Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Orosur Mining Investor Q&A session. Throughout today's recorded meeting, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. I'd now like to hand over to Chairman Louis Castro. Good afternoon.
Thanks very much, Mark. Yes. Good afternoon, everybody. My name's Louis Castro, Chairman of Orosur Mining. Also on the screen, Brad George, who is our CEO. Thanks for attending and we hope to be able to answer as many questions as you've got ready for us. The presentation will be in two parts. Brad will make a short presentation and then we'll do the Q&A. Since our last webinar, which we held at the end of October, quite a lot has happened. We finally completed the acquisition of Minera Monte Águila from Agnico Eagle, something which took much longer than we had anticipated. We did get two very good concessions on it and negotiations took a bit of time.
We did manage to acquire and get the project back for no money up front, which is fundamental to us 'cause the money that we wanna put into the ground rather than for anything else. We managed to get that. The second concession is that we've got total flexibility as to what we do with this, with all these licenses that we now have under our control. As you'll see as Brad goes through the presentation, in Colombia and the project down south, we have quite a few areas of interest, if you like. They may go all the way to deposit, we don't know yet. We do have flexibility as to what we do with each one of those, different areas.
We don't have to, you know, necessarily look for a joint venture partner for all of it. We have the ability to do what we want, which with individual parts of that property. I think that's an important point to make. We may come back to it during our Q&A. Okay, just wanted to make those two points. Within the company, we have obviously got Colombian assets that we're gonna major on. We also have a project in Argentina, gold with traces of silver, we believe, in the southern Argentina, the Santa Cruz province, which is very pro-mining. We have a small holding in lithium licenses in Nigeria. Not the best of times for lithium but our holding costs in Nigeria are very low.
We're not spending much time on that. In fact, we're not gonna cover it at all in this presentation. Without further ado, Brad, shall I hand over to you if you want to go through the presentation? Take the controls.
Yes. Thanks, Louis. Good morning, everyone. I say good morning 'cause it's 1:30 A.M. where I am, so I'm doing my best to stay awake. Well, I won't apologize but for older holders, some of the presentation might be familiar. I am gonna go back and rehash some of the history because given the activity on the market in the last couple of weeks, we probably have a lot of new shareholders wondering who the hell Orosur is and where it's been all their lives. We'll go back and do a bit of history. I'm sure the questions will come through. We're already there, of course. In summary, we're not a new company. In a past life, the company was called Uruguay Mineral Exploration. It's a Yukon-registered company.
We're just Canadian but dominated by the London Exchange by 98% these days. For about 20 years, it ran a gold mine in Uruguay, South America, that produced 1.5 million ounces. That came to an end in sort of 2017 and the company transitioned from there into or back into an explorer while it wrapped up the operations down there over a number of years. Largely done now. As a company, as Louis pointed out, we have two major gold projects. Okay, a bit of silver in Argentina, in South America. Probably most importantly or very importantly is that both projects are either owned 100% or we have a pathway to 100% and I'll explain that later on in the program.
That gives us enormous flexibility in one, owning the projects and two, whether we want to bring in a JV partner, which as Louis said, we're not in a hurry. At least owning it 100%, you have those options. Equally as importantly, they're both big blocks of land and getting bigger. I mean, I've been exploring for years. You can't explore on a postage stamp. If you're looking particularly from an earlier stages, you need as much land as you can get. We've got a big project in Colombia, now much bigger because of the acquisition recently I'll talk about later on and a big project of almost 600 sq km in Argentina. We've got big chunks of land.
The reason I guess many of you are here is that the recent drilling results for Colombia have been very exciting for a lot of us. As always, I would caution caution. You know, this is good fun but mineral resources take a while to develop and that's, you know, let's enjoy the ride but you know, there's a lot of work to be done. Argentina is early stage but looks very exciting geologically. Geologists are easy to excite. Importantly, we've just got drilling permits, so we look to start work there in the new year. It's nice to see an upward sloping share graph, which has been a long time coming. Obviously been a very exciting couple of weeks with the latest drill results coming out .
That, I think importantly for us, is that that's got us noticed. I don't know the numbers. There's probably close to 2,000 small miners in the world, small explorers in the world still these days. Probably far too many. Very hard to get noticed. I think those results, you know, given the way the world communicates now with social media. We've jumped out of the pack. You know, they were very stark drill results that's got everybody wondering what on earth is this? Got us noticed. The share price reacted and now suddenly we've, you know, we've lifted ourselves up a level beyond beyond the pack. Cash on hand, clearly that'll be on. I have no doubt will be a question that will be asked. Probably about $ half a million.
Yes, you know and we're always gonna need to raise money, so I'll just state that now. Why the attention? Well, as you know, as was pointed out, we've had the Colombian project and that is the key driver, since 2014, late 2014. Really actually about 10 years. It's been 10 years, it's been an overnight success, if you call it a success. Finally got the project back ourselves. Which for most of those years we've been subject to being a passive passenger to major companies and major companies do things in their own particular way. Again, I'll explain a bit later on. Finally we're back in the driver's seat. We're not beholden to anybody. We have it 100%.
Those drill results, you know, while they always need to be taken in context, are so good that they're just, they get everybody excited. That's really interesting. We have an older prospect at Anzá in Colombia called APTA, which has seen most of the work over the years. About 38,000 meters of drilling. It's interesting. We've made the point that we're going to move that or we want to examine the process to move that to a resource. We haven't pulled the trigger on that. We never said we would. We've just examined whether it could be moved to a resource and if so, what the process would be. That's encouraging. On the same project at Anzá in Colombia, there's what we think and what our previous partners thought was a major porphyry system, El Cedro.
E l Roble now they're the same thing. They were previously two prospects but they've been joined together. They'll probably need a new name. We'll get down to there in the new year but it's, you know, we're really sticking with Pepas at the moment. As I noted, the project at El Pantano has drill permits now, so, you know, we'll get back there and look at the work program for the new year. We're at a point we've got quite a balanced portfolio. We're drilling, getting good results and other projects in the profile that we look to fund and work on into the new year. We look to be able to get a couple of cards to our deck. The Anzá project, as I said, 10 years.
For those who are familiar with Colombia, just to the north of us is a project called Buriticá, which was owned by a company called Continental Gold and sold to Chinese firm Zijin Mining a few years ago for about $1 billion. Continental used to own the Anzá project but they couldn't fund both and they spun Anzá out in about 2012, I think. They did some good work, got some good drilling results and then Orosur merged or bought them in December 2014. Exactly 10 years. That was coming to the time when Orosur's gold mine in Uruguay was beginning to get a bit long in the tooth and there was some issues down there and there wasn't really enough cash being thrown off by that project to fund exploration.
The project ticked along for a while in a low-key way and that led eventually to a joint venture being signed with Newmont in September 2018. Newmont had a grand plan to dominate the entire Mid-Cauca Belt. The Mid-Cauca Belt being the primary gold belt just to the west of Medellín in this region. They had JVs and ownership stakes in three companies up and down that belt. We signed that JV with them and they also took a $2 million equity placement in us and that makes them still to this day our largest shareholder. Immediately after that JV was signed, there were some security issues in Colombia that led Newmont to largely withdraw. They did no work in the first two years of that joint venture and paid us the money in lieu they were required to spend.
It sat there for quite a few years. Agnico, which was then about number seven, which now I think is number three in the largest gold miners in the world. They then wanted to come to Colombia. They hired most of the executive team for Continental who'd left after the Zijin takeover. They came to us and came to Newmont and then they effectively joined Newmont as equal partners and to share the obligation of the JV. They joined in September 2020. Then of course we're in the middle of COVID, so that made things rather interesting. We were running the project. Our geos were in charge but using their money. We kept operating but we had to stay in a COVID bubble for security reasons.
Again, for the next year and a half, work continued but it was stuck with this very small central area in Apta and couldn't really get out until late 2021. They moved out, began to find new prospects at Pepas and other places. That then took us to the end of the first phase of the JV. The JV was in three phases. The first phase was four years. That came to an end. They then had to move or at least they had the option to move to phase two, which is more money, more equity. That's when they began to. I don't speak on behalf of these two big companies but they began to have second thoughts about Colombia as a destination. Not the project. They love the project.
But Colombia was problematic for them given they'd both since done major mergers with other companies, with Newcrest and Goldcorp and Kirkland Lake. They had so many projects that they just thought, well, Colombia is at that time politically a bit complicated, particularly with Newmont. They began to look at ways of moving out. We began that conversation beginning or end of last year, beginning of this year, as to what that departure would look like. As Louis said, it took a lot longer than we thought and I was a bit naive in thinking it'd be done by April, March. We got it done in November. No cash up front. We defer consideration to production, so we pay an NSR royalty and we're back in charge.
It's taken us, as I said, this long to get us back to being in charge. We began to drill immediately and obviously the results were quite impressive. The project changes a bit. When we first started, about 200 square kilometers. That over time it reduced, as projects always do, as leases reduce in size, as they get older or as they become encroached upon. The key driver, it was 20 kilometers of strike of what we thought was the major mineralized trend, the Aragón Fault. Looked interesting. To this point, we've done about 45,000 meters of drilling. As I said, mostly at APTA but lately focusing on Pepas. It's well located. Major road running along that river. Big tarred road. Lots of towns. Very nice part of the world. It's about two hours drive from Medellín.
Excellent camp on site. Most of this project sits within the Anzá municipality, which is very mining friendly. They want us there. The project is now also increasing in size. Having done the transaction to buy our JV partner, we've also in effect bought their applications. We've more than doubled in size now, here's the maps. On the left is the previous licenses that made up the joint venture. We took a few applications of our own that were not part of the JV and then we also acquired a large number of applications from MMA. We're now looking at about 400 sq km. This is always, however, I must caveat, subject to change. Applications are not as secure as titles and they pinch and swell over time as things happen.
I would expect a few of these to drop off. We're now potentially, I don't know exactly but we are probably the most substantial and most dominant landowner or landholder in the Mid-Cauca Belt. It gives us a very good position to look at. We haven't been to these places. This covers a very long strike of a very major gold belt. Very little work's been done, this is something for us to look at in the new year. Certainly it gives us a very nice footprint. The key point of the transaction. We in effect purchased the JV company. Agnico and Newmont were operating in Colombia under a company called Minera Monte Águila. We purchased that company. All of its assets, all of its data, all of its licenses, we now own.
The consideration is no cash up front. 0.5% NSR royalty on all future production, plus an additional royalty of $75 an ounce on the first 200,000 ounces. That's a total of $15 million. That to us was we thought was very doable, given the very buoyant gold price, given what we're seeing with potentially quite low-cost mining. Giving away that level of NSR, which is in effect about 2% NSR, is about industry standard and we're quite comfortable with that. Importantly, no cash up front. We didn't have any cash and really, you know, we wanted to defer all consideration until we'd found a mine, permitted a mine, built a mine and were running a mine. For us, that was a very good deal. Pepas, of course, is what got everybody excited.
Pepas is in the north of the project area . It's about 10 km north of the main APTA camp and the main APTA deposit. This is an absolutely grassroots discovery, which is quite unusual these days. To be fair, to give credit, this was found by Agnico. They lost it again but this was when it comes time to fight over who discovered it was discovered by Agnico. Just as COVID began to abate, the guys got out of camp and moved north and began to map and sample and do regional ridge sampling. Found anomalous areas and importantly, this is quite a remote area. No one lives here, so it's difficult access. Found a small outcrop of very high-grade material about, you know, about 10 meters long, running between 10 and 70 grams per tonne gold.
They had some sense of what they thought the regional geology was. As this map shows, they thought it was roughly sort of southwest and northeast. We're not so sure now. You know, we had the benefit of hindsight, so we're reassessing these maps. They drilled their first hole in April 2022, PEP-1, to target what they thought was a down-dip extension of this outcrop. Somewhat surprisingly, pleased me but pleasingly surprisingly, hit 150 at 3 grams per tonne from surface. Bit of a surprise. Two further holes from this same drill pad came up with similar numbers. One hole collapsed.
This was again, when the companies I've said began to have pressures with politics and I, you know, I get the sense and again, I don't know, not being inside the tent, that they were told, "Look, we don't really want to be in Colombia. Give us a reason to stay." They sort of stepped back. Understand, of course, that companies of this size need massive projects. They're not here for 1 million ounces. They're here for 10 million ounces. They're here for Tier 1. They said, "Look, if it's not 5-10 million ounces, we don't want to be here." They rolled the dice. They stepped back substantial distances and drilled deep holes, sort of Hail Mary holes. Hope for the best and those holes mostly missed.
It wasn't bad work, it was just the pressures applied by the realities of being big companies. Then everything wound down. We had walk-up targets and that was obviously again, you know, we recognized this and that gave us a what we thought a tremendous exciting opportunity to walk up as a small company with different size hurdles to do things differently and get immediate success, which is sort of largely what we've done, I guess, as much by as luck as design. The key question that I've always talked about is that and this is not understood well, when you drill the first hole into a new, I won't call it ore body yet but into a new body of mineralization, you get good numbers.
You very rarely get much information about the orientation unless there's something particular about the rocks that gives you a clue. Generally, the orientation can remain unknown. It can be a million different things. Traditionally what you would have done in the old textbooks is you would have, you know, the first hole's a great. You would then move the rig to a different location, probably the other side and you would drill into it from the other side and you'd poke around for a while and you'd try to find some sort of key feature that you wanted to drill into from different directions that would give you some sense of the orientation. We've been back to site. We were there substantially before the deal was completed. We took over the project and began to map and sample.
We found a lot more outcrop, a lot more high-grade areas. We found 2 old artisanal tunnels that had been mined and abandoned, that we entered and the previous two partners didn't enter for safety reasons but we did. We mapped and sampled those. We saw fresh rock. We saw lots of high grade. We got a better sense in those tunnels of, because they're fresh rather than being weathered, we could see some of the structures that were still preserved and got a better sense of what was going on. We saw, well, you know, we got a tunnel here, this tunnel B, which was running, the whole tunnel was running to 10, 20, 50, 80 grams. There was a 60-meter gap between that and the previous or the first hole.
We thought, "What's happening in between that?" That was an obvious place to start, just as a whole to understand whether that first hole, PEP-1, was just luck or whether that whole chunk of rock was mineralized. We positioned our rig just next to that tunnel B, which was high grade and drilled back toward PEP-1. Of course, that was PEP-12, our first hole and it came back, you know, little short of spectacular. That was the hole that made everyone sit up and went, "Wow, what's going on here?" It also gave us information about the orientation and we begin to think now and it's becoming more certain that I guess unfortunately, our partners chose exactly the wrong direction to drill. They drilled almost parallel to what we think is the controlling structure.
We're seeing a basement fault. PEP-12 and then subsequent holes hit this reasonably recognizable basement fault below which we're getting into andesites and basalts and so no gold. That's correlatable from hole to hole. We think this fault runs from the southeast to the northwest. That first hole was great numbers-wise but it wasn't particularly effective in terms of orientation. We now think we're getting a better sense of this. We're not done yet. We've still got a few more. You know, we've had obviously two more holes that came back even better. I mean, hole PEP-13 was just absolutely ridiculous in that people just were rubbing their eyes saying, "Have we made a mistake?" Those sorts of numbers over those sorts of widths from surface are just really weird. I mean, they're just.
I'm getting old and I've never seen anything like this in 40 years of trying. It's pretty amazing sort of stuff. Now, it doesn't mean that this is it, this is any size here yet. Size is the next question. We're still poking around trying to understand, you know, where the boundaries are, where the main structures are. While doing that, if we get these kind of numbers, then it keeps everybody on the edge of their seat. It's quite nice. 15 and 16 are underway or 15's done, 16's underway and we'll be closing down for a bit of a Christmas break for about a week. The key point, however, I think, is that we had a small program planned of about 800 meters. There were five or six holes depending on results.
We now really can't afford to stop. This area is secure. We have secured the area. No one lives or works here. We really can't afford to leave it empty. You know, the nature of holes are vacuums. Just in order to keep the area secure and subject to financing, that small drill program is now basically going to become a big drill program. We'll have Christmas break, three-four days and then just crack on and keep going into January. This orientation work that we're doing, which is the next few holes will continue, probably 16, 17, 18, will just continue. If they come back with information that we think is helpful, we then begin to just step out and begin to look for answers. It's exciting.
I don't have any idea yet what the size would be. I'm not getting excited about 10-20 million ounces. What I'm excited about is the economics of these sorts of numbers. Open pit, that thickness, that grade, top of a hill, with a power line running over, literally running over the deposit. The economics of this potentially could be off the chart on the downside in terms of cost per ounce. It's very, very interesting. This sadly is a PDF presentation that this website uses, so you can't see the video but we are beginning to get a picture. The issue we face in rugged terrain, I think I made a point on Twitter, is that if you're in a straight or somewhere flat where your rig is truck mounted.
You tend to just drill holes in the same direction in parallel lines because you move the rig around. Moving the rig here is hard, so we tend to leave the rig on the one pad for a while and turn it around different directions. Okay for the geos who have 3-D software but it does make it a bit difficult to see on a presentation or an RNS announcement. Over time, we'll begin to start developing these sort of pictures because straight sections are not particularly useful. It just shows, I guess, the yeah, a good indication that top of a hill, top of a ridge, this is a mining engineer's dream. I mean, if it grows to size and it gets some potential and we have a deposit here.
Mining top of a hill, the whole hill, strip ratio very low, high grade, moving ore down to a plant. This is everything you're gonna you could wish for that could reduce your mining cost is essentially here. It's looking pretty interesting. Pepas is continuing. As I said, Christmas break and we're gonna just continue subject to finance of drilling into the new year. I would hope that over a matter of months, something will begin to emerge there. It's not gonna be fast. Those who think it's gonna be mining next Tuesday afternoon, you're disappointed. Drilling a resource takes time. You can't make it go any faster, much as you might wish. We just drill. We have one rig. We might move to two .
Beyond that, probably not, because beyond two rigs, it's hard to manage, hard to build pads. It begins to get clumsy and messy and you need to be very, very much more geared up with people and equipment and space. Maximum 2, we'll look at the new year. I think next year, if all goes well, it'll just be drill, drill or drill, baby, drill, as our friend Trump says. To the south, APTA. This was the original prospect that was first found in 2012. 38,000 meters of drilling. Very different beast. Everything in this area is either porphyry or epithermal. We have porphyry sources and other companies have porphyries. Above the porphyries, we have what can be a huge variety of epithermal systems, depending on where you are vertically in the system.
This one's a high level, we think VMS/epithermal system. It has some extremely high grades historically but then close by there's low grade. It's quite a complicated ore body in terms of the variability in grade and that makes it complicated in terms of understanding the tonnages and the ore grade. We've began to relook at that internally, having taken over control, having got all the data from recent drilling. We have engaged consultants to look at this and say, "Well, is this able to be moved to a resource?" Now, we didn't want to do a resource, because doing a resource is actually quite a very complicated and expensive business. If you need a doctor to come to site, verify QA, QC, it's a six-month job to move to a resource.
We wanted to know the answer before we engage consultants. The view is that, yes, there's probably a resource there. But what it is remains to be seen. The resources are not objective. Resources are depends on who you ask. The question comes down to, how do we better understand those high grade pods? Because that's where all the answers are going to be. We think that they probably need no more drilling probably but more understanding of the geology, because you're trying to interpolate between holes. We're beginning a process now of re-logging the older core and we'll bring some consultants to site in the new year to look at that and create a picture of exactly what drives this. The issue we have is that no one actually knows why this thing is here and that's key.
You need to understand what controls mineralization, what controls the high grade and then to have a reliable geological interpretation that can underpin the resource. If you don't have that, then you can do a resource but it becomes a very conservative resource. We thought, well, at that point, if we're conservative, we think it's better. If we can do a bit of work to increase the size and the grade, then we'll do that. Having Pepas is great. We drill that. APTA, we think that, well, we know that there could be a resource there but we want to make it as big and as good, as high grade as we can and that will require a bit more interpretation. That'll be a new year thing.
To the south, as I said, there's a large porphyry system, which originally found by Anglo American many years ago as a base metal project. Our partners went back in and mapped and sampled and have found it's a big system, you know, three by three Ks. It is a classic porphyry system, so we're lower in the system. Lots and lots of smoke. Lots of high grade veins running up to 10 grams. All the right rocks, all the intrusives. Lots of alteration, lots of arsenic, lots of, you know, sulfides in the area. It looks interesting but it needs a lot more work. Never been drilled. There's a lot more sampling. We just don't have the time right now. It's a very exciting thing to have. We're a small company.
We have, you know, only a couple of geos, limited human resources, limited financial resources. Right now we're focusing on Pepas and then APTA and we'll get down here in the new year when we get a bit of time and a bit of clear air and look at this. Now, how fast it will be, we don't know and we'd like to be drilling here in next year but really it depends on Pepas. If Pepas is the one that's scoring the runs, then that's where we focus. We will get down here when we get a bit of time and better understand this and this hopefully will develop into a drill target over the course of next year but we'll see. Moving to Argentina. El Pantano is far in the south in the Santa Cruz province.
Argentina is a federation, so the states control mining. It's very much state by state as to whether you're welcome or not. Santa Cruz is ferociously pro-mining and most of the big gold mines are in Santa Cruz. The biggest being Cerro Negro, which is owned by Newmont, our biggest shareholder. Well, they tell me that when it's all done and dusted, it'll be a 20 million ounce or a high grade and we'll have made a fortune. Immediately north in Chubut Province, they hate mining. Again, it's a question of being in the right place. We're coming to the end of the first three years of this JV. It ends actually in February or on Valentine's Day next year. We did a deal with two local geologists.
The companies had looked here previously in a very low-key way and they walked away. We did a deal with two local geologists. It was a big project at the time of 60 sq km. Now it's about 570 as we reduce. Zero entry cost, very low burn cost. We did a deal that had $1 million over the first three years and then $2 million for the following two years. Interestingly, actually very rarely, we have the option to go to 100% on this, which is. I've never seen this before. We asked the question and told, basically told to bugger off, actually we did the deal. We have the right to own this 100%, which again, gives us options. We're looking for a Cerro Negro analog, that's our target.
The reason we came here is that although no work had been done, it had all the right ingredients geologically on the ground. The beauty of here is it's flat. There's not a blade of grass anywhere. It's just rocks on surface. We're, you know, we're halfway to Antarctica. There's no vegetation, no trees. You can just wander around and see rocks and we're seeing all the right stuff in what we think is a major system. Different part of the world. We're far east of the Andes now. It's still epithermal but it's more of a rift related. This relates to the opening of the Atlantic Ocean back in Jurassic times and created these southeast and northwest rift systems into which fluids flowed and created these sort of flower structure vein systems.
The key thing about here is that quite often, in fact, quite commonly, the gold doesn't go to surface. So you can wander around and find quartz veins that are barren of gold. 'Cause as the gold fluids come up the system, they're hot, they want to boil. They can't boil until the pressure of the binding rocks releases. Suddenly they do and they almost explode. The gold comes out explosively in these boiling zones and you get these really big, thick, high-grade intersections. Then the veins carry on but the gold is gone. So you're looking for things that could be deep. It could be 100 meters down. So mapping on surface is not looking for gold. You're looking for the key signs that this process has gone on.
So you're looking for more mobile elements, mercury and arsenic. You're looking for a quartz vein. You're looking for evidence of steam vents, of hot springs and looking for the right structural preparation of the rocks. You've seen the rifting that relates to the opening of the ocean. You've seen the fluids moving and you've seen that geochemistry. This is what we see at El Pantano. It's a big system. It's a 25-kilometer-long rifting system. The geochemistry is exactly what we want to see in terms of the arsenic and the mercury and a bit of trace gold. Quartz veins everywhere. We're seeing all the right silicification. It's never been touched. Literally never been touched, never been walked on, never been drilled. We think it's geologically ferociously exciting but very early stage.
As we know, the market doesn't like early stage. Having Colombia now going well, I think we have the appetite to move down here. Newmont likes the project. They've been there. They have given us assistance. They're on the sidelines watching. We've been to their project. They've been to ours and they think it's a great project. Again, doing no JVs. We're doing it alone. We have the money. With permits just arrived, we'll get in there in the new year. We may not drill immediately. We may do some geophysics first. The permits are there, so we can drill where we want to. We'll look at getting a lot of work done there in the new year before the winter hits. Winters down here are pretty grim. We want to be out by June or it gets pretty crazy.
It's an exciting project. We've in the last three years just doing all the preliminary work. Mapping, sampling, doing ground magnetic surveys. Again, it's ready to go. I guess the question where we are, we'll re-dig these lines as things increase. But clearly, Pepas is what's driven the share price in the last couple of weeks. That took a long time to get done, a lot longer than we thought for the deal to be done and that's just how deals work. I'm sorry. But the results we got, I think, justify the delay. I mean, we didn't expect to get results that good. I might pretend that we did but actually it stunned me. The market took notice and that's, as I said, lifted us above the pack. Long may that continue. That will continue.
Pepas will roll on next into, if all goes well, resource drilling. The APTA assessment and resource will continue and that will begin in the new year. El Roble, we hope to confirm as a porphyry in the new year. Again, it depends upon priorities of where we direct staff but, you know, we don't have cast of thousands, so we have to really focus on what gives us the biggest bang for our buck. We begin work at the, in Argentina. I guess most importantly, by being noticed now, you know, we're not having cash thrown at us but we are beginning to see, as seen by an announcement today, we're now being seen by bigger pots of money, by institutions. Both in terms of our size.
We're now at CAD 30 million market cap, which sort of gets that nice spot. We're now seeing the bigger money beginning to see us and take an interest in the phones. The phones are ringing for chats to say, "What's going on? Who are you?" Yeah, look, it's a nice change to be popular for a while. That's where we are at the moment. I'll leave that there and we're happy to sit here for a while and take some questions.
That's great. Brad, Louis, thank you very much indeed for updating investors. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of the screen. Just while the guys take a couple of moments to review your questions submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, will be accessible via your Investor Meet Company dashboard. Louis, as you can see, you've had a number of questions from investors throughout your presentation. We did receive a number before today's event, so thank you to everybody for your engagement. If I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Yeah. I guess I'll give Brad a break, actually. Help yourself. I hope it's tea or water that you've got in that flask. We don't know but there we are. The first one relates to in fact, Brad's answered this already. How much money remains in the treasury? You mentioned this already. It's at just over half a million dollars at the moment. And clearly now we're getting to a more active phase. There will be at some point a need to replenish that. The good news is that well, two things. I'd say we have been careful in A, what we spend and B, in what we raise, because the price has been pretty low over the last few months. That's now changed. We're gonna be in a better position with a better price.
And secondly, getting some interest, not just here in the U.K. but also in Canada. We haven't used the Canadian listing to much of an extent but hopefully we'll be able to make some use of that going forwards. The next question. If OMI, if Orosur enters into a joint venture, what's to stop the other company putting Anzá into care and maintenance, which is what happened last time? Okay. Well, fair point. Fair point. This was a joint venture agreement that we inherited when we arrived and so we had to work within the strictures of the JV. And so that did lead to a bit of delay. To be fair, we did have COVID in between as well, so it was difficult to be particularly active outside the Anzá region, which is what Brad's already alluded to.
What I would say, just going back to my points right at the beginning of the talk, is that it doesn't necessarily well, A, we don't necessarily have to go for a joint venture partner right away. Secondly, if we do, it doesn't necessarily have to be over the whole land holding here. You know, at the moment we've got two or three areas of interest and there's nothing that might stop us from, you know, developing one ourselves, looking for a partner on another and, you know, deciding what we're gonna do with the third. There's quite a lot of optionality here. Going back to the specifics of the question, how are we gonna stop it happening again? Well, you know, it's all in the drafting and relative strength on this.
If you're going from a stronger position, then you'll be able to do a slightly better agreement. We're confident we can minimize the time that's gonna be spent, you know.
I can jump in there, Louis. Yeah, to make your point. When we did the JV with Newmont originally, we were basically bankrupt. I mean, the company was on its knees. So that gave us limited ability, well, before our time. This was the previous. There were maybe some things in the JV that we'd do differently but you know, there's no point, you know, looking at hindsight. As I said, it was in care and maintenance effectively for the first two years because of security issues with Newmont. They did no work but they paid us money in lieu. Then in the when, y ou know, when we used the word care and maintenance, really that was that limbo time between phase one and the beginning of phase two.
I've explained to many investors that the process of moving from one to two changed because the tax rules in Colombia changed. There was a complication imposed upon us. Generally speaking, the JV partner can do what they want. It's their money. The one way around that is, of course, you can say, "Well, A, you've got to spend $X and B, you have to do a certain amount of work." You might, for example, say, "Well, okay, you have to do so many thousand meters of drilling," for example. That would probably be the mechanism we would use in future to, i f we did a JV, which I'm not saying we will. I'm not a great writer, to be honest. To confirm that the partner does their work.
The big issue we had historically was not care and maintenance, it was force majeure. What we did do for most of the JV was that we remained in control. We did the work, albeit with their money. Even when Agnico came in and COVID was there, we did the work. They wouldn't come for safety reasons and health reasons for COVID, so we went and did all the work. If we didn't do that, then they could have called force majeure. We did what we could to continue to make sure work continued. Yeah, that mechanism of saying, of defining certain work programs might be the way you'd do it. Then I guess the next question there is if we did a JV and let's, you know, JVs, I'm not incredibly versed, as Louis said, it would depend.
If we would have remained in control, would we give over control? As things today, we haven't had any JV chats. Not interested. You know, the phone's, you know, we've had a few people saying, "What are you gonna do?" Which is sort of a loose way of saying, "You know, do you wanna do a deal?" Because we're coming into a gold market. There's lots of junior mining companies. What they want is projects. You know, that's the key issue is that you don't, i f you don't get a good project, you're not gonna raise any money. They can suddenly see this is a good place to be. We've got a lot of land in a couple of countries. Do we wanna do a deal? We can do a deal on one or all.
My view is now, Pepas, we'd be nuts to do a JV on that. I mean, it's that exactly what a junior company wants. It's cheap to drill, cheap to get to, getting fast results. That's you know, really what we really want to be. Exploring a big porphyry, for example, that's a different beast. You look at what Collective Mining's doing south of us. That's a deep hole. It's rugged country. It's expensive. A scenario might be is that we do Pepas and we bring a partner in for that. That's speculative but we can block, we can divide them up. At this stage, Pepas is what's the key. If we did a JV on that, well, I just can't see the sense right now unless it was an amazing JV. That's just a really nice junior company project.
Let's see what comes up. The next one is the south of Anzá. There was some speculation. South of Anzá was to be drilled by the year-end. Obviously, delays cropped up. Is the south still highly on the agenda? What's a rough time to drill? Well, I think we've covered that in the presentation. I think Brad did a good job on that. The south means El Cedrón and El Roble, the porphyry that we've just discussed. So yeah, it depends on priorities. Right now it's Pepas, possibly APTA and then El Cedrón or El Roble after that. Again, depends on funding and how things progress on the other two projects. It's very much still on the agenda.
There's plenty of sampling results that we have from there and we can do a little bit of work there just to perhaps define better the target. The drilling is likely to be later on next year rather than earlier on. The next one. Has the phone finally rung off the hook after the high-grade intercepts Pepas has delivered? Well, it's interesting actually, because I'll just put in context this. At the end of October, there is a gold mining conference in Medellín in Colombia, not too far from where our project is based, actually. I attended there with Joaquín Sarroca and we had very interesting conversations then and that was before we even started to drill Pepas. The reason for that is that Colombia itself, the general atmosphere, environment, mining environment is improving.
You know, when this current president we have now came in sort of three years ago now, mining was looking under threat, I wouldn't say, because Antioquia province has got a great history and it will still carry on but it was in a more difficult position. President hasn't been able to pass a lot of the stuff that he did want to pass. Congress has been digging in its heels. The political situation is changing and more and more companies are coming into the country. We've got some sizable guys coming up and wanting to have discussions because we do have the landholdings. We've worked hard at that. We've got a very good community team doing what they needed to do, even through COVID.
While Agnico and Newmont were there, they also invested on the community stuff. It's important to have the social license. Yes, there are discussions going on but as Brad says, we're not in a particular hurry to do, you know, a deal right now. Let's see how things develop over the next few months. Next one probably for you, Brad. Can you see this one? Much of the drilling at Pepas has been north and west of PEP-1. I note that the map. Oh, here, shows a river some distance to the east. How far is PEP-1 from the eastern boundary?
Yeah. The big river to the east is the Cauca River, w hich is what the name of the whole region comes from. It runs 100 km from south to north. It's a Mid-Cauca Belt. There is a Cauca State further south of us. That's the really big crustal scale structure that controls everything, not in and of itself attractive. It's just a big thing that then feeds off. That's quite a few kilometers to the east. We don't wanna work down there. It's not prospective until most of that area is blocked off. On either side of the Cauca River, there are these forest reserves, these dry tropical forests. We don't work down there. We're up in the hills.
The Cauca fault is a major crustal scale thing but it's not in and of itself attractive at a prospect or deposit scale. We'll go as far east as we need to. You know, we sort of made the point and this goes back to Louis' comment about the work down south. You know, we're a tiny company. We've got a couple of bucks in the bank. We've got a couple of geologists. We can't do everything at once. We've gotta. You know, we have to be very careful about how we apply our time and our money and our people to get back. One, to get some good results, to give us confidence to raise money and to get the market to notice us again. We've had a very long period of just being, you know, ignored.
We're focusing on that which gives us the biggest bang, which is Pepas, top of the hill. Pepas is easy to get to. It's a half an hour drive from the main road, top of a hill. It's really nice. We're starting in the middle. The holes we've drilled so far are just sticking in that core, understanding what we think controls that and we'll just step out in very small steps. We're not gonna go galloping off to the east or to the west or the north trying new things. That's all very exciting and there's lots of smoke. We're seeing anomalies all over the place that we'd love to go and drill but you've just got to restrain yourself and say, "Look, that's not gonna go anywhere. It'll be there tomorrow.
Just get this thing moving to the point where it becomes self-sustaining and we can begin to expand our resources." It's to do what Agnico and Newmont did, they had, I lost track, 160 people in their camp. You know, cast of thousands. We can't do that. We don't want to do that. All of these things we have to do in a very logical sequence in a way that a small company can afford and can manage with our current resources and our current management bandwidth. Yeah, the river, the Cauca River, is a long way off, so we won't worry about that.
Yeah. Next one. With the Anzá project now fully owned, how does this consolidation change the company's ability to raise capital or attract strategic partners? Well, I think I've probably covered that already actually with my last answer. Yeah, the reality is that now we've got 100% interest. That gives us a lot of optionality and there are people calling and one day we also may even approach you if we think we want to go and find a partner.
It gives us an easier way to be valued. This was always the argument about Anzá. If MMA had elected not to move to phase two, then the old JV had a facility that said, "Okay, if that happens, then they'd own 51%. They would then fall back to 49%. We would assume majority control and then we can take over control and spend our own money. If they didn't contribute, they would dilute away over some period of time." That was an unknown period of time. It's taken years to dilute them away. They could have always said, "Oh, we'll come back in now after the risk has been done." You had no idea of knowing what our ultimate equity position would be.
We could have been 51 or, you know, 90. How do you value a company if you don't know what they've got or what they can get in future? You say, "Well, just give the whole thing back 100%. It's easier for us, easier for you. You don't wanna be there. We do wanna be there." Having 100%, yes, people just know what you are and can put you in a nice little box and write that's what it is. We know what the payment to you to make are in five, 10 years' time. That's all known. People love known things. They hate uncertainty.
Just having nice round numbers, known numbers just makes it all a lot easier for all the little bean counters and analysts who are running numbers over us now and saying, "Well, you know, it's just. There's enough uncertainty in geology." Having certainty in equity just removes one big unknown.
Next question. How does the grade and scale at Anzá compare to other similar gold exploration projects in Colombia or Latin America?
Well, I can't comment on scale yet. Scale is a big question, I suppose. The grade is up there. I'll be honest, I have no idea what Pepas is. You know, the question of how it got there, why it's there, what it is. This is a question for next year when we've got a bit of time. At the moment, it's just, we're just drilling. It's just so fast that we haven't any time to scratch ourselves. The question of its genesis is something for mining conferences in five years' time. You know, what we do know, as I said, the whole region is essentially you have a big porphyry comes in from below, fluid coming up from the porphyry and above that you have this huge variety of epithermal systems.
There can be a thousand different styles depending on where you are vertically and laterally. They interact with the host rocks, with surface water and all kinds of things happen. You get this massive variety in width and size and grade and so on. The porphyries themselves tend to be low grade. They're big but low grade. If you look at the Buriticá, I look at Collective Mining, they're always normally going to be sub 1 gram but they're big. They're gonna be 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 grams, maybe some credits of metals and silver. They're low grade. Lots of ounces but the issue with those is that they're big buggers. You know, t o build, you might have 10, 20, 30 million ounces but you're gonna need $2 billion to build that.
It'll be 10 years and it's a massive footprint and a massive waste space issue and, you know, they're hard work. Above that, you get the veins. Where you are matters. Buriticá to the north of us, they're kind of in the middle. They have what we refer to as carbonate base-metal veins, so sheeted veins. They're a sweet spot. They're thick and they're very high grade. Buriticá is an underground mine but it's base grade's about 10 grams. You know, really attractive. What we've got is a bit lower grade but it's surface. That's different. That's different for a different reason. That's mining economics. Scale, I don't know. That's, as I said, the question. You know, 70 meters at 7 grams at surface, open pit mining is, it's hard to calculate what that's gonna cost.
The beauty is it's very, very cheap. Louis, good meeting. I've come, I'm gonna mention numbers. I won't mention numbers. Yeah, it's very fast. It's very fast. It's very cheap and very fast on different fronts. It's very fast, cheap to explore. The holes are short, the holes are fast. They're all mineralized. Bang, bang, bang. We're not drilling these deep holes that take months to drill and cost a squillion dollars. They're just bang, bang. They're very fast. That's cheap. That's good. If we ever build a mine there, I'm just saying it's a big if but if there was a mine there, then of course having higher grade means you're gonna get the same amount of gold from less tons. The less tons means a smaller plant.
A smaller plant, you know, the average open pit, global open pit gold mining grade now is about 1 gram. So we're, let's say we're 5 grams. So your plant is one fifth the size. You're moving one fifth amount of dirt, so you need less trucks, you need less. Everything's just less. So it becomes a much, much cheaper thing to drill, a much, much cheaper thing to build and a much faster thing to build. Which again, all feeds back to the kind of thing that a junior mining company likes. Do I want a billion-dollar plant? Yeah, nice but I'd be dead by then. I'm more focused on the thickness and the grade rather than the scale. We don't need a lot of scale here.
If we can get this to 1 million-2 million ounces at this kind of grade, that just makes a lot of money. We're not getting ahead of ourselves but it's a pretty good start.
Yeah. It's early days. Very early days at the moment. We don't know the scale and we've got some great results but we need a lot more drilling yet before we get any confidence levels there. Yeah, it's attractive. No question it's attractive but we don't quite know yet where we are compared to others. The next one or the next two more about capital raising, which I've already talked about. The next one is, would you be able to talk about hole PEP 11? This must have been under Agnico, I guess, right? Hole 11.
Yes. That was their last hole. I can't talk about specific holes just yet because, you know, we're still building our own picture. They drilled holes and moved off to the west. They drilled holes in certain directions. It was all over the place. That hole 11 was drilled quite deep, quite a long way down. Hang on. I think we bumped off.
Brad, we've cut off at the moment.
Sorry, Brad. We're just losing the connection. I'll just take your camera down just momentarily to see if that can support the bandwidth. Can you hear us okay, Brad?
I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Yeah. The connection has dropped a little bit. Do go ahead, sir.
Right. I'll keep talking so you can continue to see my face, which is probably a positive. Look, yeah, hole 11 and hole 8, they are the nearest ones. At some point we'll begin to, you know, explain how they work in. No, they haven't closed things off. I really can't be talking about the boundaries yet because we just don't know.
Yeah. Okie doke. The next one. Are you employing security personnel on site at Pepas or is this unnecessary? We do have some very limited security personnel. It's in a remote spot. There's no need for security personnel as we probably all think about them. I mean, frankly, at the moment we're in a fairly good location. If we do need, there's plenty of people around. If we do need some help, we also rely on the community to let us know if you know, things are happening in the local area. We've got very good connections there. The simple answer is right now we don't need the sort of security personnel that one would think of in the usual way. The next one.
Do you have any idea of the size of a potential resource at APTA, based on the current drill data? Again, it's something which we're looking at at the moment, employing consultants to come in and have a look at. Likely that we don't need to drill anymore just to get a better idea of the geological model that we're gonna be running with for the interpretation, as Brad said earlier on. Right now it's not something that we want to be doing overnight but it's something that we want to get to probably the next three to four months. Let's see what we hear back from the consultants in the new year.
I'll expand there, Louis. I mean, the short answer is yes but I'm not gonna tell you what it is. We, as I said, well, making a resource compliant to NI 43-101. It's a big job. It ends up being about a 100-page document. It's gonna cost several tens of thousands of dollars. You don't do that until you know what the answer is in advance. We've done our own numbers and yes, we know what it is. We think there's more there. We think, again, this is maybe being a bit optimistic from a geological point of view. That it, again, wasn't drilled well and this goes back to the previous owners, Waymar, who throwing them under the bus, we think were just drilling holes in the one place to get sexy results and not geology.
We didn't actually do much of our own work. We did a couple of holes between the JV but ran outta money. Again, Agnico and Newmont were looking for big things. They were drilling a lot of deep holes that were slightly, you know, optimistic and, you know, again, trying to find things and just hoping for the best. We think that, again, a smaller company coming back in and doing it, I won't say properly but then oh, we'll be doing it properly. That can be substantially increased both internally in terms of better understanding these high-grade areas. We're beginning to think that, well, having a chat with a few friends, we think APTA might be a slightly distal part of something bigger. Distal being a bit further away.
We think that there might be an interesting source to the south and to the east that we haven't yet explored. Just seeing the way that the trend and the dip of this thing changes and the metallurgy changes. We think it might be the limb of something bigger. We think there is a resource there. We sort of have our own number but we think we can improve it. With just a bit of cheap work and it is much logistics. What I'm trying to do is bringing people to Colombia to do this sort of work. It's expensive, the airfares and mucking about. I don't wanna have guys come down twice. We wanna have consultants come and look at re-log core.
They've gotta come and the guy who signs the report has to come and view what we do and sign off on our procedures and processes. I wanna double up and if they're gonna come down, let's have them come for APTA and Pepas. I'm not saying Pepas is gonna be a resource but we can actually get all that compliance stuff and all that QA QC stuff done at the beginning rather than the end. If I'm gonna get a guy to come or two guys to come down at that substantial cost, I wanna maximize what we get out of them. They'll be doing, you know, moving APTA forward and also basically giving us the compliance tick at Pepas as well, so that that can move forward faster. It's just a question of being efficient.
Not blowing shekels on you know first class airfares and everything else. Because you know these people aren't cheap. They're very good but you know you pay for them. We'll look at that in the new year and just get the maximum bang for our buck.
Good stuff. Well, listen, we're nearly coming up to the end of the hour. There's one other more question here, which is very easy to answer. How many warrants have been cashed to date? The answer is that solely the ones that we announced the other day. There may well be more if the price holds where it is now. We will let you know and announce that as soon as that happens.
That's great. Brad, Louis, thank you very much indeed. You have in fact taken all the questions from investors. Thank you Brad. Appreciate it's 2:00 A.M. in the morning with you.
Pleasure.
Louis, I know that feedback is particularly important to you and to Brad and I'll shortly redirect those on the call to give you their thoughts and their expectations. Before doing so Louis, if I may just ask you for a couple of closing comments.
Well, yes. Two comments. Thank you very much everybody for attending. We've had some very big numbers coming onto this call. The biggest we've had to date. Not surprising, I guess, given the exciting results we've had. Those hopefully will continue. There will be some which aren't gonna be quite as exciting. That's just the way it is in exploration drilling. We're very confident we've got a very nice project here. Not just one but perhaps a number of them as I mentioned to you right at the outset. The only other thing to say is, everybody have a good Christmas and, let's come back with a bit of energy for the new year. That's about it from me. Thank you very much.
That's great, Louis. Brad, thank you once again. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the company can better understand your views and expectations. Take a few moments to complete but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Orosur Mining, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good afternoon to you all and good morning to you, Brad. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mark. Thanks everybody.