect answer. Let's go to the next one here. No, that's Kevin. Kevin's answering via the chat. Perfect. Much depth potential to Dumbwa.
Now we're getting back to technical here with Pierre. Kevin, maybe you want to answer this one. Is there much depth potential to Dumbwa given the vertical structures? I'll field that.
Yeah. Go for it. I mean, I covered the geologic model that we're working on a sheet-like North-South trending shear zone. Certainly, our structural measurements, our observations on the core, the mineralization, the bornite going out to chalcopyrite or bornite chalcocite, cuprite going out to chalcopyrite certainly supports. I think we've got to the stage with the geological mineralization model where we can robustly defend it. The East-West constraint, I think we're very close to closing this thing off East and West along the majority of the strike that we've drilled so far. Pierre is correct to identify that we've not done a great deal of work at depth. We have a couple of deep strat holes.
There wasn't much in either of them. It was more to try and understand the geology and structure at a very early stage. We don't drill down below 300 m anymore. I feel when you look at the grade tonnage curves, that what we're trying to prove here is a at-surface, near-surface, low-grade, ultra-high tonnage copper deposit in a very mature mining district. So we do tend to not go below 200 with our drilling. Certainly, when we go below 200, the system does seem to weaken with depth. I'm not sure that's persistent along the entire strike length. It's certainly true of where we drilled so far. But I'm comfortable to take this down to 180, 200. We don't actually have a technical explanation about why it gets a bit weaker with depth. I think I'll leave it at that.
It remains open at depth, and we're not sure why it weakens. But maybe with more drilling and more examination, we'll be able to answer that question a bit more.
Yeah. That's totally fair. That's a good answer, Kev. Thank you. So just looks like one last question here. We're basically through the questions we've received. If anybody has anything else, got another minute or so to throw it out there before we close things off. This is asking more on the corporate side, asking about warrants and asking what we have in terms of warrants. You can actually pull down the deck that's currently on our website, has a full breakdown of warrants that are currently outstanding. We basically have somewhere in the range of about 18 million unexercised CAD 0.33 warrants that are there.
So there have been a fair number of the warrants at $0.33 exercised over the last few months, but there are lots left outstanding. Those, of course, are good to May 2027. So there's a nice long strike length to those still outstanding. So we got lots of time. And that is another function of cash coming in the door to work on these projects. So very, very good from that perspective. And of course, the warrants attached to the most recent financing, $2.5 warrant for two years. So just to answer that question clearly, we've got lots of warrants there and lots of capital left to come in. We're in great shape. So we've done a great job. Any other questions, throw them out there. But I think we've got through just about everything to this point.
And I hope everybody enjoyed the opportunity to hear directly from Kevin and Adrian Karolko as to what they're doing, give you a better sense of what we're accomplishing out there, why we're so excited as a team, as a company. And I just think as a group, we're so proud to have these two individuals leading the way geologically. They are incredibly, incredibly good geologists. We're blown away by the work they've done and what they've accomplished so far. But just an incredible opportunity to build out a project that really has incredible scale and potential. And they are doing this incredibly, incredibly quickly. So here we are today, looking back over the last 24 months, these guys are doing a bang-up job.
So Kevin and Adrian, thanks for taking the time today to do this and put you in my position of doing the presentation for this one and get the word out about what you're accomplishing out there.
Well, I'm very happy I don't have your job, Adrian. I have to admit.
I hope you enjoyed the hot seat.
Very much so. It's still steaming.
Yeah. Exactly. So we will do these again. Just so everyone knows, the goal is to kind of do this on an ongoing basis. As we have more results, more assays, and we move on a little further, we'll definitely do this again and get Adrian and Kevin in the hot seat. But they did a great job. I hope everybody enjoyed it. And a huge thanks to all of the participants that got on the call today to listen in.
And we look forward to seeing you next time. Take care, everyone.
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