Welcome to the latest Ticker TV interview. I'm Donald Leggett. I'm joined today by Brad George, CEO at Orosur Mining, the London and Toronto-listed gold explorer and developer with projects in Colombia and Argentina. As of this morning, OMI's market cap was around GBP 97 million. It was moving around a little bit today, and the company raised $50 million as of last October, so they're well-funded. Brad George joins us from Perth, Australia, to give us the latest on their project. Greetings, Brad. How are you today?
I'm well, thank you, Don. I am very sorry I didn't get to Cape Town to enjoy your company. I was told you're in fine form.
Yes, we met Louis, and it was very useful. It was much harder work than I expected, though.
They are. I mean, everyone thinks it's all jolly, it's all beer and skittles, but actually, they're just exhausting and,
They're exhausting and quite stressful.
They are.
you're meeting a lot of strangers.
Yeah.
trying to impress them. After five days of it, you kind of think, "I'm really glad.
Yeah.
I'm going home.
No. There are far too many of them, and they cost too much, and it's just by the end of it, you just wanna go and have a good lay down. Anyway. I'm glad you-
PDAC is your next one, yeah?
Well, we're looking at PDAC end of this week, so I'm getting on a plane to about a 90-hour flight to Canada on Thursday. I'm looking forward to that enormously.
Yes. Well, it's all for the share price, Brad. All for the future.
Yes. Exactly.
...of the project. Indeed. Anyway, let's take us back to the mineral resource estimate for Pepas, which was well-received. Well done.
Well, obviously reception was mixed. I mean, we were thrilled. I mean, I was thrilled, the board was thrilled. I'm a mining guy, so I just look at it in terms of how much money it makes. I mean, I don't care about how many ounces. To me, it's just, does this make money? The answer is, my God, yes. It's a different way of looking at things.
Mm-hmm
...I think it probably in hindsight, our timing was off. I mean, we came on the cusp of a fairly substantial correction in both the gold price and junior equities. You know, we don't argue about valuation, but, you know, things had got frothy, and so probably that was healthy, albeit probably painful. That was just a factor. I think there's also a fairly large component to any junior company shareholder base that just enjoys the journey rather than destination. All they want to do is enjoy the news flow, drilling results, and our results, of course, were amazing. Once you arrive, then they go, "Well, the fun's over. No more drilling for a while," and they wander off to some other shiny object.
There's always that sort of post-resource malaise, and, you know, we understand that and there's going to be a bit of a shift in shareholders as they walk away and new ones join, so there's a bit of a process. Look, we think, you know, it's great. I mean, ultimately, you know, all we care about is, you know, can we build this thing? Does it make money? And the answer is yes. What the market does is the market's problem, but it's all about economics to us.
You've said before that Pepas isn't a huge project, but it does seem to be high grade. Why are both those things useful in terms of making Pepas actually, you know, become a mine in a realistic timeframe?
Yeah. I suppose most men would say size isn't everything, and I'm sort of in that category is that the market does at times care about how many ounces, but not all ounces are the same. I mean, ultimately, the only way a mine makes money is if it actually gets built. So the only question you should ask about it, well, can it get built? If so, how long will it take? What will it cost? And will it make any money? You have to forget the ounces, just look at the project. I made a comment, I guess, a couple of weeks ago on Twitter that when I was in Vancouver recently, I saw around a conference, there was so many projects that to me looked, you know, really good on paper.
You know, be a couple of million ounces, a few grams. Were they in production today, they would have made money, but they're not in production now. I was asking some people why are they kind of floundering? They said, "Well, the difficulty is they may be seven, eight, nine, 10 years away from production, and they're gonna cost $100 million." If you look that far ahead, not only do you knock the gold price in half, you increase your costs by half by just, you know, inflation every year. Half the gold price, double the cost, suddenly they just don't make sense or at least they're at best marginal. Finding the funding for these projects is what I think is the difficulty that most companies are having right now. We don't have that problem.
I mean, Pepas is small, but that's a good thing because it's cheap to build, fast to build, the grade's high. It makes, on paper, a lot of money. All of those issues of the time length, you know, the gold price, the cost inflation don't really impact us. It is, at least we feel on paper, a thing that can be funded very, very readily without this angst of years of feasibility, bank feasibilities, massive dilution of share price. It's something that actually makes sense and can be done today. It's kind of an old-fashioned way of doing things, and I'm old, so that suits me.
You're certainly fashionable. Look at you.
I try.
What comes next? Feasibility study and permitting?
A bit of both. There's a Colombian requirement to do a thing called a PTO, which in Spanish is a Programa de Trabajos y Obras. Sorry, Louis is fluent, I'm not, so he can explain. It's a program of work. It's kind of a feasibility, but not quite. It's a mining plan that we give to the government that explains into rough details what we're gonna do, the footprint, the size, where things will be, the impact upon, you know, vegetation, water, social impacts, various things. We submit that. That basically triggers the permitting process. We can go back and modify as we go along, but that fires the starting gun. That's underway now, and that will be a few months.
We have to submit by, say, mid-year kind of thing and begin that process. That's not JORC or 43-101 . Within that, there are economics, but we can't tell the market about that because they're not compliant. We'll need to run the feasibility in parallel with the PTO. The PTO comes first, and parts of the things that will do the PTO will then feed into the feasibility. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel and repeat ourselves cost-wise. Do the PTO first. That will deal with some of the basic things like, you know, where the road goes, what land do we need to buy, you know, how do we avoid forest, just sort of basic stuff.
That will then feed into a feasibility study, which will begin probably in a few, you know, a few months' time. We'll talk to our consultants in Canada in next week and just map out that process. Yeah, the PTO is first, and then the feasibility will come probably in a few months' time. The two things run in parallel, and that will give us, one, it begins the process. Obviously, the sooner we start, the sooner we finish. Then the feasibility allows us to then communicate to the market, raise finance, and do all the market things. There were two things in parallel, but they come in a certain sequence.
Okay. If I were to sum up the strategy, the plan is to get some relatively quick gold production started by delivering an open-pit mine, which then funds further exploration in what's a very rich area for exploration.
Yeah. I'm trying to avoid that comment. I mean, that's always.
Ah.
a strategy. You know, you start small and feed money back in, and a lot of the market doesn't like that. I understand why, because small things still require your attention. That's the plan, but the difference being that the grade of Pepas and the gold price means that it's just a very, very attractive standalone price. If that's what we had, I'd be very happy. I mean, it makes
Mm.
...on paper, a lot of money very fast. To us, it's a standalone project that's just very robust and excellent, but it's not gonna be a long-lived project. It's not a company maker, it's a company starter. Let's think of it in different terminology. Yes, you know, we came from a very low base 18 months ago, having had all that pain and anguish of getting rid of Agnico Eagle. We needed to just get something done quickly to get some credibility, and we did that. Pepas is, to me, okay, not huge, but economically it's an absolute cracker. I mean, it's just, it's the absolute sweet spot for a junior miner. We can do it, we can fund it. It's fast, it's quick, it pays back quickly, all the right things.
Then all the other things we've got, we haven't touched or we're touching now. You know, I guess we could say, you know, looking back a year, we had no money. We didn't raise money till October last year. All of these questions about the order of things are somewhat moot because we had no cash. We had to do Pepas first to get the money that now allows us to move forward exploration. Yeah, it's kind of a plan, but also a plan driven by the realities of availability of funding. You know, we're now in quite a good position.
Now, if I could ask you a very granular question about flotation tanks and tolls. What is your preference? Would you prefer to do your own flotation, or would you prefer to toll your ore to a nearby mine and to a nearby mill and let them process from there? What are you thinking?
I don't know what granular means, so I'll just assume by the government. Look, we've spoken previously about the idea of toll treating, and that's still plan A. We also said we wanna have plan B and plan C. We wanna have an option available to us that are driven by, you know, what makes sense metallurgically, what makes sense in terms of what the market wants to buy, and importantly, and what it costs to build. Probably as importantly, what product opens the door for pre-sale funding that could allow us to build the mine.
One thing we hadn't thought of six months ago, we are looking at now, is the idea of producing a sulfide concentrate, such as is happening down the road at the Zancudo mine, which is about an hour down the road. Now, you know, what that basically is using a flotation plant on-site. It's more on-site, but you're producing, rather than producing a 5-gram a ton ore body, you're producing maybe a 30-gram a ton concentrate. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means less trucks. What's interesting, and we're just looking at this at a very early stage, is, well, that's very attractive around the world to copper smelters. Now, I'm getting my head around this. This isn't my expertise, but copper smelters need gold concentrate because copper ore is quite hard to find.
There's an oversupply of smelters around the world, especially in China. There's quite a few copper smelters buying gold concentrate ore to lift the economics of their copper smelters.
Oh.
Importantly, they will pay in advance for that. They will basically give you a pre-sale that in effect builds your mine. We're looking at, this is an interesting way to fund the mine in a non-dilutionary way. Rather than raising capital in the equity markets or going to a bank you have no idea, we go to a metal trader or to a smelter company and say, "Okay, they know how it works. This is their business. They might give us pre-sale or cash in advance to build the mine and then get the concentrate." This is just plan A, you know, plan A, B, and C. This works because it's a simple mine to build.
If we said, "Okay, we're gonna be 10 years production," they will say, "Well, okay, give us a call in eight years' time." But because we're saying it's small, it's cheap, it's reasonably simple, the execution risk, the price risk, the cost risk are all greatly reduced, the timeframe shorter, this is in their time horizon. One of the benefits of having the MRE released is that the phone began to ring and people say, "Okay, what are you gonna do with this?" You know. "Can we assist?" You know, inverted commas. You know, "Can we buy it? Can we buy the ore? Can we buy the concentrate?" Now these are all just, you know, we're juggling balls in the air. The phone began to ring, not offers being made, but just chats to be had.
We'll have a few conversations in PDAC with offtakers. Say, "Well, okay, this is our rough plan. Give us some ideas." It's all very early stage, but-
Mm-hmm.
We are looking at probably three or four different scenario. Certainly the kind of scenario that gives us access to development funding in a non-dilutionary way is looking attractive. Early days, but, you know, that's an important thing to examine.
Okay. Two things to talk about next. El Cedro, the two porphyry gold system with high grades, and Anzá. Anzá's had an awful lot of drilling done on it and is possibly quite close to an MRE. Which is-
Mm.
Which is your preference between the two of those?
Well, yeah, the preference changes on a weekly basis. I mean, a year ago we would've thought El Cedro was number one because of its potential for size. It's huge. It has the possibility of a very large system, the sort of thing that appeals to the market, appeals to major companies, you know, so on and so forth. The challenge is it's so big, where do you start? Anzá was always nice near resource, but the grade was kind of it was a good grade, but maybe not as high as we would like. Now we've got double the gold price. Suddenly that's, you know, the things have flipped. Anzá is looking actually very, very lucrative now, particularly given, as you say, we've had 38,000 m of drilling. It could be moved to a resource quite quickly.
We're now considering how do we sequence things? Now ultimately we'll do everything. It's just a question of the order of things, and that's as much driven by logistics as prices. Anzá now suddenly is very attractive with the gold price. We've booked a rig. We're just cleaning out the house. We'll be drilling there in a couple of weeks. We wanna just prove a few changes to our geological concepts at Anzá. We think we've changed a bit of a view on how it works. We'll drill hole there for about six weeks. Now, depending on how they go, it either then goes into expansion or infill to resource. We'll suck it and see and we'll move forward. El Cedro is more a question of the sequence of logistics.
We wanna do more aeromag or higher-res aeromag to prove up some target 'cause it is so big. We had difficulty end of last year getting a contractor because of helicopters and various things, we've gone back to drone mag, which is good, but slow. The drones have now signed up. We're just doing the socialization now. We need to tell people in this community that there's a drone coming, otherwise they'll probably shoot it out of the sky. There's just a bit of a logistics there. We'll begin flying drone mag in a week or two. It's all just sequencing. It's all just logistics. You know, what comes first in terms of people, machinery, vehicles, and yada yada. Anzá will start drilling in a matter of weeks.
That will take six weeks or so, depending on how it goes. At the end of that, the mag is done, the results are back, we can target and we can then say, "Okay, well, the rig goes from Anz á to Cedro." Or if Anzá is looking good, we'll leave the rig there and we'll get a third rig back at El Cedro. One of the beauties of being so close to Medellín is that we can ring up and get a rig the next day. I mean, they're just available and, you know, we have the capacity on site, so we can make these kinds of changes reasonably quickly. It's a question of, yes, there's a plan, but the plan will change on the basis of results in a reasonably short timeframe.
Anzá's first, do the mag, Cedro's next, and then of course there's the existing rig at Pepas. It's doing what we call the grand Pepas strategy, is that you know, Pepas is what it is, but we don't know what it is and we don't know why it's there because we never had the time or the money to go back and do that. Now it's a resource, we're drilling north and south, big long sections, geological sections, trying to understand what it is, why it's there, how it was formed, where's the rest of it. Two rigs running as of two weeks' time, and possibly three running in March, April. In April.
Okay. Talking about exploring, that takes us nicely to El Pantano, the gold project located in a major Argentinian gold belt. You've been conducting the first phase of drilling there. When do we get to hear about the results, Brad?
Well, I think it's fair to say had we hit something amazing, you would know. I mean, we are obviously subject to continuous disclosure. Had we hit a monster, you would be told about it. We made the point that that was never expected. That wasn't the plan. All we wanted was geology hints and sniffs. We've seen some very nice rocks. We've seen some good geochemistry. We've seen some very interesting things. I can't announce to the world, "I've seen nice rocks." That's you know, what does that mean? We need to contextualize that and say, "Well, okay, we've hit nice rocks and it means this." That's not just hole by hole. That's all the holes together. We will finish the program probably in. We're actually gonna drill more than we thought. We originally planned about 3,000 m.
We're probably gonna drill nearer to four. That should finish in about three weeks' time. All going well. Looking very interesting, but what does it mean? The current plan is we go to PDAC end of this week. After that, the whole team, myself, well, I'm useless, but the whole team will go down to El Pantano, spend a week on site looking at all the core and building a picture of what it means. You know, we're seeing structures in every hole. Structures, breccias, faults, and mineralization in every hole, but over a 20-km wide strike length. How do they tie together? The question being, okay, is it good? Is it bad? What does it mean? What do we do next? That's ultimately the big question.
We'll pull everything together, create a three-day picture, give the market some contextualized argot of what we found and then what comes next. It's all basically pulling together the geology. We'll be there for a week after PDAC, pulling all that together.
Okay.
Yeah. Look, it looks great, but, you know, it's with an undrilled project, the first program's always gonna be kind of, it's fun, but it's a difficult thing to explain to the market, that you've seen nice rocks. You know, nice is not a particularly useful term. So,
I've heard lots of junior miners come back and say, "Our first phase of drilling didn't show nice rocks.
Well, look. Yeah. The difficulty is we've seen the structures, we're seeing exactly what we wanted to see. Now the question is we've confirmed the system, we've confirmed the mineralized system. Now the question is, well, what have we seen that then gives us guidance to where we find the good stuff if it exists? I think it's been a very successful first phase, but it's the first phase of X phases. We just need to do things in the right way with geology and explaining how that works to the market. It's just context.
Now, last October, you raised $50 million, which puts you in a very healthy position. I'm gonna ask a broad brush, holistic question, if you like. Another word you may not understand, Brad. Is it a good time to be a gold explorer developer?
It's a difficult time. Obviously, you know, what we learned from the fall about a month ago is that nothing goes up forever. That was a very salutary moment in time when the gold price went down by 10% and the whole sector went down by 30%. That was probably necessary. Painful, but healthy. It does tell you that it's not as easy as it sounds. It's still. You still need to get good projects, and ultimately this is what I think, you know, what we've always focused on is forget about the hype, forget about momentum, forget about whatever sexy on the day. Just get good projects, get good geology, and get the project held in the right way. Now, just going back one step to El Pantano.
One of the other objectives of the drilling program is that, I don't know the exact numbers, but I think about last week we met the JV, so we now own the project. I'll confirm probably in a week's time, but we now own that 100%. We have two projects, two key gold belts, 100%. That's pretty exceptional, pretty rare and a good mix of, you know, El Pantano's amazing, but needs to be, you know, brought together in a package. Pepas is small but very juicy, high-grade resource, and in between there's this very nice ramp of projects at different stages. We're in a very good position, but that's taken 10 years to get there. If you were starting today, you can't do it because suddenly you're in a gold bull market.
Getting access to projects is gonna cost you an arm, a leg and two teeth. It's too late. Yeah, it's a great sector to be in. Volatility is reality. Just deal with it. Sorry, it's the way it works. For those new entrants getting into sector, it's not too late, but it's pretty damn close.
Final question. You've kind of answered it really. Why should OMI be on people's watch lists?
Well, we already are. I mean, obviously subject to the pullback a few weeks ago, we were up 17 times from the low at the beginning of the JV pullback in late 2024. Yeah. We've already had a very good run, and now we've come back to a level and we're starting again. I think the fact that we just have, as I said, we have one project that, you know, subject to permitting, and we can't control that, is gonna be a mine, we hope, and can be done and can be funded in a way that is not subject to the market of auto banks. It's a very digestible size. If you want to invest in a gold mine, we're in a good position.
If you don't care, if you wanna invest in momentum, then fine. You know, go somewhere else. We've you know, we're targeting ourselves to a certain niche investors that want to, you know, want to see a project get into production. You know, I think we're well positioned for that with exploration upside. I think we're quite well-balanced, and we're enjoying the fruits of, you know, as I said, 10 years of developing projects and getting assets and it's been a long road. Yeah, I think we're in a good spot.
10 years in, you're an overnight success and you'll make a very good long-term hold. That's why I take away from that.
Knock me four times. I'm not getting any younger, so.
Yes, you want it to happen in your timeframe. Brad, it's a pleasure as always. Thank you for joining us from Perth, Australia today. That's Brad George, CEO of Orosur Mining. He's shared the OMI development pathway. Always useful to hear about hints and sniffs from Brad in Perth. I don't know what he gets up to there. Thank you very much indeed as ever.
Well, pleasure.