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 using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Non-Executive Chairman Louis Castro. Good afternoon to you.
Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to our year-end webinar. I'm Louis Castro, Executive Chairman, and also on the screen in front of you, CEO Brad George. Just yesterday, we had our annual general meeting. All of the resolutions we're glad to say, were passed. In fact, we had the most votes cast for quite some years, and certainly since Brad and I joined in 2020. Thank you to all of you who have voted. This webinar we'll hold in the usual manner. Brad will make a presentation, and we will then have a session on any questions and answers. We did have shareholders yesterday at the AGM, and we've answered quite a few questions then.
I suspect we may be having a repeat of that. In any event, thanks for attending. It's 2025 has been a transformational year for the company. Just a year ago, we had just acquired the 51% of the Anzá project in Colombia, which we didn't own. We got that back from Agnico Eagle. We just commenced drilling Pepas, which is the prospect in Anzá, which has been catching everybody's attention. We did that with a raise of just GBP 800,000. We've been careful throughout to make sure that we don't raise more than we need. With that money, we've been having some very good results coming out of Pepas.
Those results have been good, and we're now heading for a maiden resource at Pepas by January. Brad will go into more detail. We've also got the Argentine project, and in February this year, we went past the 51% ownership of El Pantano project, which was quite a result. By the end of the current drilling program, we're gonna be owning almost about 100% of this. We will get to 100% probably by March or so this year, which is about a year before it was due. Brad and I have been having quite a busy year promoting the company. We've attended quite a few conferences. Of note were the Beaver Creek Conference and the Zurich Gold Show.
I think in part as a result of that, and also because we've been getting people's attention with the drilling, we've really transformed the shareholder list that we have. We've got the all-important retail element, which gives us a lot of liquidity, certainly in London. We've also got quite a strong institutional shareholder base now, mostly out of Canada, but we do also have institutions in Australia and Hong Kong. Overall, it's been a successful year from a shareholder front. The balance sheet has been strengthened, obviously by raising of cash. We raised CAD 20 million just back in September. But also we've released the provisions that we had in the balance sheet against Uruguay, which we shut down some years ago, and on which we had some provisions against potential creditors.
All of that has now been cleaned up, and we've got a much, much healthier balance sheet there as well. The strong balance sheet, cash in hand to fund certainly the 2026 drilling programs, which I think Brad may give you more detail on in a second. We're also gonna have a busy 2026, and we are looking forward to that. Okay Brad, I'll stop there, and I'll let you go ahead on the presentation.
All right. Thanks, Louis. Yeah, just to reiterate what Louis said, we've been both now with the company since 2020. Really, for most of that time, we were something in a bit of a holding pattern with the joint venture with Agnico Eagle. It's now been just over a year since we got that project back. I guess, as Louis said, it's really been a year of just trying to get some runs on the board, given those previous years of malaise. I think we've achieved quite a lot.
It's mostly about Pepas but in the last 12 months, we've got the project back, we've found an ore body, moved it to a resource, raised a lot of money, and moved other projects to the drilling stage. It's been a pretty good year. It's just we're trying to make up for the last couple of years. This presentation is largely a slight variant of what Louis and I presented to investors recently in Zurich and in Toronto. With some recent modifications. There'll be some changes in the new year. We've got some nice results coming in fairly soon, so we'll make them modifications. Obviously, as Louis said, the company is very different now. We're quite large.
We're substantially over $100 million market cap. We're getting out of that micro-cap size. A very nice cash balance, which should, on current burn rates, fund us for all of next year into 2027. We'll remove that overhang of potential the next capital raising, so we can just crack on work. Two projects now, both want to say gold and silver. They're precious metals. We use it as a catch-all phrase. The Anzá project in Colombia and the El Pantano project in Argentina. Obviously, Colombia is the older project. We've had that project now for what, since 2014, so over 10 years. Argentina now coming up to four years. These projects were not. Well, they didn't appear yesterday.
These, you know, while we might be in a bit of a gold bull market, most of the good projects that benefit from bull markets have been around for quite some time. We benefited from the luck as much as design of picking up these projects back in the days when it wasn't popular when they were cheap, when they were affordable, and we could do good deals. We're now seeing the benefits of that longer-term decision-making a few years ago. The investment thesis this is all sort of rocky, sort of throw away stuff, but yes, we've, you know, we've come a long way in 12 months. There are, you know, as people tell me, 2,500 to 3,000 junior miners around the world, which is probably 2,500 too many.
I think in the last 12 months, we've moved ourselves out of that pack into the top couple of % that actually have asset, real assets that actually stand a reasonable chance of being developed. And that's those two things are very different. It's one thing to have an asset. It's another thing to be able to make some kind of projections as to when that might come into production. We've come from being a you know sort of a cunning plan to now we're at a point where you know we're on the brink of having a mineral resource estimate, and we can begin to wrap numbers around projections for production in the near term. A very nice little asset, very high grade, very lucrative.
We own both of our projects or are about to own both projects 100% which I think is very key for us, which is a very intentional decision on our part to maximize the equity position. We've got a pretty widely spaced portfolio of assets from a near resource to a bit further away from resource to large grassroots. We've got the whole spectrum of relevant things kind of covered. I think as I said, this year is a consolidation phase. As of January, we now then move into a dual program of having one project moving into the, for want of a better word, the feasibility stage with other projects in the exploration stage.
We have these two, this nicely balanced portfolio of one project being developed, other projects at the exploration stage. Good projects in the right location and the money to work them. The two key projects, obviously, the Anzá Project in the Mid-Cauca Belt, just west of Medellín, northern Colombia. It's about 330 square kilometers of mostly applications and some granted titles. That actually might change. We're having a sniff. We might get the applications granted. Watch this space. That will give us a lot more land to work. The El Pantano Project, which we've had for getting on four years, which is a larger project in the south of Argentina, the Deseado Massif. Two key projects.
The key is that both of these projects are in the main gold belts in their respective countries. The Deseado in Argentina is the main gold belt and the Mid-Cauca Belt in Colombia is the main gold belt. Again, the right projects in the right locations. The Anzá project, we've had this project. We bought this project via a merger with a Canadian company in late 2014. Did very little work on it. It then became subject to a joint venture with Agnico and Newmont from late 2018, culminating in us buying the project back at the end of last year. Largely on the basis of the Pepas prospect, which you know, to credit to Agnico, they discovered but didn't pursue.
That prospect was really what drove us to spend probably a year longer than we had to trying to get the project back a hundred percent rather than just diluting them away as we could have done under the JV. We thought the project getting back into total control for a junior with that prospect was absolutely key for us, and we were luckily proved to be right. A large piece of land in the Mid-Cauca belt. The Mid-Cauca belt's a Miocene porphyry belt just west of Medellín. It runs several hundred kilometers north-south. It holds most of the major gold deposits in northern Colombia, certainly. North of us is Buritica, which is, if I remember, Zijin Gold. It's 10 million ounces, very high-grade.
The famous to the south is the Guayabales project being operated by Collective Mining, which is a market cap now of well north of $1 billion, and they're looking at moving to resource next year. They sulfide bodies, it'll be 10 million ounces again. We've got the right rocks in the right region. We at this stage have three prospects within the project. We think we'll find more, but these are the three historical prospects that are forming the attention of our work in the last couple of years and for the next six months at least. The APTA prospect is historical. It's been drilled since 2012. It's got a lot of drilling. It needs to run the last mile to move to being a resource. It's very nice.
It's very high-grade. Similar geology to Pepas, a bit deeper, a bit more complicated geology, but it needs to have a few more drill holes and some understanding, and that can be brought to a resource we think in early next year. Pepas, of course, is the one that's got the market excited. It was discovered by Agnico in 2023. Smaller but very high-grade at surface, and it lends itself to low cost, very low-cost development, very low cost, very low cash cost production. A nice small but very high-grade, very lucrative project. Exactly the right kind of project that a junior mining company wants when the gold price is going nuts. This is a project that can make a lot of money very fast.
El Cedro in the south of the project area is a large porphyry system showing high-grade gold in samples, but as yet undrilled. You know, again, we own the project 100%. All of these three prospects are on the one license, and that makes things substantially easier from a permitting point of view. Just to show things where we are. Geographically, that city to the east is Medellín, so about 30 kilometers as the crow flies to Medellín. Well-located main road right near the project. Towns, villages, labor forces, power lines. It's a very well-located project. We're not in the middle of the boonies.
Everything we need to build a mine is essentially available to us here. The licenses, I guess the key is that those darker brown are the granted titles. The lighter yellow are the applications. Applications we've held for many years. They're free to hold, which is key. Colombia is quite expensive in terms of landholding costs, and the clock doesn't tick. We have some indication, we hope in coming weeks and months that some of those might be converted to granted titles in the near term. That will then allow us to drill. We hopefully can double our granted titles in the near term and double our exploration size. Pepas, of course, we reassumed control end of November, beginning September last year.
We had begun to drill actually about a week before the deal was signed. We were getting in a bit of a hurry. Our first hole, Pep-twelve, was quite spectacular. Everyone knows the history of this is that Agnico had drilled a couple of holes and got very good results, to be fair, in that their first hole, PEP-001, was 150 meters at 3 grams from surface. What Agnico did then was not really. Well, they did what big companies do, which is different to what a small company does. They needed to understand if this was a major company scale project. Rather than doing the work of understanding the orientation of what they'd found, they moved back, drilled deep holes, missed everything, and they walked away.
We just came back and did things differently, as a small company can. We did some work, understood the orientation, the depth of strike, the plunge of the mineralization. Discovered that the first few holes had been in the wrong direction. We swung the rig around, and ever since we've been churning out these, you know, really are what can be said to be quite extraordinary results. On quite a regular basis over the last 12 months, we've produced the best drill hole in terms of grams times width in the world in that given week. I think we've probably half a dozen times come up number one, so it's a pretty extraordinary little project.
It's not gonna be huge, but it's got a lot of things going for it that lend themselves to very low cost development and very low cost production. Very profitable operation. As I said, for a junior, that's key. This is intermediate sulfidation system above a porphyry. It's hosted in tuffs. I guess the longer term issue is that the ore body is quite young. It's 8 to 10 million years old. The region's still active. The whole system's still moving and being faulted. Pepas is a small part of a bigger system that's been faulted and moved laterally and vertically. What we're finding is, by luck, a little bit at the surface. The question we want to ask is, "Well, where's the rest of it?" It's been faulted up post-mineralization.
There is more to be found, and that's going to be one of the key foci of attention next year is to where's the rest of it. We very intentionally for most of this year didn't really look. We said, "Well, let's just get this to a resource. Get it on the wall, get it in the bag, and then move into feasibility, and then we can go back and begin to look for more of these things in the area." We very intentionally haven't really explored the area in great detail. Just getting Pepas done first, and that's largely now complete. The rationale, I guess, as to why we've pursued near-term production is simply a combination of two things, what it is, where it is, and the gold price. Those three things say a lot.
It's very unusual. It's at surface, top of a hill. It outcrops. It's thick. This is not a vein. This is a 50, 60, 70-meter wide zone of mineralization. Very low strip ratio. There's a power line literally right over the top, and we're 2 km as the crow flies from the main paved highway. Along the highway, there are other operations and mines that we potentially can examine as a third-party toll treatment opportunity. It's just a very unusual ore body that you just don't find anymore. Rather than examining the general plan of drilling for five years and, you know, maybe build a mine in 10 years' time at a cost of, you know, God knows, $1 billion.
This, to us, has potential, not locked in stone, to be very near term, a couple of years development, and permitting. Very low cost. Sell the ore to a third party toll treating, pay the capital back in a number of months, and spend 10 years making a lot of money. Oversimplifying it, but it's just a very unusual little ore body in precisely the right place at precisely the right time. Our point of view is, well, we simply cannot not pursue this. We may find more, and we certainly hope we will, and that may change the plans. As it stands, this is exactly what a small company wants as its first ore body. You know, it's fast, cheap, makes money, and we can grow from there.
The APTA deposit, which is about 15 kilometers due south on the same license. It's been drilled since 2012. The same geology. It's the same mid-sulfidation epithermal system, but underground. It's about 100 meters, 200 meters deep. Different host rock with the same genetic style. Again, very similar thicknesses and grades. Very high grade, very patchy, structurally controlled. Been drilled quite substantially. It doesn't have the same amenability to near-term production via toll treatment because we can't get to the main highway without going through a village, so we can't run trucks all day and all night. This would be a more traditional, you know, build a mine, build a mill 5-year plan. This is probably, as I said, the last mile from resource.
The geological model here is not quite yet fully defined. We've had a bit of a rethink since reassuming control. We think there's a bit of a difference, different style now or a different control. Once we've got Pepas done in the next couple of weeks, the rig will then shift to other places. We'll go down and drill some holes in APTA in Q1, Q2 next year, attempt to address the geological model or at least confirm our new concept with a view to then that becoming a resource in say Q2 next year. That will give us a second resource. Now, I said that that's a more longer term project area.
That again gives us as a company, in 18 months we get two resources in a very short timeframe. We're quite pleased with that we can get these things on the board quite quickly. A good little project. It'll be bigger than Pepas. And again, probably not going to be. It probably was never going to be a Newmont, Agnico size project. A company of that size needs 10 million ounces. For us again, to get our resource inventory on the board so quickly is quite extraordinary in the short space of time. Again, this is just one example section from APTA in the last couple of years. There's some of the holes here are again very similar to Pepas, very thick.
Tens of meters at tens of grams. Not the sort of thing you see on a daily basis around the world. I guess what we always assumed was what attracted Agnico and Newmont to the project over the last couple of years is the bigger systems. As I said, these guys need monster projects. The El Cedro porphyry is about 5 km south of APTA, had been discovered by Anglo American about 10 years ago looking for copper. Gold at the time wasn't particularly valuable. They found gold and they walked away. Agnico and Newmont began to do some work here at the end of their tenure over the last couple of years. But that they never advanced for their political reasons to leave the project.
We've been back, we've mapped, we've sampled, we've defined this lovely porphyry system about 1.5K square. All the lovely porphyry zonations that you see in textbooks, but never in the real world, they do exist here. It's a lovely circular orbit, circular system. We've been mapping soil samples over the area. We're finding 0.3, 0.5, 1 gram per tonne gold in soils, which is exceptionally high grade for soils. In the flanking epithermal systems, we're finding up to 8, 9 grams in these systems. Now what we want here of course, is that the porphyries in the Mid-Cauca Belt are the source of everything. They are the source of metal, source of heat, source of fluids. But in and of themselves, they're not always that appealing because they can be a bit low grade.
What you want normally is the epithermals above and beside them. The porphyries feed fluids and gold into structures, find attractive hosts, and the grade increases substantially. Buritica, Guayabales, these are all epithermal systems adjacent to or above porphyry systems. We have a lovely porphyry system. It's very high grade gold in and of itself. And flanking it on both sides, east and west, we've got these major epithermal systems, where we are seeing high grades in rock chips and veins, never been drilled. Our plan here is to drill in Q1. We've had some modifications to our plans here. We had assumed that we'd be able to fly an airborne geophysical survey, a mag and radiometric survey in November, December to better define these structures. We've had some difficulty with contractors. This is quite rugged terrain.
There are no systems available in the country. One group was going to come in and fly, but we had a few contractual squabbles, and we told them to sod off. We're now looking for an alternative mechanism to fly the area. If we can't find that, we may just go and drill without geophysics. This is not an area where we've been able to find satisfactory suppliers of all the services we need. We're still examining being able to fly the geophysics in the region. We flew geophysics at Pepas using a drone, but that was a very small area. To use a drone over the bigger area would take months. They're just too slow.
We're still examining that, and we'll reassess in January as to whether we can find an appropriate contractor that we feel comfortable with contractually. The plan still is to drill this in Q1, you know, obviously subject to modification, with or without geophysics. To target this concept of demonstrate it's a large porphyry, find some high grade epithermals, and then decide what we do with this. Now, we own this project, which is excellent. The challenge for us, however, is that we will have moved Pepas to a resource from go to whoa for about 7,000 meters of drilling, which is exceptionally small and very fast. These big porphyry systems we know from one to the region might require 200,000-300,000 meters of drilling.
These things will cost $60-$70 million to drill out. We need to decide once we've done our first phase, is this for us or is this something that might entertain an alternative structure, a JV or a seller or an IPO? We'll do the first phase. We'll prove the concept. Then we'll assess at the end of that project as to what is the best thing for us and for the shareholders. The timeline's obviously subject to change. As Louis said, the resource, we had hoped to have the resource done by end of December. But that's ultimately in the remit of the resource consultants. They determine that timeline. They've been to site. We passed all the QA/QC checks. Everything's fine. We're getting our heads around the geology.
That seems to be fine. They did recommend that we drill a few more holes, and that's underway now. Of course, the drill bit blew up in about a month ago. That cost us a week. They're going again now. The current plan is that we will complete the drill out program in the next. Well, hopefully this weekend or beginning of next week, it'll be done. We certainly are on track for the mineral resource in January. That's still the plan. You know, obviously subject to whatever, but that's the timeline. It will be the resource, and it will be a NI 43-101 technical report on the whole project area. The Canadian exchange requires us to do a new report when you do a mineral resource.
It'll be a new report to replace the existing NI 43-101 report, so it will cover all the data. That project begins or gives us the results in January. Once that's done, the project can then move into the inverted commas the feasibility process. Now, we're not going to at this stage do the usual three or four stages of feasibility that a bigger project might do. We do this through the Colombian system first. We do a what's referred to as a PTO, which is sort of a Colombian standard mining plan, and that pulls the trigger on commencing the permitting process.
The resource comes first, and then we can use the resource to then design a mine plan, and that begins the process of the permitting and the work to move that through to production. All those things begin. The resource comes first. El Pantano in Argentina, a project that we acquired, as Louis said, about four years ago. Absolutely untouched grassroots projects. We really couldn't find any projects we liked in the region years ago that were available for sale that had been drilled. They all had something wrong with them, so we went back to grassroots. Very unusual at the time, and still unusual today to have that done. Our criteria were we wanted to be in the right part of the world in a major gold producing district, and this is.
There are some huge gold mines down here run by major companies. Key is as much land as we could get. If you're going to go back to grassroots, you need to have lots of land just to maximize your chances of success. We had a project at the time was about 600 sq km, now about 550 with reductions. Also key is it showed, it demonstrated on the surface, all the key signs that what we know to be the geological controlling structures are in place here. You know, we know the systems here are low-sulphidation rift-related systems. We know what we want to see on surface, and everything we wanted to see was here. This is all related to the opening of the Atlantic Ocean in Jurassic times.
We want to see these southeast, northwest rifting systems, up through which then come these fluids. We know what we're looking for, and we saw it here. We saw a massive epithermal system, all the right surface signs, all the right geochemistry. Never been touched, never been drilled. We spent the last three or almost 4 years just doing the preliminary work. Mapping, sampling, ground geophysics, ground mag, some IP. Looking exactly what we wanted to see. Again, a 20-kilometer-long southeast to northwest rift structure, 5 kilometers wide. Showed all the right signs. The challenge being, well, it's so big, where do you start? That was the issue. We got to the point about a month ago, six weeks ago, we began to drill for the first ever drilling program on this project.
We're planning between 3,000-4,000 meters of diamond drilling. As I've said in previous webinars, this is very low-key, very high-risk preliminary drilling. I've, you know, I made the point numerous times, PEP is not how exploration normally works. Exploration is not walk up and shoot fish in a barrel. Exploration is normally iffy and dodgy and risky and painful and it takes a long time, and you eventually hit success if you're lucky. This program for us is. Well, for me, success would be if we find some sniffs. If we find the right rocks, the right structures, those structures are active or have been active, fluids have flowed, and if we find some anomalous gold in the right rocks, then I'll be very happy, and then we can sit down and plan the next phase.
Thus far, we're very happy with what we've seen. That little rock on the left is what we refer to as colloform banding. This is exactly what you want to see in a low-sulfidation system. This is the juicy stuff. Now, the issue we have here is that we have made some modifications to the assay process. We've been very lucky in Colombia with having a gold assay lab in Medellín, which gives us three days turnaround, which is very unusual. Most companies in the market are lucky to get three-week turnaround. Doesn't exist in Argentina.
We have an assay lab in a town called Perito Moreno, about six hours drive away, that will do fire assay for gold, and then assay have to go to Mendoza, which is 2,000 km away for full assay. We had planned to use the fire assay for getting gold and then just do the longer lab for pathfinders. Visually, in XRF, we noticed and have taken the view now that there might be some substantial silver credits in this material. Silver is again in this part of the world a big thing. We've seen some things that would suggest that there might be some silver issues here. That's good, but it complicates the assay process.
We've now sort of rejiggered how the assays, how the samples move in terms of fire assay and ICP. That's added some delays to getting results back because of having to assay several different times and getting different numbers. We would expect to get the assays back from these possibly in about a month after Christmas. Again, for a good reason, because we now think that there's going to be some substantial silver in here as well as gold. We don't wanna be issuing two kinds of assay results from the one rock. We wanna wait until everything's done. Looking very good. The plan is here we drill until probably middle of February, would be the current plan.
Then we stop, sit down, have a good think about it, understand what we've got, what we've hit, and what it means with a view to moving forward into the next drill phase later in the year. The timelines here, again, are subject to change. As I said, the team are there now. Both projects now will shut down for Christmas break next week. They'll both restart again probably the end of the first week in January. Everyone's had a very busy year and deserves a break. We've got some very nice projects on that are happening, so everyone looking forward to the restart in January. That's the end of the project.
Again, I guess what I'd say is that I made the point that we've been in this now for basically one year. I mean, the previous four years we were getting ready for this year. Dealing with the joint venture, getting rid of the joint venture, and moving the El Pantano project now to the point of drilling. In 12 months and two weeks, as I said, we've found an ore body, got to the brink of resource, raised a lot of money, and moved our other projects to the point of drilling and quite exciting prospects. For a junior, this is, it's been a pretty extraordinary year by any standards. We certainly hope next year's going to be as good or better. You know, touch wood. Thank you for your time.
Thanks, Brad. Good stuff. Have a cup of tea, and I'll do the first two or three questions or a drink. In fact, I think we've answered these on the way as we go through. First one is, are we still on track for a mineral resource confirmation in January? The answer, Brad's already addressed that. Yeah, everything's on track for that sort of timing. This will be the resources that we have here in Pepas is the one we're referring to. There will be a wider report, again, as Brad said, for the wider area. It needs to be put in context according to Canadian regulations. There'll be the resource summary coming out, and then shortly after that, there'll be the bigger report.
The next question, please can you confirm whether you have commenced baseline environmental monitoring at Pepas? And if so, when has it commenced? Well, again, as Brad alluded to earlier, the way the system works is you prepare a PTO, a work plan effectively. Well, first the resources. Based on the resources, you then prepare the work plan, which eventually gets you effectively to the mine. Also importantly here, where the access road is gonna be to and from the highway that Brad referred to. So both the footprint of a mine itself and the access road, both those need to be monitored environmentally. And the baseline study needs to be done. So once the PTO has commenced, we will then be...
In fact, we've now been commissioning a couple of groups to put forward proposals for the environmental. Sensibly, they can't commence until you have an idea of, A, the footprint and, B, where the access road's gonna be. It'll lag just slightly behind the production of the PTO. Who knows? These things will be happening in the next six months or so. That'll be the start of it, and the start of the permitting process. Which will be, you know, we'll be going into not just 2026, but also 2027. The next question, which is the traditional one we get, which is that our management own very little stock. They've compared us here with a company called EUA where the directors own 30% of the total share count.
Well, as again, we've gone through this in the past, where management has that sort of holding. It's not that they've been buying shares at a rate of knots. It's generally they've started as owners of the company, and they go ahead and floated it. They floated off whatever it is, 50%-60% and then retained 30%. You know, we're unlikely to get to those sorts of levels. However, things are changing. Brad has now gone through the issue of RSUs where we take part of our remuneration in shares. Brad has now got 1.5 million shares, I believe, Brad. It's around that sort of number.
1.6 rings a bell, almost seven.
Yeah. As have other teams of members of the management team. I'm, because of the tax situation in the U.K., I need to defer the taking of those shares. It will happen. I will take them. You'll see me catching up in due course. We are having more skin in the game, as it were. In any event, we've always been focused. With or without shares, we, you know, we're very intent on making a success of this. Brad, this one's probably up to you. What's happened to the latest drilling results? Only five drill results in seven weeks. What happened to the four-day turnaround? I guess-
Right. I guess there's a point that as we get toward the end of the drill out for Pepas, there's several things. One of the requirements from the resource consultants is to sort of close your body off. A few of the holes around Pepas that we drilled were dead holes. They were planned to be. They were just defining the boundaries and the margins. That's fine. You know, I don't really wanna waste my time and your time, you know, announcing dead holes. The four days is there. We try to announce results every sort of four, five, six holes, and that varies depending upon materiality. Obviously, if we get a couple of holes that are absolutely gangbusters, then we put them out.
If they're holes that were drilled for geotechnical reasons that are just drilled for rocks and faults, then that's not so material. The question, the context of what those holes are for, and when you're doing a resource, you're gonna have holes that are defined, that are there to get grade, and they can have holes outside that are just there to define rocks and boundaries and other things. That's part of the resource process. You have fun times, and you have sort of rather boring times just to define the margins. That will still take. That won't change. As I said, the drilling at Pepas will probably complete for the resource drill out in next week. The resource, the rig goes back beginning next year.
Where it goes is still being debated. It's probably gonna stay around Pepas and to look at Pepas surrounds. We've been doing some mapping, and even some trenching of late. We've finally been allowed to do some trenching in the area, so we're looking at some drill targeting now in January. We are thinking of a second rig in Anzá, but a second rig requires targets. That's a question of adding APTA and adding El Cedro to Pepas. That's a question of moving that forward. The same question at El Pantano. I did say fast turnaround down there and it has, but it's a question of the silver.
Now, the beauty of Pepas is that it's just gold. When you're drilling for resource, you're just filling in the gaps. You don't really need the other elements, the pathfinder elements that might come from the ICP process, which requires weeks of work. The fortunate was great for Pepas. Not so great for El Pantano, which we want the silver, obviously. Because we're exploration, we want the other things that might give us vector formulation, you know, the arsenic and the mercury and the base metals. It's a more complicated process. We're still a lot quicker than most companies. It's just a question of, well, you know, we will announce holes on the basis of materiality, and that changes from batch to batch.
Good stuff. Thanks, Brad. The next one is a geological question, although it says, "How does the Anzá geology compare to Collective Mining?" I don't know how much information we have about the geology.
Yeah. They
Just-
Collective Mining put out. They did a talk for the first time at a conference in Perth a couple of weeks ago, and I got a copy of the paper. Look, it's in the same, it's all part of the same family. It's, you know, I said there's a porphyry system as a source as there always is. Then above it and beside it, you can have a thousand different varieties of epithermal systems and breccias and all kinds of things going on. Pepas and APTA are probably higher level. They're above the porphyry system and off to the side. They're we're looking at the, you know, the fluids entering an attractive host rock. In the case of Pepas, it's a tuff.
In the case of APTA, it's more a mudstone. It's been silicified, made brittle, brecciated, and made into a host. One of the key points, I guess, is that if you look at the Guayabales project, all of this, there's a couple of centers in the region. In area, they're only about 150 meters across, but they go down a kilometer. If you look at the history of the Guayabales project, they poked around for a while and didn't have much fun, and then found something and then had to drill deep. That's when things got interesting. It just shows the depth extent of these things. Yeah, I think we're in the same rocks.
It's just a question of every situation can have a different style at the micro scale. We haven't drilled deep. We haven't even begun to look deep. The same rocks, the same plumbing systems. Yeah, we're in the same district, the same thing. We could have anything there. I'm not gonna say we've got a Guayabales, but we haven't looked yet. It's certainly the same rocks.
Thanks, Brad. The next one I can handle. How long before Pepas goes into production? Well, this ties into the comments I made earlier in relation to the environmental baseline study. First, we do the work plan. The work plan, that's gonna be commissioned in the next sort of month or so. That'll start January, February. At that point, the environmental baseline will be commissioned, which will then start probably 3-4 months after that. It's 1 year for the environmental baseline, up to 1 year. You know, these things will take, we would have thought a year and a half to two years. That's what we're anticipating. Maybe quicker like that, maybe slower, depending also on obviously the politics. There's probably gonna be a change in government.
Well, let's see what happens come next May, June. That may all influence how quickly these things can take off. The advantage that we have, as Brad said, is that this is a, it may be small, but it's a very high-grade project. It will fall within the small scale mining provisions in the Colombian regime. Which means that it's gonna be seen more favorably than perhaps, you know, large open-pit mines, which can be difficult to permit. So we've got the advantage of that. We've got the PTO starting up in the next month or two once we have the resource numbers, and the environmental will start thereafter. That's the sort of general timing that we're looking at.
Next question goes to, "Has there been any preliminary communications with any toll miners in the area in respect of plan for Pepas?" And then, "Is there a possibility of a bulk sample from Pepas which may be obtained before full permit approval?" I'll do the first half. In terms of communications, one of the tasks that we've got out for the people who are commissioning, who are gonna prepare the work plan, is to go out and survey and sample and talk with the three or four miners in the area that can toll. We know they've got capacity, and one in particular we know very well, and they are definitely looking for feed, and it'll be one where we could talk to. We know it's possible.
As to which option is gonna be best, there'll be a number of factors on that, including the grade that we're moving to them, the makeup of our ore compared to theirs, and other factors like that. We will get to know which is the best option to take on toll mining, whether we need to beneficiate anything at the mine head before we shift it anywhere. There's quite a lot of planning to do, quite a lot of options to look at. We do believe that toll mining is a very strong probability here. Brad, sorry, on the. That's it on
Yeah
... on the-
Yeah. Colombia just doesn't have. Brazil, for example, does have a facility where you can trial mine at a small scale, but big enough to actually make it worthwhile doing profitability. Doesn't exist in Colombia. There are different levels of mining, small, medium, large scale. The bulk samples are going to be required as part of the metallurgical process, particularly the ore sorting process. They're not gonna make a lot of money out of that. There is sadly no shortcut that you can just start to sneak in and start mining a few truckloads and pay the bills. You've got to do things by the book in Colombia. Even if you didn't have to, we'd do it anyway because there's no prizes for getting caught doing things behind the scenes.
You need to do things, you know, quite transparently. You know, we've sent off the PQ hole. PQ is a much bigger diameter hole. That's in the laboratory now in Canada, and we had been told the met work might not go on until into January. They seem to want to clear the decks before Christmas, and they're pretty advanced now, so we're getting all the metallurgy numbers as we speak. We may not get it all done for Christmas, but we seem to be getting most of it done, so we'll have full met work done hopefully by the end of the year, which will feed into the resource process. Which is quite key.
That from this stage seems to be looking, just on the back of it, as expected, the numbers look fine. I mean, it's, there's nothing that we've seen in the ore that would suggest a problem. Nothing in there that's deleterious. There's nothing that would suggest it's refractory. Nothing suggests it's hard. It's just, it looks like fairly blocky stuff, but you have to confirm that, so that's going to be fine. Couple of questions there about silver. What are the handheld XRF numbers? Well, I can't say that. Handheld XRFs are dangerous bloody things. Geologists waving them around, zapping shiny bits of rock is exciting, but I won't talk to the market about that because it's, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I mean, ultimately, when you start seeing things. I mean, we had one example this year where we saw visible gold in the core Pepas. That's horrible. I mean, I hate visible gold because, yeah, okay, it's nice to look at, but it means your assays are going to be completely meaningless. It just. If a little speck falls into the pot by accident, you get crazy numbers. So it just, it does make things very difficult in terms of getting a number that makes sense as a sample rather than as something to talk to the market about. So silver, yeah, we are seeing silver in the core, but that's not something that means it's going to be an assay. When you see a little vein or a speck and you didn't go and zap it, that's not a representative sample.
It's just something that says, okay, there's silver here. This needs to be now examined in an assay lab where you take a meter core, crush it up, mix it up and assay that. That number's meaningful. Zapping a shiny speck is not meaningful. Geologists do it, and they love it. But that's not a number that you're ever gonna use for anything other than, you know, raising money or keeping the share price going. Yes, there's silver in the core, as there was always going to be. We didn't quite expect that we'd see, you know, maybe what we saw. We've modified the assay process. I would expect the assays from the silver will start to come in.
Again, it's just a bad time of the year that the labs are also closing down, so we're giving them a bit of a push. But if we don't get them this before Christmas, it'll be in the new year. I do apologize for that, but it's just a question of these things coming out at exactly the wrong time of the year.
Good stuff. Thanks, Brad. The expected turnaround time, we've talked about that. Just mentioned it, so yeah. After-
We have adjusted the process now. The first batch are being redone to do this. The batches from now on in will be faster because we've made some adjustments to how the samples move. The issue we have at the moment is that it's a long way to the big lab. It's you know it's 2,000 kilometers rather than you know it's two days drive rather than two hours drive. We have to sort of figure out the movement of trucks and logistics and how things work because it's just not as easy to just pop over to Medellín with a truck and then have it back by lunchtime. It's you know it's a week turnaround.
Okay, great. Actually, only one more question, which I'm not sure whether we can answer specifically, but are we still expecting a 350,000 ounce resource of Pepas? It's a few weeks away, but not much longer. I mean
Yeah. I never said we would. I mean, I've. As I think I said, we put out in our head, we wanted a resource or we would like to get a resource that could feed a 30,000 ounce year operate for 10 years. Do the numbers, 300,000 ounces was sort of kind of my target. 'Cause I like 10 years. To me it was more the 10 years rather than the ounces because you need 10 years in order to just, you know, have the first year getting it all going and the last year closing it down. You want to have a nice chunk in the middle to make a lot of money.
When you have less than ten years, the markets as well, you know, it's a bit of a flash in the pan. Look, I don't know. I mean, we've made the point, and there's a question about, well, when the resource is due. It's not our decision to make. The resource is an external thing done by external consultants. We have our own view, we have our own model, and we're talking to them, but they go away and do their numbers, and they tell us when it's done and what it is. Now, I would expect to get some concepts of what of their models immediately in January. We'll have a discussion, and we may kick and scream and squeal, or we may be very happy, I don't know.
You know, we have a sense of what we think it's going to be as a ballpark. The exact number, you know, we don't know. I mean, I guess the point I've made probably several times before is that at what point does it become an economic ore body that warrants development? That question is largely one of, well, what does it cost to build? 'Cause the more it costs to build, the more you've got to find to pay for that, and then have something left over to make money out of. If we can look at something which is very cheap to build by virtue of being small, at-surface power line, near main road, you know, ya da ya da, then the size hurdle comes down.
We're not spending the first five years just paying back the capital cost. We can pay the capital cost back in 5 weeks. That means that a very small thing can make a lot of money very. This is the way things work in Australia, just by virtue of the fact that you're never going to be more than 100 miles away from some old mill. It's a very different way of doing things than if you're working in the middle of the Amazon jungle, 1,000 miles from anywhere, where you've got to reinvent the wheel, then you need big things. Because we're on the main road near everything, we are. Well, and I am personally comfortable, and Louis will agree to disagree with me because I always talk out of school, that we are beyond the threshold now.
Well, this works. Now we're just saying how it's gonna work.
Yeah.
That's part of the resource and the PTO process.
No, I agree. Look, there's been two or three analysts have also looked at this. They've had a look at the size of the ore body, taken a view on the grades, and then you know produced their own models and those are around for if you want to review. The next one, I think it's the last one, sounds like you might have made a discovery already at El Pantano.
Yeah. I wouldn't.
Let me comment. Yeah, exactly. Let me have a go first, and Brad, then you can follow up.
All right.
I believe we're both of a like mind on this. We do disagree at times, but yeah, look, it's early talk. It's early stage. We believe we've hit a mining mineral system. The difficulty here is you don't quite know what depth you've got to go to, as Brad has always reminded me, and it's also quite an extensive bit of ground. It's 20 km. So there's still lots more to look at. The drilling we're doing is more to get an idea of the rocks and, you know, where we may be able to trap things. So it's probably, from my point of view, it's too early to call it a discovery. But you know, it's probably.
Well, it is good news from a point of view of having found a mineral system. That's a fundamental point. To go for a discovery is probably too strong a term.
Yeah. Now, look, I'm very happy that we've had some success in that we have found a mineral system.
Mm-hmm.
Meaning that is a package of rocks with all the right structures, a source of fluid
Yeah
a source of heat, a source of metals, and a trap. We've found a mineral system, and that's actually pretty unusual. To walk up to a project that's never been drilled and the first few holes snag a mineral system is, again, pretty exceptional, and testament to the, you know, targeting of our geo who chose the project there and did all the work. I'm very happy with that. Yes, there is a low-sulfidation mineral system here. That picture of that core, the colloform banding is just the bee's knees. Discovery? No. Now it goes to discovery. Discovery means economics.
You take a mineral system, and you're like, "Well, where do we find bits that are big enough, wide enough, high enough grade to make economic sense?" That's a different question. As Louis said, it's big. What we need to now find is, okay, where are the parts of that system where it's thicker and higher grade? We have the plumbing, we have the source for the fluids. That's all there. Now, where are the spots where it blows out into chunks that make economic sense, both vertically and laterally? That's the next phase. This was just a drill program to say yes or no, is there a system? I think the answer now is, well, yes. Next phase will be, okay, well, what do we learn from that?
What can this drilling tell us that can provide us with guidance as to where we can now go to find the parts, if they exist, that are economic? That's the next phase. Discovery, no. Mineral system, yes. We've done the hard bit. Well, now we've got the other hard bit.
Now it's the patient bit. Yeah, exactly. Still to come.
All right. Fantastic.
Yes.
Yeah. Louis, Brad, you have addressed all those questions from investors today, so thank you very much indeed. Louis, before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Well look, yes, as usual, again, well, thank you to IMC for setting these up. We found this to be very useful ways of communicating with shareholders, and we do get some good feedback on this. Please do give us more feedback. Brad and I are always available for discussions. You know, we're increasing the share price but also increasing the nature and the number of shareholders that we've got, which is always good news. We're gonna have an interesting year coming up. This last year, to my mind, has been one where we've raised funds, we've got the word out there amongst investors. I think the work we're gonna do in 2026 is gonna be something which is maybe of just as much, if not more interest to the industry.
Some of the drilling that we're gonna be doing in El Pantano and on one or two of these prospects in Anzá are gonna be something which piques the interest of other players. It's gonna be an interesting 12 months. We're certainly gonna do as much as we can to promote the company, but promoting on good results and good work. As Brad says, we're very cognizant that we've got a bloody good team, not just in Colombia, but also in Argentina, and that's absolutely fundamental to the company. That will continue. We have a very flat structure. We have a very loyal group of people working with us, and we're grateful to them for that.
Anyway, that's it from me and Brad for this year. All it just goes to say is Merry Christmas, and I hope everybody has a peaceful and restful break. We're gonna try and take a few days off, but the phone is never off. Thank you again, and as I say, we'll speak to you shortly in the new year, I'm sure. Thanks again.
Fantastic. Louis, Brad, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Orosur Mining, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.
Thank you.