Good afternoon and welcome to the Orosur Mining Inc. investor presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your question 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's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the floor to Paul. I'd now like to hand over to Louis Castro, Chair. Good afternoon, sir.
Thank you. Thanks very much for the introduction. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the webinar and questions that will follow afterwards. I'm Louis Castro, Executive Chairman of the company. I joined the company some four years ago, and my colleague Brad George is the CEO. Brad will be making a presentation in a few minutes, after which we will have the questions at the end of the webinar. If we're unable to answer any of them through lack of time, then we will endeavor to get back to the individuals or publish something on the website. Just before Brad starts, what I'd like to say that we are at quite an inflection point for the company right now.
In particular, our flagship project in Colombia, which is now finally back under our control after two years during which not much activity took place. We've now effectively taken the project back from Agnico and Newmont, our partners there, who departed for their own reasons, not related to the project. Brad will go into more details on it, but it's an interesting point at which to take this project back. The gold market's looking very interesting right now. We are getting indications of interest already, even before we complete the actual transaction on Anzá. There's clearly quite a bit of interest out there in the market for a good gold asset. The agreement, unfortunately, did take some time, a bit longer than we had anticipated, to bring to fruition.
We actually had the outlines of the transaction agreed back in March. Dealing with two giants as we were, it was difficult to get everything consummated. We're expecting to complete in the next two to three weeks, so early to mid-November is the target. Clearly the earlier, the better for us, as we can start to mobilize and get some action going at Anzá in Colombia. We also have a second project in Argentina. I'll let Brad talk more to that. A small lithium project in Nigeria, which frankly at the moment, given the state of the lithium market, is on hold. We're not doing an awful lot with that.
Although that said, I did note that Rio had just gone on and bought quite a sizable asset in the lithium space. So in the medium term, perhaps that will come round. Anyway, with that, I will now hand over to Brad, so he can take you through the webinar. As I say, we can take some questions at the end of the presentation. Thank you.
All right. Thanks, Luis. It's midnight down here in Perth, so apologies in advance if I nod off, but someone can give me a prod. As Luis mentioned, we do have a lithium project in Nigeria, which, you know, we do value, but this talk tonight will be almost entirely on the gold projects. You know, I imagine the gold is really what's gonna drive the market value. I'll be concentrating on Anzá and El Pantano. Where we are at the moment is, as Luis said, you know, we've been running very hard to get to a point where we can basically start again. Luis and I have both been with the company for four years.
For most of, or for all of that time, our Anzá project, which is, you know, what we call the flagship, for want of a better word, has been in the hands of two major companies, Newmont and Agnico, who acted together through a Colombian company called Minera Monte Águila, or MMA for short. They ran the project as a joint venture from late 2018. The end of last year indicated that they wanted to leave for a variety of political reasons, which we'll talk about later on. For most of this year, we've been negotiating, as Luis said, somewhat slower than we would've liked, to get the project back 100%. That's now by and large done.
We're just ticking a few boxes, signing a few forms, and we'll be in a position to own the project 100%, yeah, very soon, which somewhat coincidentally is happening at a time of a very buoyant gold price. Now, I wouldn't mind saying we did that by design, but actually it's just good luck that, you know, we're in the right place at the right time, as much by luck as design. We're gonna try and take advantage of that. Where we are at the moment is, you know, we're a small company. We've got a bit of cash. We're listed on the Toronto and the Canadian and the London exchanges.
Setting aside Nigeria, we have two very good gold projects that we think are well-positioned at a time when the gold market is really getting quite interesting. Both big projects, large landholdings, and I'll talk about the landholdings in Anzá particularly. We've substantially increased the landholding down there as a result of this acquisition of MMA. That's advanced. We have one project which we moved to a resource. Another prospect, Pepas, that everyone's excited about, myself included, that we want to drill. Then a more grassroots project in Argentina, which geologically gets me a bit excited, but is much earlier stage and therefore needs a little bit more work. I think we're well-positioned for what seems to be a very interesting time in the gold market.
As I said, as much by luck as design, but we'll take it as it comes. Your stories, the share price up and down on the basis of the news flow. We have expectations that hopefully in a couple of weeks' time we'll begin to drill and we can get that moving again. As Luis said, and I made the mistake of saying earlier in the year that I had hoped to be drilling by May. That didn't work out. The process for buying MMA just took a lot longer than we would've liked. For a number of reasons, they're related to the regulators. Largely due to a sticking point in a few clauses in the MMA agreement that were above and beyond what we'd agreed at the beginning of the year.
You know, once the lawyers get involved, there are a few issues that the lawyers seemed to want to add in there that for us were showstoppers. We just fought very hard and kicked and screamed for months to get these removed because they really, we thought at least, would impact upon our ability to operate in some years' time. Not in the short term, but in the medium term. We took a view that we're not gonna to jeopardize the longer term future in order for short term gain. It was quite a long, at times acrimonious negotiation, but we got there in the end. Where we are now, that deal's done. It's agreed. We've all signed off.
We're just going through the completion now, which is just basically signing paperwork and directors jumping on and directors leaving and a few other things. We have done all the work ready to begin drilling at Pepas. We have had it done for quite some months, so we can begin drilling in a matter of weeks. The drill rigs are ready to go. They're on standby. The crews are on standby. We have all the accommodation, all the permitting, everything ready to go. We haven't quite signed the drill contract. We'll do that tomorrow probably. That's ready to go. The drilling at Pepas is going back to follow up some very exciting drill results from a couple of years ago that we don't think were followed up correctly.
You know, the Pepas project, the first hole at Pepas recorded 150 m at 3 g/t gold from surface, which, as first holes go, is about as good as they come. That's really where we're gonna start in the next couple of weeks. The older APTA prospect, which has seen most of the work over the last 10 or more years, we think is on the brink of being able to move to NI 43-101 resource. We're doing some work on that. We think that toward the end, the El Cedro, El Roble porphyry system, which we identified just at the end of Agnico and Newmont's tenure, is looking very interesting. That we think is possibly what they were looking for all along when they went there, something really big. Largely untouched.
Mapped and sampled, but no drilling. We'll get down there and we'll move that forward. El Pantano in Argentina, we've just come out of winter. Winter's down there pretty grim. That's now ready to drill once we get the permits, which hopefully should be next month. We look to be drilling that in beginning of next year perhaps. I apologize to those who've been long-suffering shareholders. You may have heard all this before, but we may have some new people, I'll just run through the history of the Anzá project. Orosur, of course, was a mining company. We ran a gold mine in Uruguay for 20 years. That came to a natural end in about 2016, 2017. The mine closed down.
Perhaps closed down in a slightly messy fashion, but that's often the way things work. Orosur had seen the writing on the wall and had bought into the Anzá project some years before, 2014, by acquiring a Canadian company called Waymar Resources, did a bit of work, but not much because as the Uruguay mine was winding down, there really wasn't the spare cash available. We did a bit of work, but not much. That led ultimately to Newmont coming into the project in 2018, both as the shareholder and a JV partner. They became our largest shareholder, gave us a $2 million equity injection, and took over the project with a three-stage sort of 12-year JV to move that forward. They then did no work, essentially. There were some security issues in Colombia immediately after signing.
Beginning of 2019, if memory serves, Newmont then bought Goldcorp, a major merger. Again, they just had bigger fish to fry. For the first two years of the JV, in effect, no work was done. It just sat there and we all paid money in lieu. That led Agnico to join Newmont in 2020. Now Agnico wanted to come to Colombia. They'd hired much of the executive team from Continental Gold, which had a large project, Buriticá, just to the north of us. They really wanted to hit Colombia pretty hard. They joined Newmont on an equal basis. The local company was rebadged as MMA. It was Newmont Colombia. That, of course, was the beginning of COVID. That wasn't much fun.
For the COVID period, they worked quite hard, they were limited to the central part of the prospect because of the need to work in a COVID bubble. They were not really able to get out and to explore the large parts of the system. That only happened in sort of 2021, 2022. They began to find new areas, Pepas being the most exciting, which was then drilled early 2022. We saw more mergers. We saw Agnico was buying into Kirkland Lake, a big merger, and then bought a large chunk of Yamana, and then Newmont, of course, bought Newcrest.
Again, these two companies just started doing bigger deals that brought with them more projects than they could handle. Just this glut of exploration development projects that they'd suddenly acquired, coupled with, let's be fair, difficult politics in Colombia at the time, led both of them to come to the conclusion end of last year that maybe Colombia wasn't for them. That's when we began the discussions of they didn't wanna move forward, fine, we want the project back. The JV at the time had the capacity for us to simply dilute them away over time. We said, "No, we want it back 100%." What we spent the last, well now, 10 months negotiating is to get that back 100%, with some kind of compensation for them down the line.
We're there, albeit it's taken a long time to get there. Now, pardon for the messy diagram. You won't be examined on this. This is just a bit of geology. Northern Colombia, the Mid-Cauca Belt. The Mid-Cauca Belt is the main gold belt of Colombia. We're just to the east of the Andes Mountains. This is a major collisional system. The Pacific Ocean, the Nazca Plate is pushing underneath Colombia creates the mountains, creates the volatile material that creates these porphyry systems. Now, the image on the left is, excuse me, a schematic of epithermal systems or an epithermal gold system. Epithermal covers a multitude of sins. Essentially, it's a porphyry at depth that pushes up fluids and gold-bearing fluids into the rocks above.
There can be a million different types of what happens then. These fluids interact with groundwater. They interact with surrounding rocks. You get all these multitude of different epithermal styles depending on where you are vertically and horizontally. What we can find there is we don't know because it's just quite rugged terrain, so we're gonna find all sorts of things there. We're gonna find the porphyries themselves at depth. We found VMS, which is at the surface, and we found all the things in between. While we understand the system, the plumbing, what we're actually looking for in terms of geology and geometry, we don't know because epithermal covers such a multitude. It does mean it's a very fertile and very exciting place. It's just kinda complicated. The project covers a...
The project area is changing, and I'll explain it in a later slide. Historically, it was about 200 sq km of applications of granted titles. Two major granted titles that covered about 20 km of strike, of what we thought and knew was the major controlling structure of the Aragon Fault, centered around the APTA prospect, which was the original one that was drilled back in the old days. I put all the names here just for some guidance. Historically, from previous owners, from us and from MMA, it's been about 45,000 m of drilling, which is substantial. Most of that at APTA. About 38,000 m at APTA, and a little bit to the west and then north of Pepas and Papela.
Most at APTA, and only really began to touch the northern prospects toward the end. A large camp at APTA. I think at the peak, MMA had about 160 staff on site, so it's quite a big camp, which is nice, that's all there for if we inherit all that back. Good access. There's towns, the Anzá town. Major areas, major population centers. Not major cities, but people, roads, good access, good communications, and most importantly, it's quite a mining-friendly area. Like most countries, mining is viewed positively or otherwise on a case-by-case basis. The Anzá community are very pro-mining, largely, I guess, as a result of the good work that we and MMA have done over the years to familiarize them with how things work.
Very positive and we've recommenced those socialization programs and made it clear that we're now back in charge, and they're ready to go. The key points of the deal. As I said, the JV had the capacity for us to simply reassume control and dilute them back over time. Now, we never wanted that because, well, the main issue was, I guess, that we would've started 51%, and then ultimately we wouldn't know where we'd end up because they could always jump in again. Getting it back 100% to us was very key because that gave the market some basis for how to value us. They knew what the equity position was. Importantly, it gave us the ability to do more deals if we wanted to.
You can't do JV upon JV. Owning it 100% means we can then bring in new partners. We don't want to, at least not yet, but at least the option's on the table. The deal is we buy the local company, which is something we don't normally do, but that was the deal. No cash up front. We don't have any cash. That's fine. We pay them a deferred consideration upon production. Once we've invested money in exploration, have met success, permitted, built a mine, and running it. This could be, you know, years at a time. We pay them money from production, some cash flow, which I think was a good deal for us, and I think the market appreciates that.
A small NSR royalty for the life of anything we find, 1.5%, and then another royalty on the first 200,000 ounces that gives us $15 million. We've done the numbers, and we think that the, what we're seeing there mineralization-wise, any project we find can withstand these without being too onerous. We think it's quite a good deal. The other issue in the next slide I'll show is that we also acquire MMA's other applications. We had our own little land holding. We had applied for a few more ourselves, but we couldn't do much because we lacked the financial capacity. MMA, because they were big, had grabbed lots of land, and we get all that, so we've more than doubled our land holdings.
We now, we think, are either the biggest or one of the biggest landowners in the major gold belt in Colombia. Just to show that in graphical form, on the left is our existing or our previous land holding. The light green are the granted titles and the outlines are the applications. The applications had decreased as they do over time with new environmental reserves. On the right is the new licenses. A couple of ones we applied for ourselves, which are now ours, and then the rest are the MMA applications. We now control, or we think, the major part of the Mid-Cauca Belt. That again gives us options coming into a good gold market.
We've suddenly got ourselves a very nice and very large portfolio. Pepas, of course, is what everyone's excited about. This was first mapped late 2021 as the guys moved away from the central APTA prospect during COVID. Found a very high grade outcrop about the size of a large dining table, very high grade. Drilled a hole thinking that they were gonna hit that at depth, and somewhat surprisingly hit high grade from surface. 150 at 3 grams from surface, which is, it's a pretty good hole. A couple of later holes from the same location backed that up. Now, the problem with that is, and I've talked about this on previous webinars, is that that right-hand diagram was sort of the first section we drew on that first hole.
Now, that's actually not correct because one of the issues when you drill a hole for the first time into a new prospect is that you get good numbers, but that first hole is not capable of resolving the orientation. The orientation can be anything really. What you would normally need to do is to move the rig at the other side, drill from a different direction and just poke around for a while and resolve the plunge, the depth, and the controlling structures. This is just basic geology. You just need to, you know, resolve the orientation, and then you begin to step out. Now, big companies do things differently. A little company, we would do that because, you know, we're quite happy to find whatever's there.
When you're the world's largest and third largest gold companies, you need to have monsters. You they're not there for things that are less than 5, 10 million ounces. That's just their minimum size. So their approach is, "Well, we don't care about that. We wanna know, is this thing 10 million ounces?" So they do things in a very different way. So they step back a long way, drill deep holes, and they missed everything. Now this is just you know, it's not bad work, it's just the reality of being a big company. They do things differently. The politics in Colombia became difficult, and they did mergers and
They've left us with this, what we think is an extraordinarily walk up target, to go in and redo this work in the way that a smaller company would do. To go in, repeat these holes, drill into Pepas again, resolve the orientation, and begin to move out slowly. While we were negotiating and finalizing the agreement, we took over control effectively of the region just to make sure everything was right. We were looking at the outcrops and the logistics for drilling. We began to map and sample in more detail, and this was announced today. The area is quite heavily wooded, so and it's a heavy rainfall area. The rocks you see, well, you don't see much rock for a start, and what you see is heavily weathered.
Outcrop's quite hard to find. We wandered around and found a few old artisanal tunnels, which were very close to the previous drilling. We pushed a track in for the drilling, and we've mapped along that track. What we're finding is that there's a lot of gold over, you know, quite a large area. As we announced today, those tunnels, particularly the tunnel that's directly above PEP-001, the whole PEP-001, is very high grade. It's 20 meters. You know, everything's + 10 grams a ton. The tunnel ends in high grade. That's highly encouraging because we can go into the tunnels and we see fresh rock rather than weathered rock. We can see the controlling structures.
What we see in that tunnel, rock-wise, is exactly what we saw in the hole PEP one. It's the same lithology, higher grade, and we're seeing the same structures. Then mapping along the major structure just to the south, again, we're seeing more detail now than we've seen previously, because we can open up and remove the overburden and see fresh rock. We're seeing now very high grades over quite a large area, which is encouraging as it gives some indication of potential for size. It doesn't mean it's gonna be huge, but that's a very different case to having, say, one high grade sample in the middle of nowhere. We've got lots of high grade samples over a large area. This is a big system. It's a complicated system with only a couple of holes.
What we're seeing on surface is really getting the geos quite excited as to potential for this to be something quite substantial. Early days, but what we're seeing on surface is you know really quite positive. Just to put that into sort of a 3D view, that image on the top is the holes, PEP-001, PEP-007, PEP-005 in isometric view with those artisanal tunnels. At surface or near surface, we're seeing the tunnels, which have the same rock types, the same structures as the hole, and there's 60 meters difference between the two of them. Now, is that all gonna be gold? No, I'm not gonna say that. That's not proven yet, but it's something that's a good question to ask. That's going to be the first couple of holes.
The bottom image is those three existing holes. The yellow traces are where we plan to drill the new holes. We've moved the rigs to the eastern side. We come from a different direction. We do a short drill program, starting near those high-grade tunnels, hitting the original holes, and this process will resolve or hopefully resolve the orientation. If all results are positive there, we begin to step out in a methodical small-scale way. We're starting in known mineralization, which cynics might argue is a bit of a director's hole, but it's done for valid geological reasons. We need to know the orientation. Once that's done, we just keep drilling.
A very nice place to start, a very good prospect to start. Probably one of the key points, I mean, those who are shareholders during COVID will remember that we had these horrendous delays in getting assays back from laboratories in Peru. We're not gonna use them. We're gonna use the LabMed in, and we've tested them, and we get turnaround in 4 days rather than 6 weeks, 8 weeks. We're able to react in real time. Each of these holes is short, 130 meters, takes about a week to drill. We cut and sample, get to the lab. We can respond and adjust the holes basically on a real-time basis, which makes life a lot easier when you're trying to define ore body without having to wait this, you know, three months of turnaround time.
Hopefully, that will remain the case, and we can just react and move forward and grow this thing reasonably quickly. APTA, I said, is a historical prospect that was originally found. Some very high grades were found there in the early days. It's a hybrid epithermal VMS system. Very high grade, very thick in sections, but geologically complicated. A lot of work was done there because of the grades and because of the COVID bubble when MMA began to work. But it was never going to be something of their scale. It was never going to be a 5 million ounce-10 million ounce. Agnico Eagle never bothered moving that to a resource category because, well, one, it was never gonna be their size, and two, companies of that size don't get any value from resources.
I mean, they're a production company. They get value, and they're valued on the basis of revenue, not on the basis of resources. To us, that's different. We've gone back in with all the data, the new data from the drilling. We've modeled that ourselves. We've got a sense of what we think is there resource-wise. We've recently just engaged external consultants to sort of work with that. They're going to be conservative. That's what consultants do. They'll get a number. We'll get a number, and we'll argue, and meet in the middle somewhere. That's not going to be the result. That's just going to be to give us indication of what a starting point is, resource-wise. We may not go to resource if it's not a number we don't like.
It gives us an indication of where we need to do some more work to lift that to a higher category. This is because you've got some very high grades in here, those high-grade pods make a big difference. It's defining those high-grade pods that's going to lift this up to a substantial resource. We need to just target the drilling in a more effective, more efficient way to lift this to a you know, a nice sized resource, which again was different to what the big guys did because they were looking for big, deep things.
We think it's a nice resource, but we just need to do the work, and we'll get the modeling from that done in a really short timeframe with a view to perhaps some drill targeting in the new year to better define those high-grade areas and lift that up. That will be nice. We'd have a nice resource there, and we'll have Pepas hopefully, if all goes well, moving forward. Then to the south of the project area is El Cedro/El Roble. Used to be referred to as two different prospects. We now think they're the same thing or two parts of the same thing. This mapping was done last year. Even though the MMA had sort of wound back exploration, they were still required to do some work to meet the obligation of the license requirements.
They mapped and sampled down here and found this, well, large porphyry system. It had been known in the past. Anglo American had looked at this 15 years ago for copper, hadn't found copper, had found gold, and it wasn't their thing. We've gone back in, and we've found that it's a large porphyry system, lots of high-grade veining, reticulation, silicification, and to nice grades. You know, we're getting 5, 10 grams in rock chips and veins in the area. It's a very large system, highly encouraging, but the problem with being too large is where do you start? It's a nice problem to have that it's a big system, but it's only really just been touched. We'll start work at Pepas.
We'll progress APTA and then send the crews down here or a different crew down here and just better define this, map this, sample this at tighter spacing with a view to defining drill targets in early next year. It's nice to have three, you know, targets in this small area that we at different stages of development. That'll keep the market excited. Beyond that, the new applications we get with MMA, I have no idea. We haven't touched them. We have no idea what's there. They're just new virgin countries. At some point, we'll need to just get out in the bush and move further north and south and see what we've got, what we've acquired with MMA.
You know, again, it's largely untouched country, but it's a nice problem to have. Moving south to Argentina. As I said, we've just come out of winter. Winters down here are pretty horrible. We intentionally looked at this project as absolutely untouched grassroots. When Luis and I joined the company and we had some money and MMA was taking over the project at Colombia, we wanted new projects. We spent months looking at lots of projects available for sale, for joint venture, and I always took the view that nothing really appealed to me, that if a project is so damn good, then why was it available for sale? Everything we looked at just, there was something wrong.
It was the grade was low, or the location was bad, or there was a problem. We just found nothing that really ticked all our boxes. We said, "Well, go back to grassroots." This is what the market needs in terms of discoveries, people to go back and look at from scratch again. The market won't fund it. Because we had Colombia, which had been funded by the majors, we had the capacity to go and look at grassroots projects other companies couldn't do. We found a project in Patagonia, in Santa Cruz province in Argentina, which is one of the mining-friendly provinces. It's a federation down there, so it's state by state. The states run the mining. Some states are anti-mining. Santa Cruz is very much pro-mining. That's a positive.
A major gold producing district, the Deseado Massif, which is the major geological feature, has some major gold projects. The biggest is Newmont's Cerro Negro project, which is at the end of its life, will probably be about 20 million ounces at 10-15 grams. A big beast. It's real, a highly exciting, highly endowed area. We picked up this very large piece of land from a couple of local geologists. Hadn't been touched to a large extent, but had all the right geological features we could see from the surface and from geophysics and satellite imagery. It looked good, the right locations. Importantly, and rather oddly, we negotiated a mechanism to go to 100% ownership of that, which is very unusual.
Again, we wanted to own the project 100% so that we could then have options to do deals down the line. Again, doing JV upon JV is hard. With 100%, we have the flexibility to go it alone, bring in a partner, we'll see. But it was untouched. So we did a lot of work just getting it to the early stages. Again, a bit of geology. So this is the Deseado Massif. Major gold prospects. Cerro Negro is the biggest. Cerro Vanguardia, which is Anglo, which is just down the road from us, is about 5,787 million ounces. Different geology. This is again, epithermal, but rift-related low sulfidation. So this is a rifting open of the area, about 150 million years ago that created these large sort of northwest/southeast structures.
Fluids come up, they boil explosively, and they create these sort of flower-like structures where you get some very high grade and quite thick gold veins coming to surface or coming to near surface. That's the key, I guess, is that quite often they don't come to surface because the boiling dumps the gold out. The quartz veins go on, and they become barren. Knowing what level you're at in the system is absolutely key. We knew what we were looking for. We knew what the model was, and we mapped and sampled, and we found everything here that we expected to see if there was a system here. We've spent the last two years mapping, sampling, doing geophysics, ground mag, and we're seeing everything we expected to see.
We're seeing a major structure in the right orientation. We're seeing major anomalies in mercury and arsenic, which are the two pathfinders you see with these systems. Gold anomalies, massive silicification, swarms of quartz veins. It's a big system, a big epithermal system. Whether it's gold is the question to be asked. Now, our major shareholder is Newmont. They still are, and they have the biggest mine down the road, Cerro Negro. We've been there. They've been here. They have to this point, been giving us technical assistance, showing us what to look for, and they're cheering from the sidelines. They, they're watching carefully, and they're helping us out and, you know, they like the system, they like the project. That's now at the point where it's largely ready to drill.
We had to submit applications for drilling permits, which have been done. We should get those in the next couple of weeks. We look to, you know, funding dependent, the point of being able to drill those in the, perhaps in the new year. We'll see how that one goes. It's a nice situation to have very large project in a very well-endowed part of the world at a time when the miners of the world are looking for gold projects. Just the last slides. Where are we now? We've obviously just signed the SPA, and we're just ticking the boxes now. I said a couple of weeks. We, Luis mentioned we hope to close or complete first week, second week of November. You know, it's just paperwork.
We've just announced the assay results from Anzá, which is that's now out there. We will begin to drill. The plan is we'll mobilize in days. We look to be drilling in early November or as soon as we can after the closure. We'll get everything there, everything on site, get everyone ready to go, look to have drill rigs turning middle of November, that all going well. We'll get assays. I said, once we start drilling the first holes, in a week we get the assays back. We're getting results by early December. We get things happening in quite a tight timeframe. Resource at APTA, well, the work's begun. What the outcome is, we'll see. That's, that will either move to resource or near resource, and we can figure out the pathway to move that forward.
We'll begin mapping and sampling at El Cedro quite quickly and get that worked up, and then drilling at El Pantano. The company, as Louis said, has just transitioned from being somewhat passive to now hopefully being somewhat active. We've got a very buoyant gold market, and we're gonna have two very good gold projects. Now that we're in charge and doing things differently, we hope to get the news flow coming through at a much faster rate than it has in the past, which obviously has been a bit of a drag on the share price. That's where we are. It's a bit of a rehash, but I'm happy to sort of jump into questions and
Fantastic.
Address.
Brad, thank you very much indeed. Louis, thank you for the introduction as well. Ladies and gentlemen, just please do continue to submit your questions. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you the recording of the presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Brad and Louis, as you can see, we've had a number of questions throughout today's presentation and pre-submitted. May I just ask you just to click on that Q&A tab, and where appropriate to do so, just read out the question, give your response, and I'll pick up from you at the end, please.
Sure. Thanks, Ricky. We've got, well, it's the first two questions. Let me just see. Sorry, I'm just learning how to use this. Here we go. Well, the first two questions actually go to financing. Shall I do that, Brad? The first-
You can handle the hard ones. Yes.
Well, they both go to how we're gonna get money in the company. The first one says, "When are you," i.e., Brad and I, "gonna invest serious money into the company? And how do we plan to finance the drills without raises?" Well, first and foremost, we are an exploration company. We're not ashamed about that. For that, we do need funds. The funds need to come either from directors, from existing shareholders or new shareholders. The other alternative, of course, is we find a joint venture partner who can come and help fund the projects with us. Those are the realities. Luckily, we are in a position now where we are driving our own fortunes, as Brad said.
It's a more active period for us, so we do have more control over, you know, what happens to the company in terms of activity, what we put out there to the market. We're in a situation now where we are getting some interest from institutional shareholders, so it's not just the retail market. That's an area in particular which I wanna pursue in the next two to three months, together with Brad's help. Brad will be spending a bit more time on the technical stuff while we're going through the drilling. The institutional shareholder is something where we could find pockets, deeper pockets than we have on the retail side. It is an alternative to going too soon to a joint venture partner.
It's an exciting time over the next two to three months to see what sort of funding alternatives we have. Undoubtedly, we will be needing money to do the plans and fulfill the objectives that we've set out in this presentation. We're doing it against a very good backdrop on the gold price. In a situation, I was discussing this with Brad just the other day, where it's not just the big companies, but the mid-tier guys are looking to spend much more on exploration. They need to replace ounces, and the mid-tier guys are also looking around now for good prospects. You know, we've got at least one such good prospect here.
In fact, we've got a whole mining area here in Pepas, in Anzá. It's a number of prospects. You know, the funding we will need to take a view as to where we go, but you know, we will need funding in the next few months. And the copy-
Just to expand, Luis, the last two capital raisings were small, intentionally small. We wanted to just raise a small amount of money to do certain things. A small raising just to complete transaction, and a small raising recently to begin the drilling. It was hard work. I mean, even though the gold market is very buoyant, raising money as a junior is really like pulling teeth. You know, we were very supportive, well-supported by the market in London, but it's still tough out there, so we need to be very careful.
Yeah.
Both of those capital raisings had warrants attached. Those raisings were done in pound sterling, but the warrants were in dollars, and the exercise prices will depend somewhat upon exchange rates. Just to clarify. If they get exercised, there's another $1.2 million or so that would come in, which would be nice. The exercise price, as I said, depends upon exchange rates, but I think the recent tranche we just did is 3.75 pence current exchange rates, and the other one would be about 4.2. If we can get some decent results from Pepas, get a bit of traction, then hopefully they get exercised, and we get ourselves funded forward well into next year. Yeah, we need money. I mean, money doesn't grow on trees.
The key point, as Luis said, is not whether he and I invest. I mean, we've always tried to, but we always answer the question that we always know stuff. I mean, that's. If you don't know things that are inside information, then you're not doing your job right. So it's very difficult for us to buy without being accused of, you know, playing silly buggers. The key point is, you know, when do the institutions begin to buy? That's really what the question you should be asking is that how do we get this company to the point where it begins to appeal to the larger pots of money? That's a question of size. We are very small and often just too small for institutions because they just, you know, can't make money out of us.
It's getting enough comfort in the project being real. I mean, exploration is very exciting and good fun for geologists, but it's not much fun for an institutional shareholder. Once we've got a few things at Pepas, and we can demonstrate that there's a resource at APTA, and Pepas looks good, then that changes the game. It's a question of really, you know, how do we tick the boxes for the bigger pots of money that they can begin to look at us. That's our objective is to really just change the company from being a dodgy junior explorer to being a dodgy junior resource developer. That's what we wanna do in the next couple of weeks.
There we go. The next question. "How long will Pepas take to drill?" How long is a bit of string? Brad, you enjoy this one.
Piece of string question. I hope a very long time. I mean, obviously, the bigger it is, the longer it takes. What do you mean by drill? I mean, the process of taking a gold project to feasibility is long and painful. Just to give you an example. 50 km north of Anzá is the Buriticá project. Currently 10 million ounces at high grade. I think if memory serves, that took 300,000 meters of drilling to get that to the point where they could do a BFS. Many investors in London have also ridden the Greatland Gold gravy train. They have their own product. Well, similar. It was about 300,000 meters of drilling. These things don't happen fast. You know, you can do the numbers. I did the numbers actually the other day. If we look at...
Yeah, we expect a drill rig to produce, you know, 500m-600m a month. If you do the numbers on that, you've got years. Depends how many rigs you want. You need 10 rigs running 24/7 for years to get this forward. But that's moving it to, you know, high-grade resource. To know what you've got in a very cursory sense is quite fast. We have one rig. We'll drill those 800 meters in six weeks. That will give us a pretty good understanding of is this thing real or not. Then you just move into the rather slow, boring, but, you know, value-adding activity of just stepping out. You keep going until it stops. As I said, if it's.
We certainly would bring in more rigs if we get the right results and the money's available. The question, how long it takes, depends how many rigs we have. I think MMA had five rigs at one point, back in the glory days. Five rigs is hard to handle. I wouldn't wanna do that just yet. It'll. You know, if this is positive, it's a couple of years. Don't expect to be having a gold mine there next Tuesday afternoon.
That said, yeah. Listen, I mean, it's in relation to the first phase of drilling that as Brad has just said, you know, six weeks or so from probably the middle to the end of November. You know, we're gonna be drilling from the middle to the end of November. Six weeks is the first series of holes that we're gonna drill. And as he says, if we get the right results with the right funding, we'll probably carry on at Pepas. What's the next one? What is on the balance sheet of MMA? Will we inherit some funds on completion? Well, we don't inherit funds on completion. It's gonna be no debts, no credits. It's gonna be a clean assumption of MMA.
We do have all these extra applications that that Brad's already alluded to. Importantly, we don't pay any cash for all of that we're acquiring. All the cash is down the road. Although we don't acquire any cash, we've not had to pay any cash for it. The next one. There's discussion here about what is the end. Brad and Luis also have had two raises in quick succession. Well, yes, we have. Difficult to do, but we got them away. Clearly there's been a drag on the share price, in part because of the lack of activity, but that to some extent was outside our control. The question is, what is the end goal finance-wise? Will the company be looking to JV its projects? Has there been any interest?
Well, I think we've sort of answered this in a sort of roundabout fashion, frankly. I am actually going to a conference in Colombia. There's a gold conference in Medellín next week I'll be attending. There are people to talk to there already. My gut feel, and Brad's, is that it's probably too soon to be taking too much interest immediately. It would be nice to develop to see at least what we have in Pepas and then see what they're after. Obviously we're always open to see what people have to say. We'll be talking to these sorts of potential partners. Although initially in not too rushed a fashion.
My view certainly, I mean, we decided as a board is that it's too early to begin talking about JVs because we don't know what we've got. I mean, we know what we think we've got at APTA, but the Papela thing is completely unknown. To do a JV now on the basis of that uncertainty would be, you know, slashing your wrists. You know, I'm happy to go alone. I think we're seeing, and I hope we're seeing, you know, the beginning of a nice gold-related bull market.
Now, I've been wrong on that in the past, but if that's the way things do play out, then I think having a large land holding in a key area and projects moving to resource puts us in a very strong position. To do a JV is always an option. But it always depends upon terms and depends upon, you know, how do you balance going it alone and the need to raise money with, you know, being diluted in equity position. It's an option there, which was again why we wanted to have 100% on both projects. But it's not one that I'm about to go chasing just yet. The phone's ringing off the hook.
I mean, we've had people, you know, talk to us and say, "What do you plan on doing?" We've given the same answer. We are being noticed by people who are active in the area, people who like the region. We've not commenced any kind of discussions, and I certainly wouldn't be in a hurry to do so just yet.
Next one. When will we be drilling in Pepas? We've just answered. How much funding are we gonna need in the next year. Well, again, it depends, in part, on the results that we get through Pepas. Indeed, what sort of drilling, if any, we need to do to upgrade the resource at APTA. The next one is, will the rainy season cause any problems in drilling in November, December? If that relates to Colombia, we've never really had that problem. I think in all the years that we were there, we were troubled obviously by COVID. I mean, to work in a bubble, and that's why a lot of the drilling was kept to the one area in APTA rather than stepping it out in 2022, 2023. No, not much.
It rains most of the year round, but not that heavily.
Yeah. We have good access to Pepas and good access to APTA. Yeah, I mean, if it pours rain, it's uncomfortable. There are places remotely if we're trying to do some mapping that we maybe can't get to if rivers come up. Drilling at Pepas, no, we have good access. We're high on the ridge. If anything, it can be the lack of rain that can be the problem because we need water for drilling. Diamond drill rigs require reasonably substantial water supply to keep them lubricated. If it stops raining, then we may have to wind back activities there. Actually, it's lack of rain that's a problem rather than the amount of rain. It's
No, it's, you know, the drillers are getting it wet. You know, it's, that's why we pay them the big bucks.
Yeah. Next one is, what steps and catalysts do we need to action, to move from exploration to production?
Okay, where do you begin?
Yeah.
We're probably getting ahead of ourselves here.
Yeah
There is a fairly well-defined process that's largely driven by the need for government approval and the need for financing. It varies. If you're a local bloke who's just mining on a small scale with the kids, then you just go and dig a hole. When you're a public company, you need to access external funding, then there are fixed steps you must follow. First always drill it. Is there something there? If there is, we move that to a resource category, either JORC or 43-101. We get to a point where it's big enough, we think, to sustain a mining operation. At various points along that process, you begin to do feasibility studies.
You start with a scoping study and say, "Okay, is the grade on a very rough basis, is the size and grade big enough to make money out of?" If it's not, then you stop. If it is, then you keep going forward. You keep expanding your resource and increasing your level of certainty. You go from inferred to indicated to measured. You keep just building out a picture of what a mine would look like. You know, okay, where's it gonna be? How are we gonna mine this? Where's the plant gonna be? You begin putting all the pieces together in a feasibility study. As you go, you begin to look at all the environmental stuff.
You know, how you deal with water, how you deal with waste, how you deal with vegetation. It's a long process. There's not gonna be a mine here in the next five years, unless it's a very small operation. There is a very well-trodden path to what you have to do to move to an operation. Ultimately, the question is, well, what's the size? You need to know how big your deposit is, because that drives how big your mine's going to be. You kind of need to know what you're working with. You know, you don't wanna just start a small mine until you find you've got a huge deposit, because then you're undercapitalized. You understand the size of the deposit first, or at least a good indication to a certain point.
You just tick off the boxes. Because to access funding from the capital markets or the debt market, you need to tick certain compliance boxes. Yeah, it's just drill resource feasibility and permitting. Permitting is a piece of string question, depending upon, you know, how the government of the day. That's becoming, I guess, more difficult as around the world in most cases. Colombia's, again, case by case. You know, we're in Anzá. Anzá is pro-mining, so we should be okay. Other places are anti-mining, or there are parts of Colombia where you're not allowed to go at all. You know, we're in the right place, so that's a good start. It's just, you know, as I said, it's a well-defined process that will take quite a few years.
Of course, at any point during those few years that Brad refers to, there will be people looking to replace their answers. You know, at any point during that time, there could be discussions to be had. It's not something that one sets out to do. You know, one gets out there and does what Brad's gone through, goes through those disciplines, go through those processes. Then you wait to see what happens as you go on. There's a question arriving to the cost of diamond drilling. What is the cost per meter for the planned program at Pepas? Well, I think.
Well, the first question, is it diamond or RC? It's diamond. I mean, for those who don't know, RC means reverse circulation. It's a cheaper form of drilling, but you don't get core, you get chips. It's diamond. RC rigs are big beasts. You have massive, they're big trucks, and we don't do those in the mountains. It's small rigs that we can manhandle. Well, not we, the drillers, of course, can manhandle. Drilling's quite cheap. Fortunately, with one of the positives of Colombia being a bit quiet is that the drillers have rigs to spare. So the total cost of that. So the cost of drilling is lots of components.
There's the actual cost per meter, then there's standby costs, cost to move rigs, cost of consumables, and then there's our costs. We have to supervise the rig. We need to get the core, cut the core, sample the core, assay the core. There's a lot of things you stick together to come up with a price. Previously, we sort of worked on the basis that diamond drilling, you know, a couple of years ago, was probably all up about $270 a meter. It's not cheap. That's come off substantially. That cost for 800 meters, which is our first program at Pepas, is going to be, you know, all up with, you know, meter cost and accommodation and standbys and moving, about 100 and probably $140,000. That's the contracting cost. There's our costs.
There's our people and our crews and our cutting and our sampling. You know, when core comes in from the rig, you get a piece of core. You then go cut it in half lengthwise. You map it and sample the geology and put it in a bag and send it to the lab. The lab's going to probably $30-$35 per assay. The assay lengths will vary. Yeah, all up, we work on that basis about the $200 +. We're probably about 20% cheaper than it was a couple of years ago, which is quite nice. Yeah. RC is a lot cheaper, but we can't use RC here. It's just too rugged. It's. If that begins to.
Well, one of the ways we got, we think, a cheaper price is by just dangling the carrot for the driller to say, "Well, yes, it's a small program to begin with, but if we get good results, we're just gonna keep on going." We're dangling the carrot of a bigger contract. The drillers are quite keen to please us.
Okay. The next question goes to the funding. How much do we feel we're gonna need to progress the three areas? Again, it depends on what we're finding and how close the space is gonna be in any drilling that we're gonna do in these areas. I mean, in Anzá, most of the drilling will be at Pepas, as we've discussed. There may be some holes going down into APTA, depending on whether we feel it's justifiable to try and build the resource there with these extra drill holes. We'd also like to drill in Argentina, as Brad mentioned. Money being there, that would also be in their summer, so that would be probably late summer, January, February, March time.
I would have thought for those three, we'd probably need somewhere in the region of $700,000. $700,000-$1 million maximum. But again, it depends on the results that we're getting as we're going along, Pepas and everything else. Those are the sorts of numbers that we're looking to appropriate. $2.5 million, half and $1 million. Will the upcoming meeting next month still be both annual and special, and will you both be present? Well, we will be there, depending on how late in the year we do it. Brad may need to be back in Australia, but as we've done in the past, he will be beamed in. We will be able there. We'll be there to answer questions. And we'll make a further presentation then.
At the moment, the timing's looking like sort of mid-December time, but as soon as we have a date more precise than that, we will, we'll obviously put out the notice of AGM. Both Brad and I will be there.
I'm traveling in a couple of weeks' time. We've got some things in Nigeria to do, and that's, I think, a Nigeria question there. I wanna be on site. I'm getting a bit tired of trying to do all this remotely. I wanna get in the bush and see some rigs turning. I'll be in Colombia second half of November, waving my arms and pointing at things and just getting in the way. Whether I can stay back for the AGM, I don't know. You know, I've got to come back and deal with a few issues. I'll be there in spirit. I'll be in London, and we may look at doing something there if we can sort of tie something together.
It's most important we just start drilling, so.
That's all we'll do. Congratulations on the tunnel sampling. Yeah, we thought that we've got interesting, good results at this stage. Spectacular results. Who is your exploration manager at Anzá? Do you want to answer that one, Brad?
We don't have one. We're not a very structured company. We don't have people with titles. I mean, Luis and I just chose titles for no reason. We have two geologists who are Argentinian, Ernesto and Jerónimo, that have been with the company for many years. They actually came from Uruguay. They stayed with the company during difficult times and worked for us at half cost. They're immensely loyal. They sort of run the project jointly. They're sort of a tag team. You know, we just give them titles, but really they're just a tag team. We just hired a young geologist that had worked for MMA previously. I think from casting my mind back, they might have had 10 geologists there back in the peak. I think.
I said they had 160 staff. Might've had more geologists. We chose one that we quite liked. He's a young guy. He's cheap, which is nice. Enthusiastic, fit. He'll sort of stay there and run the project for Medellín, and our guys will manage the project. We don't have exploration manager per se. We don't have the luxury of having, you know, all these little boxes of people. The sampling was really just quite obvious. You know, we wanted to get into. You know, we knew what we wanted to do at Pepas. We wanted to drill. We went in there and just said, "Righto, if we're gonna drill, how are we gonna do this? Where are we gonna stay?
Yeah.
We're just looking at houses and camps and logistics, and found these tunnels. Well, okay, they're interesting. I don't think MMA have been into those tunnels. I think it's not the safest thing to do in the world, and I suspect that would have broken every safety rule in MMA's book. You don't go into old tunnels 'cause you don't come out again. We don't have those rules at the same level, so we took the gamble. It was just too good a chance not to see because, as I said, it's hot and wet and the rock is all cooked up and mushed up.
To see fresh rock is a good opportunity to see, well, what the hell's going on, what controls these, this gold mineralization. We need to know in order that we can direct the drilling. We, you know, went into the tunnels and took samples on ice. It wasn't just sampling a nice shiny bit of rock. It was 1-meter samples every meter. It was very methodical, very standardized. Then the same thing along the tracks. To just get those numbers, you know, big numbers across such a big area shows that there's something going on there that's quite substantial. We've got a probably 3- to 4-meter strike. We're getting, you know, up north there's 4 or 5 grams and 5 grams down south and 4 grams over there. There's a lot more work to do.
We've only resampled the top of the ridge, the track in. One of the things we'll do is just get more guys there and just start getting into the bush and just bash their way through and map and sample some more. Drilling's the first cab off the rank. We know it's a good system. The guys do really good work. They're all younger and fitter than I am. You know, it's a tremendous team and they're, you know, very talented and very dedicated exploration group. We don't have managers as such. Everyone just bogs in.
Okey-dokey. How much funding will we need for the next 12 months? Well, this I think goes back to the amount of drilling and activity we're gonna do. Previously I said about $1 million or so for drilling, so probably another the same again and probably a bit more if we're gonna be properly active. We've got $1 million now, so probably another $1.5 million-$2 million, something of that order. I think that's-
Yeah, I was gonna say, Luis, I think you've covered all the questions off. Of course, any further questions that do come through-
Yeah
The company will have the opportunity to review those. We'll publish responses where appropriate to do so. Thanks for addressing so many questions. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important, if I could ask you for a few closing comments, that'd be great.
Well, yeah.
Over to you, Louis.
I'll be quick. It's been quite a long session. Thank you very much for your questions. It's good to see the way people are thinking. We understand concerns. It's a very exciting time for the company. Let's hope it's come across from Brad and I, and we hope, you know, to be turning on the lights in the next few months compared to the sort of lack of real activity that we've had over the last few. It's been a great deal that we managed to achieve. It took longer than we hoped, but we're hoping that's gonna pay dividends in the next coming months. Again, thanks very much, and we'll hope to hear or see or hear from you at the AGM in December. Thank you.
Fantastic. Brad, Luis, thank you indeed for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session? You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete. I'm sure it's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Orosur Mining Inc., we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.
Thank you.