Thank you for joining Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Equity Conference. I'm Mark Reichman, one of Noble's Senior Research Analysts. I am pleased to be joined by Mr. Terry Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Power Metallic Mines Inc., which is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange in Canada under the symbol PNPN, and trades on the OTCQB in the United States under the symbol PNPNF. Terry, thank you for joining us today, and the floor is yours.
Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having us here. Looking forward to discussing our great discovery in Quebec, it's called NISK. It's a polymetallic discovery. What does polymetallic mean? Just simply means a number of metals. Means in this case, we have copper, nickel, platinum group elements, platinum, palladium, gold, and silver. So, it's quite a combination, but it just means, polymetallic means multiple minerals, and in this case, they're all high grade. We won't tell you anything we don't believe is true, but as always, do your own due diligence. Quick summary at the start. We're well-funded. We, we raised CAD 50 million about a little over a year ago now. We have about CAD 33 million in the bank. We're in the midst of a 100,000-meter fully funded drill program.
It's we drilled about 35,000 meters last six months. We'll drill 65,000 meters this year and, you know, we'll have some. We should have some messages out, I think, middle of next week. And then we're pretty much every three or four weeks after that, so it's a good steady news flow. And we're located in sort of in Quebec, one of the most favorable jurisdictions in the world. We've been blessed by, you know, being able to get supported by some of the more premier names in mining. So Robert Friedland's led the last two rounds for us. Rob McEwen has been in three rounds, and Gina sort of did her participation in the market and drove the stock to new highs. So been had, you know...
The mining market has obviously turned around a bit, now it's more popular. You know, a year, 18 months ago, it was still a struggle to raise capital. Having, you know, notable people invest was sort of what kept us alive and allowed us to prosper. They basically were attracted by this exciting discovery we've had. Let's learn more about that. A little brief overview on the capital structure. Fairly typical for Canadian deals, you know, fair number of shares outstanding, about 233 or so outstanding right now, fully diluted, about 280. The big difference, I would say, is that we're about half owned by our core eight shareholders, and the core eight shareholders have been writing checks each of the last two years. Robert Friedland's been the biggest check writer the last two years.
I've been the second biggest check writer. So the people that know the stock the best are still buying more stock. I bought 600,000 shares in the last six weeks, so I think that's always a good sign. Whereabouts we're at in the world, we're in Quebec. So that map on the right is the full province. You can see we're about a third of the way up. It's a big province. It's about 12 hours from Montreal by car. You know, one of the great things about Quebec is the infrastructure is largely in place. In mining, if you don't have the infrastructure, you got to build it in the province of the mine. So having it there is really sort of a fantastic thing. Certainly de-risks putting a mine in play.
So you can drive off a route north, right to the site, right to the rigs. We have power on the site, so there's power, lines there and we're right across the road from the Hydro-Québec substation, so cheap green power is available. We're eight kilometers outside the town of Nemaska. It's got a regional airport, so our guys can fly in. And then it's also got accommodations and food for our people. It's also the home of the James Bay Cree. So, the First Nations are always a prominent consideration in, in any sort of mining issue around the world. You want to make sure that you have good cooperative, you know, community, participation. We've got a great relationship with the James Bay Cree. They've been super helpful. You'll see about that later on.
But Quebec government's done a great job of making the First Nations feel like they're true partners in the resource development game, which is great. And then the final thing we love about Quebec is the fiscal terms. So when we raised that CAD 50 million last year, we basically the investors paid CAD 1.45 a share, but on 80% of that round, we got CAD 2.83 in cash into the company, even though the investors paid CAD 1.45. That was done through a series of tax maneuvers that basically has the front-end taxpayer paying CAD 2.83 and getting full deductibility and a bunch of tax credits, and then they sell it at CAD 1.45 to the end investor. But you know, what it accomplished is a couple of things.
One, for the initial investor, they reduced their tax from 54% to 40%, so that's why they do it. For us, we were able to get our investors to put up CAD 1.45, but the company got CAD 2.50 in cash, so way better leverage, for our dollar, so way less dilution for us. And the government gets to put the investment into mining, which is what their strategic interest is. So it really is a compelling way, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world. That's for exploration, 2-for-1 exploration. And then on the, development side, something similar.
So, if this thing costs, you know, CAD 300 or 400 or 500 million to build, depending on how big you would build it, 30% tax credit convertible to cash is available from the federal government, and then a 25% tax relief is available from the Quebec government. So pretty significant incentives to build the, look in Quebec. So certainly, if you're gonna find a critical mineral mine in the world, this would be a jurisdiction to do it. Let's talk about the discovery itself. So we started off as a nickel discovery down here on the left-hand side. Had 3.1 million tons of about 1.5% nickel, grew that to 7.1, Mineral Resource Estimate in 2023. It's probably around 8.5 or so now.
In looking for more nickel, we stepped out, up here, and what we thought would be a nickel discovery, and by God, we got lucky. We hit the jackpot. We hit this amazing thing called the Lion Zone, and, there's, five holes there, averaging 20+ meters in length, with over 8% copper equivalent. That was done using the old 80% recovery rates. We're gonna talk about metallurgical recoveries in just a second, but we've, we've certainly outperformed that, you know, in the, in the, in the actual test, but you can see how high grade this is. This is very lucrative rock. When we raised the money, the CAD 50 million, I think these next two slides were the reason why. Generally speaking, I would think that we look really cheap relative to our metal in the ground.
At the end of the day, it's about the metal in the ground and getting the metal in the ground out that really creates the value. So if you look at us compared to our peers of other polymetallics out there, Foran just they announced a deal recently for CAD 3.8 billion for the merger with Eldorado Mining. So you can see how quickly that market's moving. Pretty significant discount, I would say. We're trading at, like, one-twelfth of them, and well, Foran is advanced further. It's a national strategic project in Canada. It has some significant shareholders. It's got a feasibility study, but metal in the ground, not, you know, a ton more than us.
So, yeah, there's reasons to think why, why it's worth more at the moment, but at the end of the day, it's all about the metal in the ground, and we've got a lot of metal in the ground. So that was one thing that attracted investors to us. Second thing was, we're likely to find a lot more. So why is that? Well, when we initially had the nickel discovery, it was a very normal nickel sulfide, okay? And then, when we found that copper precious metal zone on top of it, it transformed our understanding to what we had. We had, instead, a very rare deposit type called orthomagmatic nickel copper PGE deposit. There's been maybe 20 of these discovered in the history of the world, and they're literally the world's best mines. They're the most profitable.
So, they're, you know, pretty legendary mines, Voisey's Bay, Merensky Reef, Sakatti in Finland, which is the last one that was discovered by Anglo American. Not yet a mine, about to become one, but it's about 150 million+ tons now, and then the mother of them all is this Norilsk. Oktyabrsky is the heart of Norilsk, and that's the only mine in the world that's got over $1 billion worth of metal in the ground. So our grades are very similar to Norilsk, and in fact, there's only two other deposits like it in the world, Norilsk, Oktyabrsky, and the Footwall Zones in Sudbury, Morrison. So our grades are extremely high.
So our project goes from, like, a nickel zone into a copper zone, and this copper zone is extremely rich. It's funny. This is a terminology that Robert Friedland gave us when I met him in New York. He said, "Terry, copper and precious metals don't come like this. It's, it's very unusual." And he said, he said, he said, "One of two things happened." He said, "Either you salted the core or you got a duck-billed platypus." And I thought to myself, I just started laughing, and he starts laughing, too.
And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, listen, you, we know you didn't salt the core, so what you got is a duck-billed platypus." And I said—and he said, "You know, the duck-billed platypus shouldn't really happen in nature, but it does." He says, "I've been lucky enough in my life to have have that happen to me a couple times, and it's always been something big. So that's why we're investing, 'cause we think you're onto something big." So, you know, with the fact that we're really just like Sudbury and Oktyabrsky and us, I mean, think about that. That tells you the size potential this has. Do you know that for these orthomagmatic discoveries, for every ton of copper sulfide you find, you find on average of five tons of nickel?
Right now, at NISK, we're at probably 1.5 copper to 1 nickel. Soon to be 2 copper, 1 nickel, 'cause we're looking for the copper, but we're gonna find a lot more nickel here, too. So at the end of the day, this is gonna be a much bigger deposit than what we've got currently. The team that's guiding us, really, in mining, you need two types of people. You need somebody that can write checks and get people to write checks. That's me, and then you need guys that can find the material, okay? I'm not a scientist. I back scientists.
So Steve Beresford, the guy in the middle of the screen, he used to be Chief Geo at First Quantum and then at MMG and then, Chief Scientific Officer at IGO, so three successes at multibillion-dollar polymetallic companies. Steve's probably spent more money exploring for polymetallics than any man alive, in the last, you know, 25 years, and, he's certainly at the top of his game. So he's our geological thought leader. Joe Campbell, on the left-hand side, is also a mine discoverer. He was at Western Mining when they discovered the, gold mine that Agnico now owns in, in the Arctic that's doing very well for them. I forget the name of it right now, but Joe's also runs the second or third biggest geological consulting firm in the country called GeoVector.
That's what's allowed us to go from one rig to five and soon to be six or seven. So being able to do that at scale is really what transformed us, and both Steve and Joe were actually trained at Western Mining, so they approach, you know, the science of the game very similarly. So we've had extraordinarily good luck for a junior to be able to tap into this top-tier scientific help. In between them on the screen there is our newest board member, Dr. Seamus O'Regan. So Seamus used to be a minister of natural resources for Canada federally, and then he was also minister of, among other ministries, minister of Indigenous Affairs. So he's very plugged into the Ottawa scene.
Well, he didn't run in the last election, but he certainly understands, you know, you know, how that works, and as we become a mine, it's gonna be important to be able to have that rapport with the federal government and be able to expedite our permitting and do our hopefully get a position as a national project of strategic interest. Generally speaking, this commodity-to-equity ratio is sort of probably why people are listening to these podcasts on mining. I think people recognize that, we're in a world where it's increasingly important to have commodities and have supply chains, and there's likely to be a boom in that area, so this chart just speaks to that boom. This is an actual evidentiary piece.
Since last February, when we did the financing, this is what the underlying commodities have done since then. So, our stock stayed pretty flat since then, for reasons, I can't quite understand, but that's life. But for example, you know, the commodities have done spectacular. They're up, probably more like 70-75% on average, so pretty, pretty amazing. We mentioned Sakatti, which was the last one of this type that has been discovered. The core of it was 41 million tons of really high grade, and that expanded to about 157 million tons, a bit lower grade, more like 2.5-3%. Voisey's Bay is 140 million tons of really high grade. We're about 16-20 right now.
You know, how big will we be? I certainly see us getting to the 40 million ton range, and easily could get up here as well to the 140. So that's really sort of... How big are we gonna be, is the question we're gonna answer in 2026. Part of how big we're gonna be is basically the land package. We've added a lot to it. One of the things we realized last year when we were, you know, just after we did the financing, was of these orthomagmatic discoveries, 19 out of 20 were district plays, i.e., they were sprawling over kilometers, and there were multiple mines.
So, while we are quite confident Lion will become a mine, we think there's gonna be other mines up there. So now we identified regional targets, eight of them in total. We now control seven of them through some various strategies we used. We acquired about triple the land package by acquiring a block from a company called Li-FT. Those are those blue bubbles that you see over there. And then we also acquired this land area down here, where we basically added a number of key areas in what we call the Hydro Lands. So what was interesting here, this is Lion on the screen, and basically, what happened is we knew the second half, or we believed the second half of Lion was out here. It was restricted for development from anybody.
Nobody could have it, 'cause Hydro-Québec had a restriction on it that had been there since the early 1900s. So we went back, with the James Bay Cree to Hydro-Québec and said, "Guys, there's no way you're building any dams or anything out here. This is all sort of, unnecessary now, and you should turn it back to the province for mineral exploration." And, you know, they basically agreed. They're quite cooperative, and it took some time, and eventually had to go through the process at the province, and eventually, it took us 18 months to get this land back through, and we had to bid on it, and we did eventually win it. Now we got it. We've just got our permits on it. We're drilling it now. So, right now, so let's see what's next.
Yeah, we're basically drilling, I would say, our four best exploration targets in addition to growing Lion. So, from a business plan perspective, we're continuing to grow Lion at depth, and then we've got four big targets, and the targets are basically, Lion West, which is basically, just over here, just west of Lion. What had happened is Lion was about 450 meters wide. We hit some faults, and then across the fault, deeper, we're finding it picking up again. So we're testing that. This thing, here called Tiger, there's a plate here called Tiger Deep, and we, we think that, again, a Lion-like structure could exist there, and we're drilling that. There's a, a panel here, called Sixty-Four.
This is what we think is potentially the source of Lion, and it could be several times bigger than Lion, and it's quite deep. It's probably, like, a kilometer deep, and we're testing that now. And probably results back, you know, before PDAC. And you know, we've used the borehole EM to a couple of holes to identify that, so we're quite stoked about that. And then finally, the fold hinge itself, we're drilling because we basically think this thing is folded back on itself, and a second part of Lion is out there.
So, our technique for discovery has been using the borehole EM, which basically turns your six-inch diameter hole into 150 meters, and what it does is reactive to sulfides with metal in it, and that's been the way we've found and grown Lion. So the science is flashing in all these four locations and Lion Deep, so we like the odds of growing our deposit a lot. The metallurgy. We just got the met study back, and you know, I think I pulled up perhaps the wrong presentation. My bad, but the recoveries, on average, we were expecting 80% recoveries. Okay, that's what we had been running at, but in fact, we got 95% recoveries.
So, full, you know, 18% more to the bottom line. So in terms of profitability, probably almost doubles it, you know, certainly by 40%. So, so a really significant dis- you know, finding. We released that about, you know, 2 weeks ago now, and, you know, it just shows you that, the recoveries on, on the copper were, like, almost 98%, 96% on the PGEs, you know, so, so just tremendous recoveries across the board. And often, you know, metallurgical recoveries can make or break a project, but for us, it's obviously super good news. So in just wrapping it up, generally, I would expect from a, a catalyst perspective as investors, the thing you'd be watching for is on our exploration side. There's sort of three ways to grow value in the ground.
One is by adding more tonnage, which we're trying to do by adding more, you know, sort of successful drill essays that will be out. The second is to get more out of your tonnage by the extraction, which we talked about in terms of the great metallurgy. The third is having the commodity prices rise, which of course, we're also seeing as well. You know, the land packages, we've increased our land package by 600%. There's still some more land out there we'd like to get, so watch for us to... as we move on that, we'll see. We're applied to the New York Stock Exchange to uplist there, and would expect that to be concluded in Q1, so that'll be a big move for us.
We think that, you know, getting our stock on the U.S. exchanges could really help multiply value. The MET study, as I said, is out now, and that's, you know, fully received. We've got, we're, you know, we just signed off on the escrow agreement yesterday on Chilean Metals, which is a company we own half of, and our shareholders own the other half. It should get listed imminently, and that'll be a nice little bonus for us. Feasibility study, we've got a, you know, on our nickel project in NISK, we had a company called CVMR, which is a major nickel powder manufacturer in the world.
They came to us and they said, "Look, we think you can make a nickel powder plant using your nickel here, and potentially we'd build it in Texas." So we're going through a feasibility study with them that they're paying for on that opportunity. Expect to talk about that towards the end of the year. Then finally, last thing to talk about is, we have... You know, we got invited by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to go to Saudi Arabia to bid on some projects down there, and they said, "If you win, we'll introduce you to the top five family offices," which they did. We did go down and bid and won, and we're now in the process of just gearing up our first exploration program down there.
I think Saudi is gonna be one of the big surprises this year in mining. You know, we say to people, I say to people, "Look, four years ago, NISK was an idea, and now it's a mighty oak and soon to be a forest." And I think Saudi is sort of the same thing. It's a seedling, but I think it's gonna be a big opportunity, and we're looking forward to exploring it further down there. So, Mark, that's about it, and happy to take any questions that the audience may have.
Well, thank you, Terry. We do have a question that came in on the drilling program. It's regarding your 100,000-meter drill program. You've identified several targets like Tiger Deep and Elephant. As we move through the drilling season, which of those offers the most prominent potential for a major discovery?
I mean, luckily for us, they both do, all four do. Elephant would be obviously potentially the biggest, 'cause it's got the biggest sort of response on the borehole EM, and it's about five times the size of Lion. So if it actually comes through, that could be, you know, a real quantum leap. And we think we understand the origin of these deposits.
If you sort of think of the palm of your hand, and you think that the palm is the nickel sulfide parent, which is would be at the base, and these fingers are the Lion Zone, which became some sort of hydrothermal action came by, picked up the copper sulfides, brought them up to the surface, and they kept on pumping in between sort of fault zones, and that's what made them so highly concentrated. And so the key to successful polymetallic exploration is finding these pipes, like we've done with Lion, and drilling down to the bottom and then finding the parent. So we haven't found the parent yet of Lion Zone, but we think we're on the verge of doing that. We don't know how big the parent will be. It could have been eroded away.
Generally speaking, it tends to be in, in these deals, as I said, for every ton of copper sulfide you have, you'll end up with an average of 5 tons of nickel sulfide, but it goes from between 3-7. So, you know, there's quite a range there. So, you know, but even three times would be a lot more than where we're at right now, where we're almost, you know, 1.5:1, soon to be 2:1 copper to nickel. So that's why we're excited about Elephant, I guess, more than, than anything else.
You know, I think in terms of investors' minds, this project gets kind of bifurcated between NISK Main, where you already have the resource estimate, and then the growing potential from Lion and Tiger and all of these that we associate with the orthomagmatic deposits. So longer term, Terry, as you think about development, how do you delineate those two, or do you bring them together?
Yeah, I think that's a great question, Mark, you know, and I think we're gonna answer that by probably, you know... Eventually we'll do a PEA, and the PEA will basically focus no doubt on the development of the Lion Zone first. It's such a no-brainer. It's near surface, it's highly prolific, you know, from a metal-in-the-ground perspective, high grade. The payback would be very quick. So you'd build this first as a copper-centric deposit, making a copper con that would, you could extract your precious metals as well. And then, the way the circuits work over, you know, at the end of it, right now, is the way I would see it, you would eventually switch it back to a nickel circuit and take the NISK nickel stock.
Now, we fully expect to find much higher grade nickel along the way here, you know, as these things tend to go, they're very, very, you know, you know, there's-- it's a zone system, so it goes from nickel to copper to nickel. You know, so, so we're, we're likely to find a lot more nickel that's higher grade, you know, 2-3% nickel, 2-3% copper with it, and maybe a couple grams of PGEs. So that would be super lucrative to find. And we haven't found it yet, but we expect that that's just a matter of drilling more, and we'll get there.
So what is the timing on the PEA and the feasibility study?
So we've given guidance, sort of saying end of the year, this year, so we're you know, now that we've got the MET study back and it's so favorable, we're trying to sort of step on the gas a little bit there, but that was the guidance we've given so far.
Well, and you know, what's interesting is, you know, you have kind of a good problem here because you've had really successful, you know, drill results. But this camp itself is fairly large, so you're gonna be busy on Lion for some time to come. Can you talk just maybe even about the opportunity outside of Lion and the other targets?
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we basically. The good news is that we, like, we've got more high-grade drilling opportunities than we've got drills, or capital to go after them at the moment. So you know, as a junior, what you have to do is you have to, you know, move in sync with your, you know, your market cap and make sure that you're, you know, you're growing the deposit, which is what people get paid for, and that you're still pushing the envelope to find that next great discovery, which is what people really want to see us become much bigger and become a world-class deposit, which I think we could become, but we need more material. So we'll do a combination of both, you know?
And that's what we're doing right now. We're, you know, growing the Lion Zone, but we're also, you know, testing these other targets, you know, and we've got literally, you know, some of the best minds in the planet sort of working on it with us, and we're using all the most modern techniques. We used, you know, ambient noise with Fleet. We're about to, you know, announce that we're using Muon, which is a very interesting seismic ray concept that's really phenomenal, that Rio Tinto and Fireweed have had a lot of success with. So, you know, you gotta keep trying to, you know, really figure out Mother Nature. She this is a complicated deposit. What we got is two deposits came together here, okay?
Mm-hmm.
So they folded on each other, and that's what made it so rich, but it also makes it folded and makes it, you know. It's challenging. You know, we've done a good job of exploring it, but it's not like picking up, you know, there's pebbles on the beach, man. It's not that easy. It's-
The point is, it can be big. I mean, this is, this could turn into something really sizable here.
Yeah, it could. It really could. I mean, if you look at, you know, you know, could this become 100 million tons? It definitely could, you know what I mean? And it could become a few hundred million tons. So, I mean, that's the neat part about this, is I always say to people, "You know, I'm an investor. First and foremost, I'm an investor." And so I'm continuing to invest in this, 'cause I think it's an asymmetric investment opportunity. I don't think there's a ton of downside here, and there's a lot of upside, okay? We haven't quite been paid for what we've already found, but that'll come, and maybe it's gonna come when we move to the United States, get listed there, or it's gonna come with the next discovery, and then we get re-rated all of a sudden and much higher.
So, you know, but I feel like, you know, the good news is the metal's in the ground, and it's responsive to our exploration techniques and our guys have figured it out, you know. And we've got a very high success rate shown there. But I mean, as you know, in baseball, if you hit .300, you're in the Hall of Fame. In mining, if you do the same, it's the same thing, you know? So it's a game where you miss mostly, but, you know, it's about hitting enough hits and making enough progress that it pays out, and we've certainly done that here.
Well, you know, you touched on Saudi Arabia, and so investors right now, the focus is on this, but essentially they're getting that for- the other interest for free. What are the immediate plans on Saudi Arabia? Will that eventually-
Yeah, so we're actually doing some geophysics there right now and soil sampling with a view to drilling there in H2. Just to give you an example of why we're so excited about Saudi, just 30 clicks down the road from us, from the land package we've got, and our land package there is 100 km by 100 km. So think about that. It's like an hour by car, by an hour by car. That's a lot. And you know what? Honestly, we were out at the site three weeks ago, turning over native copper, and I'm like, "I can't believe this is still here." Like, you know, that people have not... You know, like, there was no prospecting, you know, methodology back there.
And so, like, that anywhere in Canada or United States would've been thoroughly prospected by now. So we're turning it over, and we're super excited about it. But get this, 30 kilometers away, Barrick and Ma’aden, Ma’aden is a giant Saudi mining company, like top five or six in the world, and Barrick, of course, is a big US-Canadian gold miner. They have a gold copper project. It's about a $5 billion project. They drilled 94,000 meters and made it to the $5 billion project. Now, that's a remarkable number, and I thought, "How is that even possible?" But what's interesting is this is like surface to 200 meters.
So when we were over there and looking at this, we found that basically, you know, you don't have the overburden, so the drilling costs over there are half what it is in Canada, but you don't have to instead of going through 200 or 300 meters worth of useless crap to find out your pay zone, it's there, right at the surface. So, like, we're gonna be doing like a, you know, a 5,000-meter drill program, or that's like the equivalent of a 20,000-meter drill program in Canada. So that's why it's exciting, and I think it's gonna be a very interesting geological area, and I think there's gonna be some big discoveries there.
Well, Terry, I think we're at the hour mark, and we really appreciate this. A very compelling presentation, and thank you so much for your participation.
All right. Thanks for having us, Mark. Have a great day. Cheers.