To the latest Ticker TV interview. I'm Donald Leggatt, and I'm joined today by Brad George, CEO at Orosur Mining, the mineral exploration company primarily focused on gold in South America. Orosur's strategy is to discover tier one projects, and currently, Orosur has 100% ownership of the Anzá Gold Project in Colombia and 51% of El Pantano in Argentina. Orosur is dual listed on the Canadian TSXV and on AIM. Its ticker is OMI, and its highly successful infill drilling program continues at Pepas. Pepas is one of three prospects at Anzá. Brad George, CEO, joins us now from Perth, Australia. Welcome, Brad.
Donald Leggett. As always, it's an absolute pleasure.
Fantastic. The pleasure is ours, I have to say.
Of course.
When we last spoke in March, Brad, you had just raised CAD 6 million, which I think at that time was GBP 3.24 million. Quite a considerable sum. I hope you've been spending that money wisely, Brad.
Well, I guess history will tell. I think so, but then, of course, I would say that. I think in the context, we only took back control of the Anzá Project in December last year, so it's been, what? Nine, 10 months. I think in that time, we've achieved an extraordinary amount. I mean, we've moved Pepas from being a cunning plan to being damn near a very lucrative resource. We've moved forward El Cedro. Yeah, we've achieved a lot. You could argue the toss, but yes, I would think that we've achieved a lot with that money. And certainly set the company up well for moving forward.
Okay. Talking of positive results, you've just released another RNS with more positive assay results from the flagship Anzá Gold Project in Colombia. It's been well-received. Can you comment on the background to the decision to move in that direction?
Yeah. There's a number of reasons, and they're in varied context. The main reason is it's because that's what the rock said to do. I mean, Pepas is an odd little thing, or I say little, it's little at this stage, but it will grow. It's very unusual in its context of what it is, its nature, its grades, location. It just lends itself to this process. It's just, it's a very unusual thing to find in the modern exploration game, and it just makes sense to do this. We're just doing what the rocks say.
Unusual in what sense, please, Brad?
Well, the average. I mean, if we look at across the industry now around the world, the average grade for open pit gold mines is about a gram, you know, maybe a bit over a gram. That's gone down over years as the easy wins have been won. This is 4-5 grams, and in fact, we're getting big chunks of 7, 8, 9, 10 grams. It's exceptionally high grade at surface, which is just, you just don't see this anymore. It's thick. It's not a narrow vein. It's not, you know, this 2-meter wide. It's 80 meters thick of very high-grade material. That size, that grade, its location, top of a hill, near a main highway with a power line over the site, with mills, with third-party mills.
It's ticking every box as to why, you know, how you could mine this very cheaply, very quickly, very profitably in a way that you very rarely see these days. Geologically, it's just quite exceptional.
Okay. These numbers all feed back into mineral resource estimate and MRE for a potential mine. I mean, it sounds to me as you're heading very much that direction. When are you hoping to publish the Anzá MRE, and what's your thinking on what that future mine project might look like? Would it be useful to start as a small initial mine that's quite easily funded?
Well, the process is quite formal. I mean, doing a resource NI 43-101, you know, there are steps to follow. We think at this stage, the drilling that we're undertaking to resource will be ended in the end of October, is our plan. We're ahead of schedule. Now, that is subject to review, but you know, we're on track. Then there's metallurgy and pit design, various things. The plan is to have the resource done, dusted, and published in December. Now, at this stage, that's on track. It may change, but I don't see any reason to, so we'll see where we go. The rationale for that is that this is not the end. This is the beginning. I mean, we think there's much more to be found.
In order for us as a company to be able to then talk to the market and say, "Okay, we've got this. It will cost X, it will generate Y," all of these economics, we must do the resource first. We really can't talk to the market about economics until the resource. The resource is the beginning of the process, the beginning of the conversation. We've, you know, gone probably a bit early in terms of how it would normally be done. Normally, you drill for years and do a resource. We've gone early because of the nature of this project, the nature of its deposit, and it gives us the ability to now begin to talk to the market about the fact that we have a mine or we have a mining project.
That's very important if you want to lift out of the, you know, the 2,000 juniors who have nothing into the top group that have something. To have something, you need numbers, and you need to be able to wrap your head around a concept, a timeframe, and economics. Having a very tangible resource gives us the ability to then talk to the market and be seen by the market as having a real project. It's a very important milestone for us, and we're really quite conscious on getting it done as fast as we can.
In a sense, it's actually very enjoyable, Brad, I would've thought.
Well, it's always fun. I mean, it's always fun finding something. As much as I'd like to think we're clever, you know, we're very thankful to Agnico Eagle, our previous JV partners. They left us with this walk-up target. You know, they left us with Pepas, couple of good holes. We walked in, re-drilled them. Yep, found it, drilled out. We got lucky. You know, luck favors the brave. We've come in, we've taken advantage of what we were left. We've moved it to a resource, and yes, I think. The market has responded because the market is really quite keen to look for. I mean, we're in a gold boom, for want of a better term, but gold booms only work if you have gold.
It's all right, it's all right having dreams, concepts and stardust, but ultimately, when you're moving into the bigger pots of money, the institutional investors, they need to see tangible results. We needed to provide exactly the results that those investors needed to see, and we have. That appeal and that attractiveness now, and we're now having meeting after meeting after meeting with institutional investors who now see Pepas as being a real thing. Being real is very different to being a dream.
Okay. Talking about being real, you aren't a man given to hyperbole, yet even you've described these results as pretty crazy, and in turn this has created a lot of interest from the institutions, private investors, potential JV partners. As you say, you're having the meetings, people are knocking on your door, the phone's ringing. Colombia is now seen as investable again by the mining majors. Hurrah. How does it impact your plans and your outlook?
I think there's a big difference between investing and speculating. Do you buy the company or do you, are you just trading the shares? When you start talking to institutions, they're investors. They're not momentum, they're not volatility. They wanna see an asset. They wanna see and understand what have you got? Will it be a mine? If so, when will it happen? What will it cost? What will it produce? They're focused on very tangible numbers as opposed to just day-to-day momentum. That's a good thing, and we have an asset and we have a projection to cash flow, which is why they're talking to us. It does mean that they need to see one, longer term, but they also need to see more tangible things. They wanna see tons, grade, ounces, resources, metallurgy, you know, permitting.
We're now moving from being, you know, arm waving and dreams to we now must produce tangible results. It's important and we're enjoying it, but we're now being forced to be a bit more grown up, which is, you know, at my age is challenging.
You have a number of other irons in the fire. You've got APTA near a resource. You've got El Cedro soil sampling near completion. Drilling is about to start at El Pantano in Argentina. Now, you're a relatively small company. Can you handle all this? That's a big question.
Look, absolutely. I mean, Pepas is where we are today. Once that's done in October, it gets handed over to consultants and they run with it, and our team moves back to drilling. We need to be drilling around Pepas to find more Pepas, drilling in Apta, drilling in El Cedro, drilling in El Pantano. We can do that with a bit of a joint use of consultants and various things. It's entirely easy for us to do. The reason, however, of course, is that we need to broaden our approach. Yeah, we're very conscious of, you know, we run at a low cost, we run at a low base. We all work at home.
Yeah, we are entirely comfortable that we can manage that and run these two parallel streams without any major additional resources.
Could I suggest that these are actually also good problems to have?
Well, I think ultimately how you do it is up to management. It's the nature of the projects. Do you have the projects that warrant the effort? I think we do, as much by luck as design. I mean, Pepas, we got lucky with being given that by Agnico. El Cedro, El Pantano, these are projects that we've been working on for years and have now suddenly, you know, come to the fore because they had excellent geology. You know, the industry, the gold industry's been very, very poor in terms of discovery for years, and now suddenly the market is demanding that we go back to grassroots and look at early stage exploration. They want tons, they want scale, they want size. We're just.
You know, again, we've intentionally got ourselves these projects that are early stage but have indications of enormous scale, and that's what the market wants. We have Pepas early stage or late stage production, so on and so forth, but these big, at the back end, these big early stage but big scale potential. I think we're balanced fairly well. You know, I think we're in the right place in a gold bull market, and that's why we're seeing this attention at the moment.
Well, it's clearly useful to have a broad portfolio. Tell us a little bit more about the El Cedro gold porphyry prospect, that's at Anzá. Then tell us more about El Pantano, which is gold silver exploration in southern Argentina. Give us your view on those two, Brad.
Well, as I said, if you look at the stats historically, exploration discovery results have collapsed the last 15 years because no one's done exploration at an early stage. The juniors can't do it, and the majors didn't do it. We're now seeing a move back to that, albeit slowly. We took a view early on that we would go back to early stage, big piece, parcels of land in key regions, but importantly, we wanted to see early stage signs of the right geological indications that something's going on. El Cedro is a porphyry system with associated epithermal system, it's big. We're seeing very high grade, all the right early stage geological signs, high grade, 1 to 9, 10-gram rock chips samples around the area. But a big system, it looks juicy, but never been drilled. El Pantano, same thing.
In a district full of monsters down there in the bottom of Argentina. Big piece of land, a massive epithermal system that we've got on a project, 25 km long. All the right geochemistry, all the right indications, all the right rocks that something is going on. Now, is that gonna be a gold mine? We don't know. We've passed the threshold of the geological event has occurred. Now it's a question of identifying if that's formed a deposit. Look, I think we've chosen the land wisely. It wasn't just throwing darts at a board. It was done on the basis of good geology, the right areas, the right time, and the right deal. We got in early. We have them both 100%, which I think is absolutely key.
We've gone into a gold market quite quickly, a gold boom market. The market's now desperately looking for gold projects, and we have two potentially huge projects in really key gold belts, undrilled, untested, but that's kind of exciting. I think, you know, the market is suddenly thinking, "Well, okay. This is kind of interesting," you know, we've shifted back from near mine brownfields to let's go back to the frontiers and look for these big beasts on previously untested, undrilled projects. We're actually getting very positive response from the market saying, "Okay. There is geological risk," but they're very keen to fund it. There's actually a bit of a frontier spirit out there right now in the market, and it's quite exciting.
What are your next steps at El Pantano in Argentina?
Well, we're drilling there in middle of October, so that's the plan. It's a difficult place. It's the middle of nowhere. No one lives there, so it doesn't have the benefit of Colombia of being able to rent a farmhouse. We've got to build a camp. It is kind of frontier in that sense. Yeah, we've got a 3,000-meter drilling program down there planned mid-October. No idea results. You know, we'll see. We have all the right indications of geochemistry, structure, geophysics. You know, everything looks good. We'll find out. If that's positive, we just keep going. You know, again, it's the first holes into a massive epithermal system. History would say, "Well, yeah.
Well, you know, wait and see. Someone's got to be first, and I think it's just a, you know, again, I'm very positive and very encouraged by the degree to which the market's indicating their preparedness to fund this early stage work, which is a nice change from previous years.
My final question to you, Brad. I know you're not a marketing man, and that's the most obvious thing I've ever said. You aren't a marketing man. Why should OMI actually be on any mining investor's watchlist?
I think the fact is we have something. I mean, it's you know, you could argue the case in, you know, in bull markets everything goes crazy, and that's fine. If you want to be in the gold market, you've got to have some gold. You know, there's no point arguing you're in gold exploration until you've found something. We've found something. We have Pepas. It's gonna be a resource. It'll be a mine. That's in the bag or being put in the bag now as we speak. That's case one, and now we have two other projects, three other projects that are potentially, you know, bigger and better, and we shall see. It's just a question of, you know, we are in the right place at the right time.
It took us 3 years or 4 years to get to that point. We didn't do it yesterday. I think this is probably the key point, is that the market changes in what it wants on the, you know, toss of a coin. It wants gold today. Getting good projects takes years, and we began the process 5 years ago. We've got where we are today through 5 years of hard work, and a bit of guesswork, and a bit of luck. It's not just a, you know, us turning on a dime. It's the end result, I think, of a couple of years of really good work and a bit of risk.
It's nice to be able to see that that's paid off and we're now getting attention by having these excellent projects at exactly the right time.
Brad George, CEO at Orosur Mining. Thank you so much for joining us. I think it's this evening from Perth, Australia. Thank you. That was fantastic. Thank you very much indeed for rolling out your views on the future for Orosur Mining. Thank you.
Pleasure.