Good afternoon and welcome to the Orosur Mining investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Louis Castro, Chairman. Good afternoon to you, sir.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks very much for that introduction. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Louis Castro. I'm Executive Chairman of Orosur Mining, and Brad George is CEO. I'll make a quick intro now, and then I'll hand over to Brad for the presentation, and then we'll have the questions and answers. Well, it's been about six months since we last had a session like this back in May. That was two months after we did our previous raising. I'm glad to say that we've had a second raising, which was very successful just a few weeks ago, which has been quite transformative for the company. In fact, it's been a very busy six months, as Brad will go through in some detail.
Clearly we've been very busy on the ground, both in Colombia and Argentina. Corporately, we've strengthened the balance sheet, having cleaned out Uruguay finally. We've actually got positive net assets there. And the number shown in the year-end account is gonna strengthen even more once we have the cash reflected on the balance sheet. Transformation on the balance sheet as well as results on the ground. We've used our TSX-V listing and the AIM listing quite extensively, and we've now got a pretty good blend of institutional, family office, and retail shareholders. And long may that continue. We need all three. We've now got three brokers following the company. Red Cloud Securities in Canada, Greenwood Capital in London, and also Turner Pope who've been with us for some time.
All three are producing notes, so again, that's good news for us. Both Brad and I are working very hard on promoting the company. There are an awful lot of conferences out there and meetings like this, so we're pretty selective as to what we go to. We've been busy doing that, and we'll carry on doing as much as we can. Okay. That's enough from me. I'm sure you'd wanna hear more of the details, so I'll hand over to Brad.
Thanks, Louis. Good evening, everybody. It's midnight down here, but I'm all caffeinated up, so we should be fine. This chat this evening, and I always give this apology to those who've followed the company for quite some time, is that we also assume that there are newcomers. We do go back over a lot of historical stuff just for newcomers. It's also a good chance for us to test drive our new presentation. Obviously, we spent a few dollars on getting someone who knows PowerPoint better than I do, so apologies in advance for any typos that still may persist. The presentation really, I guess, is just to give a snapshot of, as Louis said, we have changed a bit in the last 12 months.
Obviously the gold price played a large part of that, but our success at Pepas, the drill results, capital raisings, tidying up Uruguay. We're a very different company than when Louis and I joined the board in mid-2020. It's been a long, hard road to be an overnight success. While I won't say we're a success yet, we're at least a little bit better off than we were then. Usual gumpf. Just a corporate snapshot of who we are. There's been no major staff changes, and that won't change other than the addition of a part-time technical advisor, Dr. Warwick Crowe. We just felt we needed to beef up the geological side of things.
There's always a need for a third or fourth or fifth pair of eyes as some of these things. Having someone external who's not on a day-to-day basis wedded to the project and emotionally tied to the project is very key to spot things that change. Share price, of course, has done rather well. We're up about 800% in 12 months. That's run pretty hard. I think we've all enjoyed that, particularly those who were in at the beginning. How much more is to go is up to us, I guess. You know, the combination of a very buoyant gold price and some very attractive drill results.
We have a lot more to go, and we'd like to think that this is just the beginning, but clearly the work has to be done. Cash balance now very healthy. As of today, we're about exactly $17 million in the treasury. If those outstanding warrants were going to be exercised, all of which are now in the money, that's another probably $2 million or $3 million. We're in a very decent position. That cash sees us through to, well, at least the next 18 months, which will be the plan, obviously subject to how fast we do things. At the current burn rates, it lasted a while, but obviously things have changed. If we get some attractive drill results, we can ramp up.
It's nice to have a very long runway ahead of us now. We can work and we can do things without thinking about the next capital raising. Just the elephant in the room, I guess. You know, this is a talk today on the day when the gold price yet again hits a record high. I'm not gonna predict what that's gonna be. I'm not gonna say whether or not I think that's justified. The market does what the market does. We can't predict the price, but we are required to react to it. Obviously from our point of view, having gold projects, advanced gold projects, attractive gold projects in a buoyant gold market is absolutely key. I mean, it's. We have what the market wants at this, one of these moments in time where the metal price goes crazy.
I'm old enough and grizzled enough to have been through these cycles before. That is you get these moments of. I wouldn't say madness, but moments of time when the metal price just goes on a real tear. For those who just happen to be in the right position, who have assets in the right place of the right commodity, these are wonderful times. The key point, I guess, I would make and I always make, is that this didn't happen yesterday. All of the. Well, both of the gold projects we've got have been quite a long time in the development. We've been at Anzá in Colombia for over 10 years. It's now coming good, having got the project back from our partners last year. El Pantano in Argentina, we've been there for almost four years.
These things take a long time to come to fruition, and as I make the point, you almost need to go into these commodities in these countries well in advance when everyone thinks you're nuts, when no one wants to be there, nobody wants the commodity. Having some faith that things will turn, because once the gold price is running, getting into these projects is all but impossible. We got on these projects at the right time, at the right cost. To repeat them now simply wouldn't happen. The overview, we have three projects. I'll talk about two tonight. We have the Colombian project, the Anzá project, just west of Medellín. That's our, for want of a better word, our flagship project. The most advanced project that was giving us most of the share price momentum.
The Argentine El Pantano project, large scale, very juicy, but early stage. We'll be keen to drill there in a matter of days, actually. I think I tweeted today that the camp is being mobilized as we speak. Then the Nigerian lithium project, I won't talk about that. That one's currently in review. The lithium market is not in the same league as the gold market. We will sit down soon and assess whether that continues to remain in our portfolio. Well-balanced, and as the thing on the sidebar says, all the projects were acquired and are being managed on the basis of geology. You have to have the right rocks. All of our projects, we think, are in the right place with the right geology. Things have gone on geologically. Investment thesis.
Setting aside the gold price, I think the point is, you know, is that we have the right projects at the right moment in time when the market is looking for attractive, advanced gold projects. We got lucky. Call it luck. Call it design. We are well funded now, so the overhang or the expectation of capital raising is gone for the foreseeable future. We're now just assessed on the basis of results. That carries on. I think what's key, and has always been key, is that both of those projects, El Pantano and Anzá, either A, we own 100%, or we have a pathway to 100%. That was always a very key objective of ours when doing these deals. You know, we had options of doing JVs, having minority, majority stakes.
We always felt that 100% was what you wanted to have if you could get it. One, you own it. Two, people know what you are. Three, you have options. You can do deals. You can do JVs. You can sell. You can do all kinds of things. The more you have, the more control you have. It just makes life a lot easier. Getting the project at Anzá back 100% was key for us. Absolutely key for our share price. The negotiation of the JV in Argentina four years ago, that was a wish list. We wanted 100%. We got it probably by luck and by timing. I think, again, that gives us great optionality. Pepas clearly is what gets the market attention.
Those very thick, very high-range sections clearly shows that there's some economic deposit there. Not yet a resource, but you know, we've gone from being exploration into now resource developable, resource definition, and that does change the complexion of the company. I think we really have. You know, I think what we've also tried to do is we're not a one-trick pony. We have a number of projects that are and prospects within those projects that are at different stages. So we can appeal to all people. If some investors like advanced, some investors like exploration, we have something for everybody. We have one project advancing, another one near resource, and two more that are potentially large scale but untouched. We have lots of things, lots of balls in the air that we can fund and advance in parallel.
Having those parallel news flow streams is also quite helpful to the market. Just a map, of course, where we are. We don't have a head office, as that map might suggest. I'm in my cupboard in my apartment in Perth. Louis in London. Our staff all live at home, work at home. We don't have an office. We don't have any major overheads. We work from home and from, you know, wherever there's Wi-Fi. The projects, obviously, Colombia, South America, and El Pantano in Argentina. As I said, Nigeria is currently in review. The Anzá project, we're just west of Medellín. We're northern Colombia.
We're about as the crow flies about 25 km west of Medellín, about 50 km on a windy road, in what's referred to as the Mid Cauca Belt. The Mid Cauca Belt is Colombia's main belt, main gold belt. It runs a couple of 100 km north-south along the Cauca River, which is also the Cauca Fault. The name comes up quite often. This is a large belt of Miocene rocks just to the east of the Andes Mountains. That's resulted in a whole series of porphyry intrusions along this belt. That's, in turn, created a series of, at times, very large gold deposits, either porphyries or porphyry association with epithermal association. A large range of gold deposits of different styles.
The porphyries themselves are big and low-grade, and above them the epithermals can be big and very high-grade. It's a question of where you are in the system. This long line of very exciting, at times very high-grade gold projects. Just to the north of us is Buriticá, about 40 km run by Zijin Mining. That's 10 million-11 million ounces at over 10 g per tonne gold in resource. In operation now, albeit with some difficulties with local illegal miners. To the south of us, probably just about 80 km, is the Guayabales project of Collective Mining. Currently being drilled out, getting spectacular results. Really big, thick, long intersections of very high-grade material. Again, showing the region is very fertile, and in the right place you get these, you know, very nice deposits.
A few others in the area that give us, you know, comfort that the belt is fertile, and also tells us that, you know, there is a lot of work in the area going on that's positive for the social side of things. There's an expectation that mining will progress and understanding of mining. From our point of view, there are mills and operations in the region that we potentially can use for third-party toll treating, which we might talk about a bit later on. We have some consolidation of our licenses. We did have about 400 sq km. We're now reducing a few things with dropping a few off that aren't really or a few applications off that aren't really key anymore.
We're currently sitting at about 350 sq km applications and licenses in the Mid Cauca Belt. Still making us one of the largest land holders in the region. We're working predominantly on the core part of that project, which made up the previous joint venture that we had for some years with Agnico and Newmont. Agnico and Newmont worked together on the joint venture, and as Michelle would know, we bought them out in December last year to have the project back 100%. We're still working on that core group of licenses. It's largely untouched from a point of view of exploration across the license area, but we have three prospects within the project that are key. The APTA prospect we'll talk about has been drilled for some years.
It's probably on the brink of resource. It was never moved to resource for a number of reasons. We've recently had a bit of a reassessment of the geological model there. We'll go back and test with a view of that becoming a resource sometime next year. Pepas is the one that gets everybody excited. Smallish, but extraordinarily high grade, thick at surface. A whole range of benefits that make it very juicy as a short term, smaller scale, but extraordinarily lucrative potential operation. That's really nice for us. El Cedro in the south part of the prospect area is a large high grade porphyry gold. Porphyry, we think, but undrilled, and that will be the target of work in the new year. Just to give you a view of where those projects are. Pepas is in the north.
This is the license map. The darker yellow, darker brown are the licenses. The lighter colors are the applications. Pepas is in the far northern extremes. APTA is roughly in the middle, and El Cedro is in the south. The key point I think is that all three of those prospects are on one license. Even though the map does show two separate licenses, they're actually the one license broken into two pieces. Having one license and three prospects does make things a bit easier from a permitting point of view, and work point of view. It's nice to have a very lucrative and a very fertile prospect. Pepas, the history is that this was discovered by Agnico, we have to give them credit for that.
They first drilled a hole into this in sort of early 2022, about April, in the northern parts of the prospect, after they'd been able to break out of the COVID bubble. Following some regional bulk sampling mapping. They drilled a couple of holes in April into August 2022 that were very juicy. You know, the first hole, I think from memory, was 150 m at 3 gram per ton gold from surface, which is, you know, pretty extraordinary. A few more from there. For a variety of internal corporate reasons, they decided to depart Colombia.
Those holes and what we thought they meant geologically was what drove us to be a bit stubborn in trying to get the project back 100%, rather than simply diluting them away as we could have done under the JV terms. There was that 18 months of pain up until the end of last year where we were just doggedly trying to get the JV unwound to get the project back in a way that we wanted it. Share price suffered, cash balance suffered, my hairline suffered. We got the project back, we felt for the right reasons, and that was met with almost immediate success. We signed the deal on one day.
We'd begun to drill the week before, and our first hole in the Pepas was 70 m at 5.5 g from surface, and that got the market sitting up. What that told us geologically, however, is that the first couple of holes by Agnico and Newmont were in the wrong direction. They'd been drilling sort of subparallel to strike. We swung the rig around about 80 degrees. Our second hole was 75 m at 7.5 g per ton gold from surface. That showed that it had width, it had strike, and it was just, you know, off to the races. Since that period of time, and really it's less than 12 months now and probably we've drilled probably a touch over 5,000 m, it's been just close stepping out drilling of the Pepas Deposit.
We can call it a deposit now, I think, quite comfortably, proving it to be a resource that we hope to move to a resource estimate in coming months. The key, what it is remains to be seen. It's an epithermal system of intermediate sulfidation above a porphyry. We've been in there and done our own work, and we've maybe had some different views of the previous companies. There are porphyry systems in the area. It is an epithermal system. It's in tuffs. Tuffs are a volcanic ash rock that was porous. Those tuffs were then pre-prepared by being silicified, made brittle, fractured, brecciated, and that created an attractive host for later gold-bearing events. It's interesting in that it's not simply a vein.
It's a big, thick chunk that's been entirely mineralized over 50 m-80 m thickness in time. It makes it very geologically unusual but makes it very attractive for mining proposition. This is for a mining engineer about as good as it gets, apart from size, but shape, grade, thickness, top of a hill, this is extremely attractive. That's what led us to make the decision to focus on moving that core block to a resource fast rather than moving out and exploring more regionally, which we will do. We took a view that we wanted to get this core to a resource quickly first, get it in the bag, get that moving into feasibility, permitting and understanding how things work financially, and then go back and explore and expand for a number of reasons.
The key, I guess, is that the key driver for us is that, you know, while I don't think Pepas is going to be at this stage a multi-million ounce resource, and therefore it was never going to be an Agnico Eagle or Newmont-sized resource, for us, this is absolutely perfect. It has many things going for it. It's 2 km from the main paved Cauca highway, straight line. There's literally a power line right over the top, the main scheme power line. It's top of a hill. It outcrops. It's thick at surface. Proximity to third-party mills. As a mining pit, it would have a very low strip ratio.
It has the potential not only for very low production cost per ounce, but very low CapEx, very low development cost, which I think is key for a junior company. That for us, you know, being small, coming out of a period of, shall we say, market malaise, the prospect of being able to build a mine at low cost is very key. There's too many juniors, I guess, that are sitting on projects that are going to cost $1 billion. When you've got a market cap of $20 million, people think, "Well, okay, how the hell does that junior find a billion dollars?" We don't face that problem.
We're looking at options at the moment, and we will continue over into the next year of how can we develop this quickly, cheaply, which is quite rare in the current market as we. Those who follow the sector know that as time progresses, projects cost more, and they take longer and longer to develop as things happen. This is a bit of an outlier in that it can be produced, or we would hope in theory, quickly and cheaply. While not be a world-class deposit at the current gold price coupled with what we think will be the very low cash costs, this has the potential to really make a lot of money really fast, which is ultimately what mining's about. It's not about making gold, it's about making money.
The ability to produce an operation or develop an operation cheaply that throws off cash, that pays itself back in a very short period of time is, to us, extremely attractive. Where we are now, we began to drill end of November last year. We're currently at about 5,500 m. I think we drill 55-57 holes ourselves. We hope to be able to move that to a resource for about 7,000 m of drilling, which is extraordinarily low. If we look at projects, albeit big projects around us, they can often take 200,000 m-300,000 m of drilling. We're doing this in the blink of an eye, basically. Moving it from zero to resource in less than 12 months for 7,000 m of drilling is ridiculous.
Where things currently stand, the resource consultants come to site at the end of this month, beginning of next month. Now, of course, when I say resource, that's entirely their decision. We don't get to decide whether this is ready. They will come. They will reassess. They may say, "Yep, it's a resource," or, "No, you might need to fill a few things in here and there," and we'll take their guidance and react accordingly. Everything we say about timing is subject to the external consultants. One of the key points is that the sort of bottom picture, that's not a resource, that's our attempt at a block model, is that there is this very high-grade core in the middle. Those light blue colors, for example, are blocks of over 10 g. In fact, that's 10 g+ .
On average, they're about 15 g, so that's sort of half an ounce. Surrounding it is between 5 g and 10 g. We have recently had a couple of holes come through that have been really thick and really high grade. That's great for the market and great for us. It does create a bit of a problem, however, in that they are somewhat outliers statistically, and for the resource, they need to be defined a little bit better in order for them to be represented in the resource accurately. Otherwise, they tend to be top cut and carved off. We may need to go back and drill some more holes around those just to understand exactly what their size and scope is, because that's where the answers are.
You can get a lot of answers in a small area with these kinds of grades. You know, one of the outcomes of the resource conversion process in the end of this month is that we may need to go and better define some of these spots because they're just high grade, which is a good problem to have. That's a nice, you know, a nice issue, but we have to follow the advice of the resource guys. The current plan is that, so they're on site end of this month, beginning of next month. We've just finished drilling a large metallurgical hole, which is PQ. PQ is a quite a big diameter hole. Gives us more material that we need for metallurgical testing.
That'll be off to the lab in a matter of days or weeks, and we'll do a full sweep metallurgical testing of all the domains of the project. That feeds into the resource. We also begin to look at things like road access and third-party mills and all the other things that are part of that process. Probably end of the year, beginning of the new year. Yeah, we know these things exist, but we have to do things in the right sequence. Very attractive little project. Certainly it's come on track a lot faster and a lot more excitingly than we certainly anticipated this time last year. APTA is about 15 km to the south. This is an historic project. We now think it's very similar to Pepas geologically.
Different host rock, but same epithermal sort of system. It was originally thought to be a VMS deposit. We now think that was wrong. That was just a historical view. Similar sort of grades we see on the right-hand side. Similar thicknesses, similar grades. Very thick, very high grade chunks, drilling here. Been drilled since 2012 to 2013 by various people. Not much by us. It was by the previous company that we bought, and then by Agnico Eagle and Newmont. We're really getting back in with ourselves for largely the first time, and we've gone back and we've reassessed. Geologically, we think this is a different model. We think it needs some adjusting. Different to Pepas in it's deeper. This would be an underground mine. It's about 200 m deep. Not very deep, but deep enough.
Very thick, very high grade chunks. Again, like Pepas, it needs these high grade chunks better defined, because these are where the answers are. We've changed the geological model. The current plan of attacking is that we finish drilling at Pepas when we're told we can in the next couple of weeks perhaps, or into November. We move the rig down here. We drill a few holes to test the veracity of our new model. If that works out, we try to move that to a resource in the first half of next year will be the plan. We wanna have, you know, one resource in the bag, another one coming into the bag in quick succession, and that moves us quite quickly from being an explorer to a developer. I think that that's rather key.
Just to give you a sense of, you know, some examples, this is a typical section from APTA. This is an old interpretation we think has now changed, and I won't explain the new model. It might be wrong. But we'll show that as it comes together. Or the mineralization is defined to one particular stratigraphic level. When you get the right conditions, the right brecciation, you get these crazy thick, you know, high grade hits. It's a question of understanding what controls those high grades, because that's key to defining the answers. We'll be drilling there hopefully by the end of the year. Depending on results, we'll move that forward into resource if all goes well in the new year.
To the bottom of the project area, but as I said, on the same license, is the El Cedro porphyry system. This was first discovered by or defined by Anglo American, so quite some years ago. Looking for copper. Gold wasn't of value back then. Agnico Eagle and Newmont did a bit of work here just at the end of their tenure last year, but then they walked away for political reasons. Never been drilled. We've been in there and looked at this, and we're just about to finish. We've probably one more day's work to go to finish a large geochemical soil sampling program here. It's a very nice big porphyry system. It's about 2 km across, east, west, north, south. It has almost a classical zonation.
Porphyry is, if you look at a textbook, porphyry are these circular zonation things that never actually exist in reality. But this one almost does. We've got a central potassic core with zones around it. We're getting very high grade gold in soils over large areas and that which is quite unusual. Normally, soils are quite low. We're getting lots of 0.3, 0.5. Couple of soil samples over 1 g a tonne across wide areas. In rock chips, in some of the creeks, we're seeing 5 g, 10 g per tonne gold in rock chips and veins around the area. It's proving up to be a very substantial tonnage opportunity in terms of being a porphyry. Porphyry is a big by definition, and this one also is showing signs of being.
Of having some high grades. The key with porphyry is that you need something other than the porphyry. Porphyry themselves, just a plain vanilla porphyry, they tend to be low grade, 0.2 g, 0.3 g. Interesting, but not that interesting. What you normally need is some other event which gives you the enrichment, some brecciation, some extra pulse, some alteration that lifts you from 0.5 g to 1.5 g. I think we're seeing signs of that in this area. We're seeing signs of complexity, different kind of features, epithermal associations, where we're seeing higher grades. Very interesting, very juicy. The challenge is it's big and never been drilled. Where do you start? This is the challenge we face. We had considered certainly beginning of last year that this might be a potential JV opportunity. It's big tonnes.
The challenge with these is that, as I said, you know, Pepas is going to be a resource. It's 7,000 m. These things need hundreds of thousands of meters drilling to get to resource. Is that for us or is that for a big friend? You know, we'll see. Now having raised money recently, we can at least begin ourselves. The plan is to finish the work, the soil sampling program. We will fly an airborne geophysical survey here in probably December, depending on availability of systems, with a view to identifying drill targets and be drilling here, we would hope, in Q1 next year. Now, what happens then, we'll see.
If we can drill a few holes here that show this, that yes, it is a large high-grade porphyry system and we own it 100%, then of course we have the options. You know, that's the whole point of these projects, having things that you can then decide, is this for us or is this for, yeah, a JV. The timeline will change. I mean, obviously this is subject to results. Just to give you a sense, we began drilling in December last year. We're now at the point where we will be beginning the resource assessment in the next couple of weeks. Now, subject to their view, we hope that can be a resource this year or early next year. That's somewhat out of our hands. There's two parts to the resource.
There is the resource report for Pepas. There's also the resource report for the project, the whole region. The TSX requires both. There'll be the resource number, and then there'll be a report of it afterwards. There's two large parts to this. There's quite a lot of work involved. The report will be certainly in the new year, but hopefully the resource will be a bit earlier. The metallurgy is done. We hope to then get to the point where we can stop drilling at Pepas for the moment. Once that resource is in the bag, move to APTA, get that moving forward. Advance El Cedro with geophysics and with some drilling and more geochemistry, and then go back to Pepas at some point, probably in the new year, to begin to expand.
We get asked the question, "Well, are there more Pepas?" We think, well, almost certainly. Pepas is a small part of a bigger system. We've taken a decision as a board. We want to get some resources in the bag first and get those moving into the feasibility sort of timeline, and then go back and begin to explore for more Pepas. There's a question of this is the current timeline, but subject to results. We're also looking at some government work now where our applications are now at last beginning the process of being converted into granted titles. That won't be till next year, but at least the process has begun.
We hope to also substantially increase our footprint of granted titles in the new year, and that will open up new opportunities for us. Applications we can do some work on, we can't drill. By having, by increasing our footprint of granted titles, we certainly have a lot of opportunity in the Anzá region to drill and to find new things. We hope to have come a long way in 18 months. Certainly resource by end of the year, beginning of next year, and two other projects advancing along that route in the new year. That's the timeline now, but it changes on a weekly basis. We will update as we go. Moving to Argentina, a place I've always liked personally, geologically, but that doesn't mean anything.
This, as I said, is a project we picked up four years ago at a time when the country was on its knees. Nobody was going there. Nobody wanted these projects. We did a good deal. Very early stage, untouched, but our key criteria were that we wanted to go to early stage because we felt that projects that were being made available for JV or sale that were more advanced just weren't very interesting. They're always lower grade or there's something wrong. We thought, well, okay, we have an advanced project in Colombia. We can afford to look at things at an earlier stage. The criteria being, had to be in the right part of the world, the right country, the right regions that have large gold projects. This does. The Deseado Massif has some monstrous gold projects.
The biggest being Cerro Negro, which when all said and done will be 20 million ounces at very high grade. It's the right kind of area. We wanted a very large piece of land, so we originally got a piece of land, a JV of about 600 sq km. Now about 550 with reductions over time. Key, the right geological signs that something has gone on. You know, we understand what the model is here geologically. We know what to look for. This project, albeit almost entirely grassroots, never been touched, never been drilled, had all the right sufficient signs on surface of a really large low sulfidation epithermal system existing. We moved that forward, and we managed to do a joint venture there with some local geologists that gave us a pathway to 100%.
We're currently sitting at 51, and we have a drill program about to start, and that program will probably take us to close to 100% ownership, if all goes well. We spent years just doing mapping and sampling and geophysics, and now we're about to drill, and everyone's quite excited. You know, it's the right rocks in the right place. The key here is that these are different to Colombia. This is low sulfidation rift-related. This is to do with the opening of the Atlantic Ocean in Jurassic times. Open up these sort of rift systems that run southeast to northwest. Up come the veins. The veins then, as they come up, they then boil. The gold dumps out, and then the veins carry on devoid of gold.
The trick with these projects is that quite often at surface you find no gold or very little gold. You find veins. You find silicification. You find more mobile elements. You find mercury. You find arsenic and other things. But often you find no gold. We look at the history of some of the bigger projects in the region and how they were discovered, and Cerro Negro is the key example. It was, I think, the third company that found Cerro Negro by drilling deep. At surface it was nothing. There was silicification. There was indications. It was all the right rocks, but very little gold. It wasn't until they drilled 200 m down that they hit these really big, thick chunks of material.
Geologically, they're challenging, but the prize is enormous. Our first phase of drilling, I guess I'm trying to temper enthusiasm here a little bit by not creating expectations of what we're gonna get. This first drill program is just geological. We'll drill 3,000 m. That'll take us a couple of months. It's really just to hit the rocks. At surface, we have all the right certification, all the right geochemistry, all the right signs, but we need to know where we are vertically in the system, and that's without that, we really can't begin. This program, we may get lucky, but it's really just to understand where the structures are laterally and where we are vertically in the system. That's the key thing. This is...
You know, we would expect we'll need several phases of drilling to move this forward, so this is the first phase. Now I think the difficulty we've made for ourselves is that Pepas was spectacular, and I don't wanna create the impression that that's how exploration works. That was very rare. To walk up and drill that on the first hole was amazing. Most exploration is painful and slow and debilitating. This is geology. Very exciting project, all the right signs, but I'm just trying to temper that, what we view as success here is very different to what we view as success at Pepas.
Success here is showing that we have the right fertile structures that were active or are still active and that tell us where we are vertically. Success here is measured in a very different way. We begin work here in a couple of weeks' time. With the Christmas break, that will take us through to January. Like Pepas, I assume I didn't make the point, is that we have an assay laboratory in the region that will give us five day turnaround. That was again a very key change in Colombia, certainly, where we went from three month turnaround of assays to three day turnaround assays. That ability to get information for ourselves to make decisions is key, and also to feed the market with information.
Drilling fast, getting assays fast, efficiently, quickly, cheaply is a really key part of what we do. The timeline here, again, subject to results, but we've had this project now for getting on four years. It'll be four years in February. It's gone well. You know, it's a difficult part of the world, cold. The winters are cold and dark and utterly miserable, so we tend to work in summertime, but you know, that's just us being wimps. It's moved along. It's met every expectation we've asked of it. It has all the right signs. Every time we do a survey or a sample, it just keeps holding up, and now we're at the point of the testing of the pudding. We hope to get that drilling program.
I said we're building camps now, so that begins in earnest in a couple of weeks' time. That's us in a snapshot. We can move to questions. Certainly, looking at the right-hand side, we've come a long way in a very short space of time. You know, we got lucky with finding Pepas, and that was key. I apologize to long-suffering shareholders from last year before, with the pain we all suffered. I kept saying at the time, short-term pain for long-term gain, and thank God we got that right. We're now in a position where I think we're much better positioned than we were. We kind of thought we might be. We knew that Pepas was something special.
It is certainly for a junior company, and that certainly helped us at the moment when the gold prices were going crazy. We're well positioned. A number of good gold projects. Cash in the bank. All things turning, which is really all you want.
Thanks, Brad. You probably need to take a glass of water. Yeah, good job. There's a couple of questions here. I'll take the first two and give you a bit of a break. The first one talks about, as Brad said earlier, in relation to Pepas, we're thinking about some toll treatment rather than having to put, you know, expensive equipment right alongside the mine. The question here says, "Is there sufficient quality processing capacity nearby with enough competitive tension to ensure you can optimize economic returns?" Well, the reality is, as Brad has said, along that Cauca belt, there are quite a lot of prospects, and there are also operating mines, and some of the operating mines do have capacity.
In fact, the distance that could be traveled now, given the price of gold, is a lot further than used to be the case before. The economic returns are possible, you know, even traveling 100 km-150 km to get to the tolling. There's a long way to go yet. You know, we will take a survey. We will see what's available. We will see what sort of gold these guys are looking for. We're gonna have some ability to shape the grade and what it is we're pulling out of Pepas. Our view is, yes, there will be more than one option to go to. The work's still gotta be done.
Given the current price of gold, transporting for tolling makes absolute total sense on Pepas. That's the first one. The second one, "Has there been any discussion around a JV for the Argentina project?" Well, I don't think it's any surprise, so it shouldn't be to anybody, that everybody is looking at everybody else's projects right now, frankly. In fact, it's not just competitors and other people in the gold space. Even, you know, even get approached by brokers looking for what could be a good project to reverse into a vehicle. There's plenty to do in Argentina still for us. We're gonna start the first drilling, as Brad has said. We're not expecting great things from the first. It'll be a...
It'll be drilling that'll give us a lot more knowledge about the geology, and we can go from there. Yes, there is plenty of interest, not just on the Argentina project. There's gonna be interest also in Colombia. I'm attending the Colombia Gold Symposium in the early November. Even last year, at a very early stage, we were getting approaches. That should not be a surprise given the current market. We're not in a rush to do anything. We've got the wherewithal and the cash now to be able to decide when and what we take, if anything. It does give us a lot of flexibility right now. Brad, this next one talks about, we're back to this thing about, yeah, why don't we buy shares personally.
This chap struggles to understand why we wouldn't want to be a substantial shareholder to benefit greatly from the great work that you have been doing. Brad, I'll let you say whatever you want.
Well, the answer is obviously we do, but yeah. Well, there's two key points. That when someone, we get this all the time, talk about skin in the game. I said, rather than look at how many shares the management own, ask yourself how they got them. Generally speaking, not always the case, but generally speaking, where there's a very large management chunk of shares, they got them either A by being the company founders and therefore gave themselves basically free shares at the beginning, or it's the end result of many years of options and warrants and various things. Very rarely, occasionally, very rarely do you ever see management being able to buy on market. Any buying is expensive on market, it just doesn't happen. You know, you're not.
We're not BHP, but you'll never see the head of BHP buying shares on the market. They just can't do it. Every day we get an email, Louis and I, from the guys in the field, a drill report. You know, photographs of core updates. We are offsite, by definition. You know, every day I'm seeing drill core, and that will probably continue forever. The reality is we simply can't go near the market. We'd be arrested.
We need to be careful. We have bought in the past.
We'd love to have shares.
We have.
We can't buy. What do you want us to do? We either pay ourselves a max a year, or we find other ways of slowly, over time, increasing our stakes. Certainly, you know, we're just offsite, and that's just the way. When you're doing a drilling program, you know, you just can't do it. End of story.
I was just saying, we have bought in the past. It wasn't in great quantity. What we are doing and why we are aligned with shareholders is that we have got some share options coming through and some restricted stock units. You will see us having a bigger holding going forward. We're totally aligned with making this a success, as you can imagine. In any event, we'd wanna do that, but we are gonna have a bigger stake going forwards. The next one says, I think you've answered this already: Where do you see the company in six months' time? I think we've gone through the timeline, so.
Well, I think, yeah, if you look at junior gold company, you fall into various categories. You're either an explorer, you're a developer, or you're a producer. We want to be a number of things, but by having Pepas moving to resource, we in effect become a developer. We'll also still be exploring. That jump, while somewhat arbitrary, does change the context somewhere and also does begin to appeal to a different group of shareholders. One of our advantages is that we're trying to be all things to all people. Six months from now, we're going to be, hopefully, a developer. Now, how long it'll take remains to be seen, but that puts you in a different box. Beyond that, we can't say because everything is dependent upon drill results. That's probably key for us.
You go from being an explorer, of which there are 2,000, 2,500 of those out there, to being a developer, of which there's 200 out there. You're becoming into a different pond, and that's just, I think, key into how you, how you're valued and how you're seen.
Okay. The next one talks about how can you make your operations more sustainable. Just on this point, we're very aware that we obviously need a social license as well as just a legal license to operate in these areas. In Colombia, we've been there for many years now. We have an excellent manager there. We've got many social programs. We've also got some very strong environmental rules which we apply even during the drilling phase. A lot of this sustainability goes to production. We're very careful even at this stage. Just as an example, on the social front, there has been some pretty bad rain locally. You know, we were helping out, producing, using our trucks to get provisions out to where necessary, shifting people we could.
There's also an educational program. There's all sorts of things that we're doing. That doesn't mean that we give cash, hand over cash to anybody. That's never a good thing. We're very much part of this community. Around where we are, it's a very good mining community, and we're well liked in this area. We get there by spending time and spending money and effort socially and also on the environment. We've recently had an audit from Corantioquia, which is a local government company which monitors the environment, and we came through with flying colors. Again, that's all to do with the relationships as well as the actual work you're doing. We're doing a lot of work on sustainability. That will increase more as we go into development.
Brad, this next one relates to are you intending to drill multiple holes closer to 55, more specific?
Yeah. There's a couple of questions here all in the same vein about Pepas expansion. I didn't talk about it in the presentation much because we're still trying to understand how things work. Pepas is a small part of a bigger system. We have. You know, we know what it is, but we've also seen a lot of faulting post-mineralization. It's been chopped off and moved from its original location. We're assuming or hoping there's a small part of a bigger system that's been chopped up and moved to a certain area. The question being, moved from where? Where's the rest of it? Or where there are more? We're seeing lots of smoke. We're seeing geochemistry all around us. We're seeing all sorts of key things. We haven't really looked into it with any great seriousness yet.
We've drilled a few holes to the north, and we are aware that we're in a bigger system. We're seeing Pepas, which is very high grade, surrounded by a lower grade halo of, you know, sort of 0.5, 0.7. We need to understand what makes things change from 0.5 g to 5 g. Obviously, that's key. I guess the argument is we made a commitment to move Pepas to a resource for a number of reasons that I described because, you know, one, it just made commercial sense. This geologically was just a crazy little thing. It made sense. Let's get it done. Let's put it in the bag. We don't have the internal capacity yet to run exploration and resource definition drilling just yet. The good challenge we face at Pepas is it's just really, really fast drilling.
When in the past we were drilling or our partners were drilling deep hole that might take six weeks to drill, and you had two months delay in assays, you can take your time. You sit back, you relax, you can plan the next hole 'cause it takes weeks. We're drilling a hole every three to four days. We're getting assays back in three days. It's a hole a week. It's just flat out running to chase that rig in terms of dealing with the core, the assay, preparation, all the work, the geology, and plan the next hole. The next hole requires planning. It needs building a pad. It needs to move to a second rig, just logistically is a big job with this kind of drilling because it's just so fast. We don't have the people, we don't have the
We have the money now, but we need to think about how to do that in a way that makes sense rather than just spraying holes everywhere, which we can do, but that's a bit of an inefficient way. We want to understand the sense of movement of these faults that have broken Pepas up. That's been ongoing for a while. We've been going back and re-logging old core, trying to get an understanding of, you know, where things have come from, both laterally and vertically. This is similar to Pantano in the sense that it's three dimensions. Pepas, we think has been lifted up from lower down. We need to understand, one, where the feeder zones are. It's come from below, not from above. There's a feeder zone, and we're finding some feeder zones.
Where are the key traps that have created the conditions for these really high grade to be dumped out. We're beginning now to get some vectors structurally and geochemically as to where this has moved from. One of the keys is that the very fast laboratory turnaround we get from ALS laboratory is just gold. It's a fire assay lab. We don't get the base metals. It's the base metal or the other metal that are the pathfinder. They come from a lab in Canada, which makes three weeks, not three months. It's just taking us a while to begin to accumulate that database of the pathfinder metal and structures and alteration and the whole range of geological indicators that can begin to tell us which direction we're gonna go vertically and horizontally. That's evolving.
We have some plans which we'll expand on in time as how to test those theories. We've got a couple of drill programs planned, you know, running fence as a whole that can answer certain questions. It's just a question of the sequence of how we do these things. We have, again, our geological teams back on site, and part of the work in a few weeks, apart from resource, is to pull all that together and to develop a more defined regional exploration program around Pepas that we think can, in time, help us, you know, find more of these things. As I said, Pepas was really weird. I mean, that never happened. Walk up, first hole, bang. Shooting fish in a barrel. That's how exploration normally works.
Normally, it's a slow grind of just failed hole after failed hole, and you focus down, eventually you hit it. But it's normally lots and lots of pain and lots and lots of barren drill holes. That's how exploration normally works. Now we've gone.
Yeah
... from the fun bit to the part that actually requires geological work.
That's.
Yes, we are comfortable, but it will take time.
That's a good answer to all these questions around Pepas. In essence, as Brad's saying, we're gonna be hopefully turning into a developer in the next year. We still will be looking at greater Pepas as time established, and that is proper exploration and will take time. The next question, can you give us a rough indication of when you will start digging up the gold in Pepas? Well, Brad's gone through the timeline.
No.
The big question is, at the end of next year, that's when we're probably gonna start the permitting process. Now, we've got a bit of a leg up 'cause we already have an environmental permit. It doesn't cover Pepas right now. It's another part of the license. But we do have it, and that's a great start. But still, it's gonna take some time. This is Colombia. It's not Patagonia, where there's no one around. There are farms around here. Although strictly speaking, in Pepas itself, there's nothing there. It's scrub, a few cows wandering around. The permitting there should be more straightforward. It will not be months, you know. If we get to be digging gold in, you know, I don't know, two to three years' time, that would be a good result.
That's sort of timing, which is likely. Again, we'll see how it goes. We may be quicker than that. We might be well surprised. The elections come about in May next year. Current government is pretty heavily anti-mining. That said, everybody is still in Colombia. Everybody is drilling, and people are producing. Licenses are being granted. It is still moving, and we're hoping that it's gonna move even quicker after May next year. I guess that's a watch this space. The next question relates to potential illegals. The question is that given what happened to the Chinese goldmine near us, and I think what they're referring to here is in Buriticá, owned by Zijin, where they have had trouble with illegal mining. How can we prevent this sort of thing happening in Pepas?
Pepas is a very different animal to what we have in Zijin. We have a very small footprint here. It's at the top of a hill. It's well-protected, not easy to get to. There was some historical illegal mining going on in any event around the Buriticá area. Where there's been nothing of any significance near us. We haven't had any issues, and we don't anticipate to having anywhere near the sort of issues that have been experienced at Buriticá. We need to stay on our feet, and as part of the development, we are gonna be looking at security and what else we can do just to make sure that, you know, no problems do arise. Yeah.
The key point there is not to allow it to start. Buriticá always had preexisting, not illegal, artisanal miners predated Buriticá. They were there first. I guess it was just badly handled and that just expanded. Whereas our view is, we don't want them there, keep them away, and don't let it even begin. At the moment, we have no issues. It exists. I mean, people, when you've got a gold price, the way it is, people need to eat. There's always an appeal to do a bit of illegal mining. The government is quite pro allowing local miners in a controlled way to do things. Our view certainly is we'd rather not go there just yet. We have a gate, we have a guard, we're keeping it clean.
The next one says, "Many analysts at brokerages in London are not on top of the story. Is there a plan to meet more brokers and analysts?" Well, you'd be surprised at the number of phone calls I get by people in London who are in the, I mean, like, capital markets with my background. We do get approached actually quite regularly. I don't agree. You know, we have three brokers covering us already, two in London, one abroad. That's not to say that we can do more. You can always do more. It's a matter of where we spend time. We're getting brokers and analysts in the U.K. and also in Canada.
Again, you know, we do have a program going ahead and we would ensure that we're still there in people's minds when they talk about gold. Just to point out that we're one of the very few gold companies that attended the Beaver Creek Conference back in September. We're in quite a small group of companies and none of them were invited there, and it was quite a successful tour in North America. Another question here, "When do you think we will be drilling Pepas North?" I think we've answered that at length. Okay.
Well, what would you tell somebody stating there must be a concern with Newmont and Agnico on the project that they sold their shares, a point made in the Munich event? This is in relation to. Well, this is the Newmont placing, where the shares were placed within a day. In fact, they were placed twice over. There was a third-party broker in Canada that approached Newmont and sold their shares. At the same time, I had called our broker in Canada, and within 24 hours, they too had effectively found buyers for all of the Newmont stake. The reason that Newmont sold, and I think we said this in the release at the time, is that it's just part of their ongoing selling of all these holdings they have in junior companies.
They're concentrating their efforts and this was just one other sale that they had to make. They're still there in the background. They run Cerro Negro, which is just to the north east of us in Argentina, and we're still very close to Newmont. The fact that they sold their shares doesn't reflect badly on us. The rate at which those shares were sold, I think reflects that, there's still some interest in our shares.
Yeah. Just to clarify the question, Agnico never owned shares in us. Only Newmont owned shares as part of the original joint venture in 2018. Agnico never owned shares in us. You know, the key point is materiality. I mean, these are now number one, number two gold companies in the world. They, you know, they need huge things. They won't begin to mine for less than 5 million, 7 million, 10 million ounces. They have to be very hard about cutting early and getting out and looking at projects, and they just can't run lots of small projects. I think the shareholding they had in us was worth about $5 million, which is chump change for Newmont.
It was, they just had a very firm view on just get rid of all this small stuff because it just took too long for them to deal with. We are eternally grateful.
Absolutely. "Are there any plans for more drills at Pepas?" I think we've covered this off already. I think we'll see what the results show.
Look, I think that, you know, it's come up again. You know, we get asked the question, "Why aren't you drilling more Pepas?" Our view is, look, as said, we wanna get the resource done. We said we would, we wanna do it.
Yeah.
That changes our complexion as a company. It isn't going anywhere. We're quite comfortable. The question we always, you always have to ask yourself is at what point does an ore body, for want of a better word, become economic? That question relates largely to the cost of development. The more it costs to build the mine, the more ounces you need to pay for that cost. Our view is it's high grade at surface. If we can find a very cheap way to build it, then the hurdle is very low, and we think we passed that hurdle. Let's get that in the bag and then go back and begin to explore. It's just Pepas was an obvious walk-up drill target. We did that. It worked. That was successful. Now it gets harder.
We have to take our time and do it scientifically and do it methodically. It will happen in the new year, but we have to do it by the book and on the basis of geology. We've made the best of the early wins. Now it's just, you know, proper exploration now. We will drill in the new year.
Thanks, Brad. What Pepas will do if it develops into what we think it may be, it just underwrites the value of the company, and then we can go ahead and explore the rest of it. What will be the plans for the revenue stream from Pepas Deposit? Drilling El Pantano, El Cedro, see what there is before any JV options. Move APTA to a mine. All of the above. Well, yes, it probably gets all of the above actually. I don't think there's much to expand there. James H. "Which of the assets are you most excited about?" Well, personal choice, I think we both like El Pantano because it was such grassroots and it could turn out to be very interesting from what you know.
Mm-hmm
... the little information we have right now. Clearly for all the assets.
You know, you have different views. Obviously, Pepas is juicy. Being an Australian, I also have an affection for empty deserts, because when it comes to building mines, if no one lives there, that's a much easier thing to do. If we have some success at El Pantano, that's appealing from the permitting point of view. There are lots of things that make up what makes a mine attractive. Obviously, you know, we haven't found anything there yet. Yeah, it's a bit like saying which of your children do you love the most. You know, we love them all dearly, so we don't play favorites.
A specific question here on environmental impact study, and, how long do you need for a complete cycle of dry and wet season for baseline data? Well, the maximum is gonna be a year. It may be shorter than that, although the seasons are deemed to be changing everywhere in the world, and Colombia is no exception. That'll be part of the process that we embark on next year after we've done the Pepas resource and the sort of economic feasibility. George. "Considering the strength of global price of gold right now, have we received any unsolicited approaches for the held assets or business as a whole?" Well, when we're ready to talk about that, we'll let everybody know. As I've said, you know, everybody's talking to everybody else right now, frankly.
What are your guiding principles for raising capital? Do you have a minimum threshold of project de-risking before each financing? Interesting, actually. It's a good question.
Um-
We could write an essay on this one, frankly.
Well, yeah. I mean.
Uh
We used to have a view that we raise small amounts of money to do specific things. Certainly last year we raised several small amounts of money to do specific things. Money to do the negotiation, to get the transaction done, then to begin drilling. That was our sense. That all somewhat changed in Beaver Creek. We were told by every single investor, institutions, "Just fill your boots." Maybe not those words exactly, but the view was, if you don't take as much money as you can now, you're nuts. We actually turn money away. The view is just get money while you can because maybe you can't tomorrow. You know, our guiding principle is, well, we'd like to always raise money at increasingly higher share prices, which we've done the last couple of years, so that's nice.
Certainly, no, we don't. Our guiding principle now is to just give ourselves a runway. You know, previously we were doing capital raisings that were lasting six months, so the market knew in six months we'd be back again. Now, that's great for dilution, and it's great if you can get the share price moving, but ultimately that overhang remains there. Our guiding principle was, well, let's just get that out of the way, give ourselves 18 months, two years, remove that overhang, but not go crazy. Actually, we probably could have raised substantially more than we did. We said, no, you have to at some point draw a line. We're comfortable that you know, the prices we raised were higher than last time.
The last capital raising, again, the prices have increased again. Everyone's happy. Okay, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. You know, I think it's just a question of not being greedy about it, but also understanding that the market windows are not always open. You do need to get yourself in a position where you're not vulnerable and exposed should the window close, which they do on a regular basis. It's just protecting ourselves from a cash flow basis.
It puts us on a very solid base, which I don't think there was an option there. As you said, we turned some away. Not only that, we didn't have to issue any warrants, so that said a lot for the market. Hopefully that'll be the norm going forwards. Any thoughts about the size of Pepas? Well, we'll know soon enough, depending on the resource estimate that's going there now. It's not about size, it's about economics of Pepas. I wouldn't be holding out, you know, to be too greedy for size.
We've done things differently at Pepas. I mean, traditionally the normal approach is you drill. You find the resource, and then you design a mine accordingly. We took a different approach. We sort of turned that around and said, "Okay, well, what makes a nice juicy size of operation now that makes commercial sense in the current gold price environment?" We said, "Okay, well, let's say we could produce 30,000 ounces a year." This is all hypothetical at very low cash cost, very high cash margins. That throws off. You can do the numbers, you know, if you're producing at the current gold price, if you're making a cash margin of $3,000 an ounce and you're making 30,000 ounces a year, that's a lot of cash.
If you do that, how much do you need? What's the resource you need? Particularly for something like a 10-year mine life. To me, mine life is key, is that you don't want a five year mine life because the first year you're just getting going, the last year you're closing down, you've got three good years. You want 10-year mine life to make it sense. We said, our target was, can we find enough 2C material to feed that scale operation for 10 years? That gave us our target resource, and I think we're gonna, you know, that's looking pretty good to hit that.
Now, that's what we end up doing is very different, but that was our way of thinking, is that, you know, if we can produce or build a mine at very low cost and produce that kind of quantum of material at that kind of cost, that makes a huge amount of sense. Traditionally, the Canadian markets always dismiss that idea of near term production that then feeds back into exploration, which was correct in the old days. Even the Canadians now are saying, "Well, yeah, at this kind of gold prices, it's just, you'd be mad not to do it." It's just, it can make so much money so fast, that you'd be crazy not to examine the opportunity. We may not do that. We may then tomorrow find something else and then change tack.
Our point is we wanna at least get that resource done and begin the process of examining it and advancing it so that we can that underpins the valuation. It's such a compelling opportunity that I think we certainly can't ignore exploring it. Other projects in the region, Collective Mining's, for example, down the road, wonderful project, but 10 years from production and it will cost $1.5 billion. You know, great, but that's not us just yet. You know, we would like to do something a bit easier, and no one's gonna give us $1 billion. We don't have the track record to do that kind of work yet. Let's just start with a nice digestible project. The current gold price, that digestible project is potentially very, very lucrative.
It's the right project for us at our stage of development. It's something small and juicy.
Okay. That's it. It's already 10 past the hour. We'll take two questions quickly. I'll do the first one, you can do the second. Analysts have projected annual free cash at Pepas that makes up much of the current market cap. Is it fair to say that getting Pepas to production is an absolute priority? While the shares have rallied, the disconnect between future value still seems substantial. Well, on that, as Brad said, yes, we are looking to bring Pepas into production and nothing is ever an absolute priority. It'll depend on what else is happening at the time. As we've already commented, Pepas, having Pepas, gives us an underwritten value, certainly to what we have right now. Yes, there is potentially some upside clearly with the other projects and prospects that we're looking at.
Not for us to be predicting the share price in the future, but the great value in the projects that we have. We think, yes, there could be further value in the projects other than Pepas.
In terms of Pepas, you know, the whole question is it, is it the destination or is it the journey? Knowing that we can do Pepas is as important as actually doing so. That, I think is the key thing, is by having the resource, by having feasibility, by having a permitting pathway, knowing that it can be done and at what cost is probably more important than actually doing it. Now, we stand ready to do it, and that's certainly the plan. The key point is to give the market the economics. Say, "Well, there it is. There's the resource. There's the cash cost. There's the capital cost. There's the permitting timeframe." Having numbers wrapped around it gives you an indication of what its potential is.
Now, if we find something bigger, we may change, but certainly we're going to advance along that way. If we get there, then great. If along the way we get bought out by Newmont for squillions of dollars, then that's great too. Let's not assume that's gonna happen. We certainly do want to be at a point where the market says, "Yes, this makes sense," and, "Yes, they can do it." Too many junior companies have projects. The market says, "Well, look, it's a great project, but they're never gonna mine that. They just can't do it." Whereas we can do this. Now that.
We do have a smorgasbord of development, you know, potential production and pure grassroots exploration, so it's a nice mix. Having said we may have another one, that question's now been withdrawn, so clearly we've answered it. I think with that, we are probably done. It's coming up about, yeah, an hour and a quarter. Shall I wrap up just briefly?
Yes, please.
There. All right. Well, look, just to say thank you for, well, the Investor Meet Company for organizing this. Of course, to all of you for attending. Thank you for your time. We will keep on promoting. We will talk to more analysts. We'll see what we can do going forward. The gold price is helping in itself, and all Brad and I can do is just focus on running the company and running the projects on the ground. So again, thank you very much and thanks for your attention. No doubt, hopefully we'll be speaking and hearing from you in the next six months. We've got an AGM coming up in December, and we will have a question and answer session probably either, if not after the AGM, then certainly within a week or two of that.
We look forward to that in due course. Thank you, everybody.