Thanks, everybody. Good afternoon. It's great to be back at The Forum's conference. My name is Sam Lee. I'm the President and CEO. I'm very excited to talk about what is one of the most, if not the most important large copper and gold porphyry in British Columbia. 2025 has been a transitional year. We were one of the top performing stocks on the TSXV, ranked number seventh. In 2026, we are endeavoring to advance what we think is going to be the next transition for the company. I will be making forward-looking statements. The reason why this project is so important is that it is not only the value opportunity that's underpinned by our major copper gold porphyry located in British Columbia, but it's also the growth across a 50 km bona fide porphyry district, of which we own 100% of 40 km of that district.
We came out with a study in 2025 that showed very attractive economics that the market ended up sanctioning with over CAD 155 million of equity in six months. We've also advanced two discoveries across this 40 km portion of the 50 km district, which has positioned us today. We've also built our group, second to none board, management, and investors that we have amassed over the last five and a half years since this company has been under new leadership. In February of 2025, we released the PEA, the Preliminary Economic Assessment, that boasted at the time some of the most compelling economics that we saw. This was done, keep in mind, at a CAD 4.20 long-term analyst consensus pricing for copper, CAD 2,150 per ounce of gold, which was analyst consensus at the time in 2025 of February.
It yielded a CAD 2 billion after-tax NPV with an IRR after tax of 29%, payback of 1.9 years, and NPV to CapEx of 1.7x. That's on an after-tax basis. Under those assumptions, that would make this project one of the most compelling economic projects, not only in Canada but in the world. The market, as I said, has sanctioned us to move this project forward, not only through pre-feasibility, but feasibility and sanctioning as quickly as possible. Hence the reason why we were able to raise about CAD 155 million in the last six months. Part of the reasons why is that typically during the de-risking phase of a project like ours, there are complications. You go from 30% level of certainty down to 15%. Things are going to expand, which at the end of the day is reality.
The fact that this project has so many levers around not only commodity price appreciation, put things in perspective. When we were sensitizing this project back pretty much this time last year, the price for gold was about CAD 2,150 per ounce. At spot at the time, CAD 2,900 per ounce. The project NPV increases to about CAD 5 billion after-tax NPV and a 45% after-tax internal rate of return. This project is a very important copper critical metal project that we all know is the critical metal to electrify and decarbonize to the extent that our world is looking to do. It has a massive leverage to gold. It produces approximately 200,000 ounces a year. It will produce approximately 200,000 oz a year of gold in the first six years, making it predominantly a gold project, and that is our competitive advantage.
It has massive leverage to the commodity price upside. In addition to that, the things that we can control as we go through this de-risking phase this year, as we progress through a pre-feasibility study, it's to increase metallurgy significantly. That's something that we're looking to come out with our solution around how we're going to do that, especially around the gold, which obviously has an incredible lever to these commodity prices. We're coming out with that in Q2 of this year. The second thing is resources. We're expanding our resources significantly through the discovery of West Goodspeed, which we made approximately two years ago, and we've now released all of those results and have confidence that it is going to have a very material impact on our resource estimate. That's going to come out in Q2 of this year as well.
Finally, we've just been added to the B.C.'s Critical Minerals Office, which is an office that was strictly focused on advancing projects on an expedited basis. We are in a very charged political environment today, where in Canada we have identified that we need to extract and take advantage of our greatest commodities, our greatest assets, and that is our natural resource commodities, including copper and gold. That's the value proposition. As we go through the next three to six to nine months, that is what the market is looking forward as it relates to progressing the project on an expedited basis. As a result, we expect a rerating event at each stage of that process. Now, the growth proposition is something significant.
We think of this as a pretty much a free call option in the sense that we own 40 km of a 50 km porphyry district that started with the extraction of copper and gold, similar type asset back in the 1970s by BHP for an Island Copper Mine. We pretty much own everything to the northwest of that copper and gold mine. Today, excuse me, we have allocated CAD 10 million purely towards exploration budget, which would make this the largest exploration endeavor that this company and this project has faced over the last 70 years. Within that exploration strategy, we're breaking it up into two very distinctive objectives. The first objective is to increase the higher-margin resources that's making this project so economical today in that phase I.
We're just about complete that exploration program and set to release our first batch of results around that high-margin northern corridor area that are creating these great economics for our project. The second is to be big and bold. Right now, we haven't drilled deeper than 350-400 m in this northern corridor, which carries the high-grade, high-margin. We're talking about up to 1.5 g per ton of gold equivalent, pretty much at surface in the pit shell. That's what we released over the last couple of weeks as it relates to our initial results around infill. We see that higher-grade and potentially higher-margin rock extend beyond the pit shell. It's incumbent on us to go deep.
We're a billion-dollar market cap company right now, so we have the ability to be bold and to go deep and to find those much larger intercepts by being bold. We can afford to go ahead with development and growth at the same time, and that's exactly what we're doing. The third part of our exploration strategy is extremely important because it effectively takes into account the overall nature of this 50 km district. We have inherited over 70 years' worth of data. That's seven companies' worth of data that you would not be able to replicate in a short period of time, no matter how much money you have. We've collaborated with a think tank out of Stanford University, out of Silicon Valley, to synthesize the data over these 70 years.
We've got the right people in place now to create or at least convert the correlations into causation effects by eliminating those false positives. This is something that is pure option value across a district that is 100% owned by NorthIsle. What's driving the development strategy around the value proposition at NorthIsle is the political environment. In the 30 years that I've been in the mining industry, I've never seen such political alignment across the board in Canada for natural resource extraction industries. My Chairman, who's 87 years old, most of you know him, Dale Corman, Mining Hall of Famer. In those 70 years of being in the industry, the last time this has happened, this incredible coalition of support for the natural resource industry, was in the 1960s when they built the infrastructure around our project for the Island Copper Mine.
There's hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure that has been paid for by the government, sunk costs, to get this material to our global partners, in which case, the case of BHP, it was the Japanese. That is what's driven this momentum, certainly within the province, but also in Canada, around expediting projects as quickly as possible. That's what the market sanctioned us for with this recent CAD 115 million offering. Of the 18 critical metal projects identified by the government, which is the projects on the left-hand of this slide, five of them have already been expedited. These are low-hanging fruit projects that effectively are mines that were already in the permitting process previously. They were expedited. Now comes the more challenging part of development projects. Of that group 14 and 13 left, we are the top priority of that group.
Nothing happens without good execution. Throughout the course of the last five and a half years, we've put together a team that have been the leaders in the industry around mining, finance, development, exploration, and then, of course, production. That's something that we hold very close to our hearts here. Our leadership team comes from the top. We have two Mining Hall of Famers on the board, including Dale Corman, my Chairman, who most of you know, but also Alex Davidson. For those that don't know Alex spent most of his career obviously building American Barrick from a CAD 30 million company into a CAD 30 billion company. He's in love with districts. This is something that he really does have a fondness towards and for.
What he views is that our 30-year project that we've defined as part of our study work is a starter pit to a much broader district, of which we own 40 km, 100% of. This is truly a very important time in our company's progress around execution and discovery. This is why we are one of the top, if not the top, performers in our peer group, no matter how you cut it, one to five-year period, whether it's copper or gold peers. We're the seventh best performer on the TSX in 2025. We're very well capitalized. We have about CAD 140 million of cash in the bank today. We have no debt, very clean balance sheet, no warrants, nothing that encumbers the upside of a project's share price. It's because we are fundamental owners.
We being the insiders, the company management team, are fundamental holders of the company, owning now over 12% of NorthIsle. This is something that we always discuss internally. When we issue CAD 1 worth of dilution, we have to see a multiplier effect, a three to five times return on that dilution, and that's a shareholder mentality. That's alignment with our shareholders, and that's something that will continue on the positive impact around our share price appreciation. I've spent 20 years, I ran various functions at CIBC, including a lot of cross-border M&A. This is something that is very interesting, right, because M&A speaks to where we are in the cycle. I've always said copper is always like a tomorrow story, but copper today is the thing that's driving M&A.
People are understanding how insatiable the demand is going to be, obviously through the electrification, decarbonization, but also the dependence on AI technologies and things that just have a massive consumption of power. What we've seen, certainly in our peer group since I started about five and a half years ago, is a complete consolidation of this peer group to the point where I can't actually count more than two or three companies that are part of our peer group now because they all have been taken out. This is something that has really driven, I think, how we think about our project around developing it as quickly as possible within the confines of consultation and consensus, the things that really drive project expedited behavior. In conclusion, there are a lot of very, very important catalysts in 2026.
Part of it belongs to the project development side of it, so the de-risking, re-rating, so new resources coming up with the inclusion of West Goodspeed, which is the new discovery in Q2. The optimization of metallurgy that is significantly going to impact the recoveries, hopefully on gold. That's something that we continue to believe is going to be a significant value driver for our project. Thirdly, something that we've experienced briefly, which was the success of being included in the B.C. Critical Minerals Strategy as one of the top priority projects in British Columbia to advance that progression as quickly as possible. I have about six and a half minutes right now. We have an option here. We could either just take Q&A, which I'd love to take. I'd love to make this a little bit more of a collaborative discussion.
I could go through a really cool VRIFY deck that just shows where everything sits. Maybe that's with a show of hands and the hands representing questions, we can make that determination. Does anyone have any questions at this point? Okay, VRIFY it is. This is essentially the landscape in British Columbia. As I said, about 18 priority projects, five have been expedited. The remainder has to go through the permitting process. We are the top priority. The reason behind that is we are located on Vancouver Island, about 500 km away from Victoria. This is really significant because everything that was built north of Campbell River back in the 1970s was built for the Island Copper Mine. This is the mine that BHP ran for 24 years. In fact, Port Hardy was built for the Island Copper Mine as well.
It was about a 300-person town in the 1960s. Through the same type of political sentiment that exists today, all this money was put into the area to build the roads, the power, the infrastructure that is able to support a large-scale copper-gold porphyry mine such as ours and the Island Copper Mine. This is what the Island Copper Mine looks like today. Today it's in reclamation, but this has significant advantages for us potentially and something that we are looking to pursue with BHP on a pretty expedited basis as well. To the north of us, we have one of the largest, if not the largest, wind farms in British Columbia. It produces about 100 MW of clean power into the current distribution grid substation that's only a few kilometers away from us. This is what our project outline looks like.
This is the economics that support the project outline. It's effectively a two-phase project where you have the high-grade portion in phase I, six years of gold production, about 200,000 oz a year and about 50 million lbs a year. That has a high NSR value per ton of rock, high returns that allows us to reduce our capital intensity up front. That allows us then to fund phase II, which then takes us to the full 29 years life of mine project. That's sort of how it lays out. In terms of the construct of that first phase, that higher margin, that consists of Red Dog, which is shown here, which is a medium-grade zero strip ratio project, which gets mined out in the first five years. We have a very significantly higher margin project called Northwest Expo.
This is really the driver of the economics in phase I. We just came out with our final infill results a couple of weeks ago, and not only did we see the continuity in the medium to lower grade areas in this pit, but we also saw a continuity and an increase in the higher grade portions that did not get reflected in the pit. What that means is that the lightly shaded colored pit shell blocks, which are medium to low grade, will be converted into high grade based on these results. In addition to that, we found that this high-grade zone in that red area towards the northwest continues down at surface. This is also informing our exploration plan that we're currently drilling right now, the CAD 10 million plan that I talked about. This is Hushamu.
This is about 700 million tons of total resources, but there's about 200 million tons there that exists. That is about 0.5%-0.6% copper equivalent, so above-average mining grades in the world. That essentially represents the final six to 29-year life of mine. Expect that to be obviously identified clearly. When we move on to the growth projects or the growth exploration strategy that I mentioned, right now, the first two phases right now that's being drilled out is in the Northern Corridor. Again, this is the area that is the high-grade, high-margin area that really kicks our project into gear in the first five years. Our objective there is to not only expand those high-grade resources, but also to find different discoveries within this northern higher-grade area of the Northern Corridor.
Sorry, just quickly, this is the area that is not in the resources. This is called West Goodspeed. That's the area that's not in the resources. This is the area that is in the resources. This is about a 750 m, kilometer, I wish, strike. This is about 1.2 km strike. This is going to have a significant impact on our resource estimates as we release them in Q2, because this area of West Goodspeed currently is not in the resources. As you can see, it's right next to phase I. It's about 100 m away from Red Dog, which is in phase I. That's something that I think the market is anticipating and continues to anticipate positive results on. The thing around the district scale opportunity, and this is the really exciting part, the call option that I keep on talking about.
We have 70 years, terabytes worth of data that we've inherited through seven companies. We're now taking this data, we're synthesizing it through this Silicon Valley think tank, Stanford Mineral-X. We've just hired John Thompson to advise us on the technical side, foremost expert in the porphyry space. We retained Dr. Pablo Mejia as our VP Exploration, who came from Ero Copper to do exactly this, data generation around probabilistic targeting around district-scale exploration activities. This is information, this is data that you just cannot accumulate in a short period of time. We have, again, 70 years worth of this data to effectively take what we currently have in terms of deposits. All of those four deposits that I talked about exist here, and BHP, the Island Copper Mine, exists here. Okay?
All of that data in between, we are now using to generate a targeted district-scale exploration target that we know can help us increase our probabilistic chances of world-class discoveries. That's being funded through the CAD 10 million offering and then some once we get a better idea of that targeting program in the H2 of this year. I think that's my time. I don't think there's any time for additional questions.
There's not.
Please come reach me if you have any questions. Thank you very much.
That was right on the button. Thanks, Sam.