conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you have joined us for the third day of our Precious Metals and Critical Minerals Conference. The next presentation of the day is from Power Metallic Mines. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking Book a Meeting.
At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Duncan Roy, Vice President, Investor Relations of Power Metallic Mines, which trades on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol PNPNF, and on the TSXV under the symbol PNPN. Welcome, Duncan.
Thanks very much, guys. Thanks everyone for coming online and kicking the tires with me today. I'm really excited to talk to you about our company. It's just a machine coming alive nicely here. We are the world's highest grade copper and PGE discovery on the go right now. It's a significant discovery. We've been, you know, getting a lot of attention this week, especially with some of the assays that we've been putting out. They are just world-class numbers that have been getting put out. Let's proceed here. I'll put up your typical Pinocchio page.
I'm gonna tell you things that I believe are true, but please do your own due diligence and go from there. The results that we put out today are from our prime discovery. It's called the Lion Zone. One of the key things here is just how exceptionally rich the grades and thickness are of this property. It at this point starts at about 40 m , 50 m from surface, and we've been drilling down to, you know, 700 m , 800 m at this point. Pretty significant stuff. You can see on this chart, we've highlighted about 5 holes. They're on average about 22+ m, and the grades are certainly off the charts.
We're looking at double-digit copper equivalent numbers. In this case, we're profiling over 10%. If you convert it into gold, which is a little easier for some people, then you're looking at 12 and change. Just exceptional numbers here. The assays we put out at the beginning of the week, one of the holes was actually our second best and sort of surpasses some of these that are on this chart. Where are we? We're in what we think is the best jurisdiction going in in the world. We're in Québec, Canada. We're southeast of James Bay.
We are just outside the town of Nemaska. One of the things that that's always a big benefit for mining companies is your location and infrastructure, and we have that in spades. We're actually right beside a three-lane major highway that we can drive right onto our property. There's a Québec Hydro substation across the street with hydro lines running over different areas of our property. The town of Nemaska has a regional airport. It's about 8 km away.
It's also the headquarters of the James Bay Cree, and as we'll talk a little bit more later, they've been extremely helpful with our company and all our guys who are working up there. They provide lodging for them and food and other services. Québec's got more to it than just a nice highway going by our place. You know, the government in Québec will give you tax incentives, tax breaks for building a building a property here. Estimates from some analysts, you know, the start-up production will be around CAD 400 million.
Between the province of Québec and the federal government with their grants as well, tax credits, you're looking at over 55% coverage of costs. You know, at that point with the rate of studies done, you can probably do the banking for the balance. Our potential capital stack requirements are gonna be very low. Just a great place. Our original discovery here was, you know, the overall project is called Nisk. We did a deal with a company called Critical Elements. We got a hold of a nickel sulfide discovery. We took that from about 3 million tons to over seven on a MRE that we did in 2023.
It's since grown a bit more, but we had some other focuses that I'll explain here in a second. That initial property starts basically at surface and goes down about 400 m , 500 m, and you know, it's battery grade. It's like 1.25%, 1.5% nickel. We were at one point sitting on 200 m of drilling in our budget at one point. We didn't necessarily wanna go do a financing. We asked our guys, you know, "What else do you have out there that's sort of interesting?" About 5.5 km away there was indications of another, you know, potential nickel sulfide deposit.
We drilled that, and holy smokes, whole different world. It was the third-best platinum palladium hole of the year. As we drilled into this thing, it transformed our understanding of what we had. It's what's called an orthomagmatic, incredibly rare discovery. There's only been 20 of these in the world. We're the 21st, as I suggested earlier on the earlier slide, you know, just incredibly rich values for copper, platinum, palladium, gold, silver. We've got cobalt and rhodium in there as well. The essential Lion deposit is about 45% copper, the balance is PGEs, you're down to about 10% on gold, 5% on silver.
Just incredibly rich rock. Oh. Always good to have a smart team behind you. You know, at the end of the day, you really wanna own companies or invest in companies that, you know, have a great group of guys to make things happen. In our case, I think that's the case. CEO is Terry Lynch. Terry and, you know, the rest of the board, we're basically responsible for, you know, making sure this entity is well-financed and structured. The guys in the bottom are a little different.
The key guy I'm gonna point out is Dr. Steve Beresford in the bottom center. He is, he's basically our thought leader on the geological side. He's viewed as a bit of a demigod in Australia, where he's from. He's got a fantastic CV. Three major multi-billion dollar successes. First Quantum, MMG, and IGO. This guy is probably the foremost mind out there on these orthomagmatic type discoveries, and we're very excited to have him on board. On the, on the bottom left is Joe Campbell. Joe is our VP Exploration, and he is the head of a consulting company on the geo side, it's one of the best in Canada, called GeoVector.
GeoVector does all our work on the property. It's kind of convenient, both Joe and Steve are both, you know, Western mining guys, so all the data and work that's done, you know, behind the scenes, these guys are very familiar with. It's quite convenient. In between them is a different character for us. It's Seamus O'Regan, and he is he's gonna be playing a significant role for us down the road. He's the former federal government minister in Canada for natural resources and also indigenous affairs.
You know, at some point you go from finding rocks to finding bureaucracy, and he's gonna be very important in that area. In 2024, we were the top-performing mining stock in the TSX-V in Canada. Basically a 10-bagger. That, you know, is 100% coming from the discovery of the Lion Zone and people getting excited about it. One of the nice things about this Lion discovery is it brought in, you know, some very prominent people in the mining world. Robert Friedland has led our last two financings. Rob McEwen has been in our last three.
Gina Rinehart, who's, you know, the richest person in Australia, she came on board, buying it in the marketplace. We were able to go and raise about CAD 50 million last February, care of the Robs coming on board and others. That has set us up incredibly well on the balance sheet side, and we were able to put together a 100,000-meter drill program. We got about 60,000 meters done last year. We've got another 40,000 that we're working through right now. You know, as people have seen, it's a pretty steady parade of assay results coming out from all that work.
Here we go. Company structure, just quickly on this. The key thing I'm gonna point out is that roughly half the company's controlled by a small group of stakeholders. Terry Lynch and his family are the largest, but we've got some exceptional, you know, institutional players that are on board. Obviously the, you know, the Robert Friedland and the Rob McEwen. This is helpful for controlling our fate. Now to go to the ugly. The good, the bad, the ugly. The bad was last year, our stock basically went sideways. It was really frustrating.
All our commodity prices, you know, for the elements that we have on our property were doing exceptionally well. We were building up the asset significantly, yet we went absolutely nowhere in the marketplace. That, that was a little bit of a frustration and caused us to do some thinking. You know, very, very quickly, you know, obviously, in the environment that we have now where tech stocks are sort of dominant, you know, the business case for investing in mining stocks is exceptionally timely. As I mentioned, you know, commodities have done extremely well.
Since February of last year, you know, copper's up 43%, palladium 96%, platinum 145%. Gold continues to run, having a nice day today, silver as well, extremely strong. You know, clearly the assets that we have in the ground are getting more and more valuable on their own merit. A key thing that we did, you know, in this sort of period was realize that these orthomagmatic discoveries are typically multi-mine projects over many kilometers. We were not big enough, we thought, to take advantage of what we'd discovered. We basically had sort of determined that there was eight specific areas that we wanted to control.
We went out on a big a land acquisition program, and at this point we've secured seven of the eight, and we're still looking to add to our property. 600% increase in our property. As I mentioned before, the James Bay Cree, highly instrumental for us. This area here that I'm gonna highlight, in the orange area, this was land that was controlled by Hydro-Québec. They had segregated all sorts of property, you know, back in the 1960s and 1970s when they were building up all the hydro facilities up there. You couldn't, you couldn't stake that or do any work on it.
We looked at things and said, "Geez, you know, we're just this little company. If we go into, you know, one of the biggest bureaucracies going, Hydro-Québec, they're not gonna give us the time of day." We had a chat with the head of the James Bay Cree and explained our situation. You know, basically our lion deposit was right on the sort of border of this property, we think that there's a fold hinge involved there where the property sort of comes around and there's more deposits there. The James Bay Cree went to bat for us. We managed to get that property after about 18 months.
We've just started to do some preliminary work on that area in the last month or so. We'll be actively drilling that when we get back drilling on the property in the next couple weeks. Just casually, we take a bit of time off in respect for the James Bay Cree for goose hunting season in May, early June. We do a similar thing in middle of September to October with goose hunting season, and then we take a break over Christmas for all our crews. We're basically drilling this property north of 40 weeks of the year. Here's the ugly chart. You know, we were up around CAD 1.70 back in January.
From our perspective, things were going well. Our stock wasn't, and sort of scratched our head and thought, "Well, you know, what's the issue here that maybe people have?" There's three elements that sort of would come up that people might be critical of, and that was that the metallurgy would be negative. You've seen that with some polymetallic discoveries in the world in the last couple years, where they are typically low-grade projects.
The second sort of objection that some people have is that the project would be too small to be a mine, and that, you know, most copper projects are incredibly expensive, always a big involved on the cost side and stuff. We wanted to go out and address these three issues and help people out. We've been active with that program over the last month, and we've seen our stock come up about 40% in the last while. We think it's, you know, the message is definitely getting out to people. On the first side, we put out metallurgical results, you know, just over a month ago. They're done by SGS.
They are the top of the food chain when it comes to doing this work. Highly respected company. They were blown away by the results that came out. We actually ran them 3x to make sure there weren't any errors. The numbers here are, you know, averaging 95% recoveries. Just exceptional, off-the-chart stuff. Really, the message for this that we thought people would take was, "Hey, this is 100% gonna be a mine at Lion here." We're a little bit surprised that we didn't get a substantial uptick in the marketplace, but we're starting to see that sort of come together now.
Incredibly important data, let's progress here. The other, the other side is, you know, sort of economics. Really when you take a look at low-grade porphyry projects, incredibly expensive. Internal rates of return are typically pretty low. We are a ultra-high, so exceptional grade, and that means they're, the cost to go and take this stuff out of the ground and process it is at the bottom of the bottom of the chart, as it were. You know, the key things that people should be looking at or how much metal, how much metal is in the ore that you're taking out. When it's exceptionally high, that means your costs are significantly lower.
You don't have to spend as much money on machinery, on electricity, diesel, all those other costs. To that end, we changed a little bit of our process too. We're putting out a PEA that'll be out towards the end of this year, a preliminary economic assessment. We're also putting out a mineral resource estimate that'll be out around July of this year. We think, you know, very casually that this is going to show that we've got at least CAD 1 billion worth of rock here on the go. We think that is another critical de-risking of the property and we'll go from there.
If you're playing with your AI machines, you know, you can have some fun with these numbers. We'll have definite numbers here when we get those reports out. Analysts look at the tonnage at this point, ranging from 7 million - 16.5 million tons. The grade numbers are 4.25% - 7%. You can run the recoveries and payables and taxes on this and come up with a valuation for this asset. I'm gonna go through this stuff fairly quickly here at this point, just consideration of time.
Dr. Beresford put this chart together. This is a mapping of all the different orthomagmatic deposits, the all 20 and plus us 21, that are out there. They're typically a combination of PGEs, copper and nickel. The key thing to understand is, you know, these deposits are typically coming from a major nickel body, and there's these hydrothermal events that shoot up these other rocks, the PGEs and copper, and those are the structures. There's typically multiples of these. We've found Lion so far, and we have evidence of some others, which we'll talk about over the next couple of weeks and months and go from there.
Just exceptional, most valuable mines in the world. Just super key stuff. When you take a look at it just a little differently, you know, the classic thing is, who are you guys like? How do you compare? You know, how do I sort of judge or evaluate you on what you are? We're basically similar to two other major projects in the world. Oktyabrsky, which is the heart of Norilsk, which is a CAD 1 trillion mine. It's the most valuable mine in the world. That's in Russia. We're very similar to Morrison, which is the Sudbury Footwall deposits. There's us.
These are absolutely monster projects, and we're still building, that's what we're after. Very simply, 6 rigs on the go, very active on the drilling side. I'm gonna skip this here too. The company Foran is a sort of an interesting company to go sort of compare us to. They're a different animal. They're polymetallic. They were just taken over for over CAD 3 billion. The amount of rock that they have is sort of similar to us. It's just a different grade, not the same grades. You know, we're sitting here in Canadian dollar terms with a market cap of about CAD 350 million. It just doesn't make sense.
You know, we think as we re-rate our stock through more assays, the MRE and the PEA, that we'll start to close the gap that we have with Foran's valuation. In summary here real quick, and I'll try to get to some questions, we're wrapping up our exploration program. The environment is exceptional with the commodity prices going up. We'll get the PEA out on the Lion Zone. We'll work on getting a bigger land package. We did build it up by 600%, so that's significant. Not a reason to buy our stock today, but we did a spin-off of 50% of our assets we had in Chile and in British Columbia.
It's a company called Chilean Metals. It's trading on the TSXV. We think that'll provide some excitement for people in the next couple of months as they get their drilling program going. We made a significant asset that we purchased in Saudi Arabia. It's in a subsidiary of Power Metallic Mines. We think that's gonna be a very interesting area over the next couple of years. The last thing I'm gonna point out is we're expecting to move on to U.S. markets. Most likely, we'll go on Nasdaq, that can be happening here in fairly short order.
With that, I'll migrate to questions. Let me see if I can pull this up. There's a question here on the exploration side. How excited are you about the Elephant, the hydrothermal fold hinge and other corridor targets as potential second Lion zones that could add millions of tons to the resource base? Pretty simple. You know, we think the fold hinge is potentially the other sort of half of the Lion zone and we'll be actively drilling that after the goose hunting holiday that's there.
We're on early days on the Elephant discovery. It's a huge anomaly, one of the biggest the guys have ever seen. We put a couple holes into it, but it's not a simple thing. We think that's another piece of excitement. Tiger Deep is starting to give us a bunch of very interesting evidence, that, you know, that could be a second Lion zone. Question here. The company attracted backing from names like Gina Rinehart, Rob McEwen, and Robert Friedland. How do these strategic shareholders help you as you move towards that construction decision ready asset?
A couple simple ones. You know, they can provide more money for us, which mining companies always need. You know, these guys are incredibly gifted players in the business and we're constantly in touch with the Robs especially. You know, they have a lot of suggestions and guidance that they offer and you know, that's just helpful. At the end of the day, the more brains you have working on a project, the better off you are. Steven Smith here. Will you be able to include the drilling results from the current round of drilling in the PEA coming out in Q4? The answer to that is yes.
Everything that we drilled up until we shut the rigs down a couple weeks ago, that's all going to be going into the PEA in Q4. There'll be some very nice numbers in there. We've got about maybe 30 holes more to come out. We'll put more out early next week, possibly two rounds. As you've seen this week, you know, there's some exceptional stuff that's coming. Lawrence has a question. Nisk is already showing ultra high copper equivalent grades. What's the internal view on whether this ultimately supports a starter open pit plus underground scenario, and how important is that for rerating?
Absolutely, this is gonna be a mine. I mean, that's the bottom line. It will start off with a starter pit, you know, that might be two or three years' worth of work in the process. I would say, you know, sort of casually that the engineering work for that stuff is already starting to get done by the GeoVector guys. We're running out of time here. I wanted to answer one here. Mr. Minto, regarding the new large gold zone that was found, when can we expect the lab results on it?
We have a very interesting discovery that we made outside of Lion, and we found some exceptional grade gold at surface, and then we found more down about 700 meters. Really what we need to go do is pop a whole bunch of holes in between and that will give us key data. That's gonna be coming out later on this summer or early fall and we'll go from there.
I think I've run out of time, for anyone who wants to follow up, get more information, you can get ahold of me at duncan@powermetallic.com. If you go to our website and go on presentations, you can pull up this page, that'll give you my telephone number as well. Happy to talk in the future and go from there.