Pop on in. All right. Well, until he's here, let's actually pull up a little bit about Power Metallic. Bear with me here, folks. Bear with me. All right. They are polymetallic super giant. They are copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, cobalt, gold, and silver. Their flagship project is located near the Nemaska, Quebec region. For those that don't know a lot about Quebec, it is here in Canada. It is very mining rich. It's very resourceful. It's a great jurisdiction to be in. The government is definitely behind it. There are a lot of projects that are coming out of Quebec that are worth your time and worth looking at. Let's talk about this a little bit. The project benefits from being centrally located with the critical infrastructure already set up.
It is located beside a major highway, its nearby town and airport, and it's found across the road from Hydro-Québec substation, which supplies expensive and low-carbon hydropower. Additionally, this project has a shallow average mineral depth with the presence of ultramafic tailings that enable a significant carbon sequestration to offset the project's emissions. This position is low risk, it's carbon neutral, and it's very environmentally friendly. It's a source of battery metals, and it's a source of critical minerals. Further to that, let's talk about one of its announcements that just came out. They just announced a strategic partnership that has established a framework from Power Metallic and Amaar Mining to jointly pursue future Saudi mining license auctions rounds. With 50/50 ownership economics and an initial approved post-award work program funding framework up to $10 million. That's a pretty big piece of news right now.
They're entering into this strategic alliance and this joint venture framework agreement with this company and the affiliate with Amaar Holding. This is a joint pursue mining license opportunity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That's big. Given everything that's happening right now in the world, I would say, yeah, this is one to actually take a look at. The agreement marks that the next step for Power Metallic expansion into Saudi Arabia following the company's award exploration license. Under this agreement, people, Power Metallic and Amaar Mining intend to cooperate in future Saudi mining license auction rounds and other mutually agreed opportunities, combining Power Metallic and exploration capabilities. Any licensing award, we're just going to go through their press release right now. Under the agreement framework are expected to advance through a 50/50 joint partnership.
Power Metallic is also expected to act as a technical lead and proposed operator of this joint venture. That's huge. Now they're extending outside of Quebec and into a totally different jurisdiction, which tells you a lot about the experience they have. When you're going into a jurisdiction like that, it is quite unknown. There is a lot of education that is still needed around Saudi Arabia, but we all know that that is incredibly resource-rich. Terry Lynch is the CEO of Power Metallic. He has years of experience.
Duncan is just with us.
Perfect.
Hi, Duncan. How are you?
Hey, good morning, guys, or good afternoon, as it would be.
Perfect. Duncan, it's so great to see you.
Yeah. Good to see you.
I've given a little bit of an overview of the company, as well as got into a little bit of your recent press release. I'm going to actually hand it over to you, and I'll jump on at the 20-minute mark to give you a slight little nudge that just wrap it up, and then I'll jump on for any Q&As after that.
Okay, perfect.
Okay.
There we go. You can see the screen here?
Yep. There we go. We got it.
Okay, perfect.
Are you able to make it full screen?
Yes. Let me do that.
Yeah.
There we go.
There we go. Okay, enjoy.
Good. Thanks very much. Thanks everyone for joining me today. Very happy to talk to you about what is a spectacular project that we have on the go, and a really very interesting company, Power Metallic. Right off the bat, I'm going to state we are the highest- grade copper and PGE discovery on the go in the world right now. It's truly exciting, and I hope that you will have the same opinion at the end of this presentation. I will present you the classic Pinocchio page. I'm going to tell you things that I believe are absolutely true, but please do your own due diligence and check things out for yourself for your full confidence. Really the defining aspect of our world right now is a discovery that we made in Quebec, at the Nisk Project called the Lion Zone, and it is absolutely exceptional stuff.
We highlighted about five different holes here. They averaged over 22 m in length with spectacular numbers on the Cu Eq numbers in the double digits. Actually, we put out a couple holes in the last two weeks that would give some of these a substantial run for the money. This is highly concentrated and very valuable rock. It is 45% copper, 55% PGEs, about 10% of that is gold, 5% silver. There's about 11 different elements that are in this Lion Zone. The thing to understand is this is an exceptionally rare discovery. It's what's called an orthomagmatic. I'm not going to do too much discussion on the geological terms, but basically, this is something that was formed from a big nickel, high-grade nickel and copper kitchen. There's a hydrothermal event that created this thing, and it is truly exceptional. We're open in all directions.
We're near surface, and we've drilled down about 700 m-800 m on this very substantial rock that we have on our hands. As I mentioned, we're in Quebec. We're just southeast of James Bay. We're just outside the town of Nemaska. We think that Quebec is probably the best place to be in the world looking at these high-grade polymetallic discoveries. There's a whole bunch of reasons why we say that. It ranges from the on the ground aspects to the government and what they do for us. In the practical world, we are in a fantastic location. We are right beside a major highway in Quebec, Route du Nord. We have a Hydro-Québec substation across the street, power lines going over our land. The town of Nemaska is about 5 or 6 mi away.
It has a regional airport. Importantly, it's the headquarters for the James Bay Cree. They are the Indigenous guys who we're parked with. We have a fantastic relationship with these guys. I have to say, they've been instrumental in helping us along the way. They do everything from accommodations and food for our staff that are there. They've been influential in helping us with progress, which I'll talk about in a couple of minutes. The other sort of parts of this that are important, great tax credits coming from the Quebec government and the federal government. Rough back of the envelope, it'll be about CAD 400 million to put together a facility to take advantage of these minerals. Half that's covered by these tax grants. We would envisage using debt for the balance. Functionally, it means our capital stack requirements are virtually nil.
Not entirely, but very low. The Quebec government's been very helpful with us as well. Your classic bureaucratic headaches are extended terms for getting permits. We're seeing things expedited for us and incredibly positive there. Great environment. We started off, we were actually previously called Power Nickel. In the bottom left-hand corner here, we had our initial project, Nisk Main. We took this when we took the property over about four or five years ago from about 3 million tons of high-grade nickel to 43-101 in 2023 of over 7 million tons. We'll provide an update on that later on this year. The fun stuff came when we were down to about 200 m of a drill budget. This Nisk Main was typically surfaced down to about 400 m- 500 m, and we weren't really in the mood to go do a financing at that point.
We were typically raising about CAD 2 million or CAD 3 million a crack at this timeframe. Terry, our CEO, said to the geos, "What else do you have? What would you like to kick the tires on?" We had some old airborne EM work and some surface expressions about 5.5 km away. We put a hole down. It was the third-best platinum palladium hole in the world, and we knew we were onto something entirely different. We were looking for nickel sulfides, not that. As we put more holes in, it morphed into what we call Lion, and it's a whole new thing. It's a orthomagmatic. They're super rare. There's only been 20 of them in the world. They're the richest mines on the go. We're the 21st, and we're very excited about it, and I'll explain more.
As I learned years ago when I was a stockbroker, I asked one of my friends, "Hey, what makes a successful company?" He said, "Duncan, it's really simple. You really have to have a good collection of guys on a team. They'll make things happen and go from there." I would suggest that we really do have a good and highly productive group. The guys at the top here, Terry Lynch and our CEO and Director, we're basically looking after the money to feed the geologists who always have an insatiable desire to put more holes in the ground. The guys I really want to highlight, though, are in the bottom here. In the center is Dr. Steve Beresford. He's kind of like a demi geo god in Australia, very well known there.
Not so much in North America or Europe, but this guy's a star. He's probably the guy in the world of orthomagmatics and polymetallics. His CV is exceptional. He had three multi-billion dollar success stories that many people are familiar with and probably profited by. First Quantum, MMG, and IGO. He's also ex Western Mining guy, which is important. They were taken over by BHP, but they're one of the class acts out there in the mining side. He is essentially our intellectual thought leader and director when it comes to the geology here. On the bottom left is Joe Campbell, another Western alumni. He's our VP Exploration. Incredibly hardworking guy, very smart. He's had some nice successes as well, including Agnico's big project up in the Arctic. He runs a company called GeoVector out of Ottawa. They're one of the top of the food chain, independent geologist groups.
They do all our work on the property. Really strong group of guys helping us out in that front. In between them is someone different. As I like to joke, companies like this, we go into a transition at one point. You go from finding rocks and developing properties to walking into the world of bureaucracy and permitting and all that sort of stuff, and trying to figure out how to deal with the governments. That person is Seamus O'Regan, our newest addition to our board. For those who don't know him, he was federal government minister for both Indigenous Affairs and Natural Resources. We're definitely using a guy in the right backyard for us, from the political side, and pretty happy to have him on board. We're going to show three different charts here.
As Terry likes to call them, it's the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here's the good one. When we made our transition from being a nickel discovery to an orthomagmatic polymetallic, we were well appreciated in the marketplace. We were basically a 10 bagger. We were the top TSXV mining stock in 2024. An awful lot of fun. People were pretty happy. It got a lot of attention for us, and that had some benefits. One of them was significant. We brought in a number of key players from the mining industry. Number one is Robert Friedland. He led our last two financings. He's a superhero in the world of mining. Very happy to have him on board, very helpful. Lots of advice and ideas from him. Rob McEwen's been in our last three financings. When I was a broker, he was one of my clients.
Just a superb guy. Again, extremely helpful, knowledgeable. Great to have guys like that helping you out. Third person is Gina Rinehart. She's the richest person in Australia. She found out about this project, came in and asked us to buy 10% of the company. It was early days for us, and we were just sitting on a ton of assays that we knew were pretty superb. We gave her a price. It was too high for her. We said, "Hey, just go and buy it in the marketplace. You can get it for less than what we would want from you." As a matter of fact, she did, like a bull in a China shop, and happy to have her on board.
At this point, we're sitting on at least 15 billionaires in our shareholder world, and I think we've added another two in the last week and a half out of New York. Very helpful. Pretty strong group. Last year, when Friedland led the last deal that we did, it was a CAD 50 million financing. CAD 40 million was charitable flow-through. One of the things that we take advantage of with Quebec, we did CAD 40 million of charitable flow-through at CAD 2.83. Buyback, which happens immediately with the tax incentive guys, was CAD 1.45. That gave us a whole bunch of money to keep the geos happy. It was the start of a 100,000 m drill program. We did roughly 35,000 m last year. We've got 65,000 m on the go. Six rigs incredibly active here. Now, we have a little bit of downtime during the year.
Right now it's spring break, and coincides with the goose hunting season in the area. We shut down our drilling then. There's another one that happens in the middle of September to October, which is moose hunting season. Other than that, and Christmas break for our guys, we're drilling 40, 41 weeks of the year. Pretty solid. That means too, that investors can look forward to a pretty constant flow of assays coming from the labs. From our winter drill program, we have about 30 to come out. I know the guys are working on a news release, where we've got at least a dozen holes to come out any day now. That's going to be fun to watch. I think people will be happy with what they see.
Just a very brief comment here on our company in terms of stakeholders, and significant as a defense from unwanted lowball takeover offers from guys. Just roughly half the company's controlled by about six or seven groups. Our CEO, Terry, and his family control 18%- 19%. I'd note that Terry's been an active buyer in the marketplace when he's been able to over the last 120 days. Bought at least 700,000 shares. There's another sort of 25% ownership in here that, again, is a small group of very sort of dedicated, long-term thinking shareholders. Fantastic structure. We've got some great institutions that are on board as well, in some cases, like Palos, we're their number one pick. Nice crowd to be hanging out with here. We go from the good to the bad. This is the bad chart.
Last year, despite commodity prices taking off like mad across the board for what we had and for a serious advancement in the resource size that we had, our stock went nowhere. Very frustrating for us, frustrating for shareholders. This made us think about how we need to go deal with the public and educating them on what we have on the go, what our upside is and such. On the commodity side, just sort of focusing on what we saw in terms of price change, really substantial numbers. Most people looking at the world think that there's an awful lot more upside to these different elements as we go forward. One of the things that we did do last year was realize that these orthomagmatics are typically multi-mine or substantial size mines, and they're typically district plays.
At the time we did that financing last year, we had just over 40,000 sq km of property. We had identified about eight major targets in the area, and we wanted to take a crack at as much as we could. We went out and we did a major land acquisition. We boosted our positions there by 600%. We are now in the low 300,000 sq km range. Significant. We own seven of those eight, and as opportunities arise, we will try to get that eighth and go from there. One of the key areas that we did get was what we call the Hydro Lands. On the top right here is your Lion discovery, and as we come down, there is Nisk. We had identified a fold hinge in here, which basically we think is the other side of Lion. This was controlled by Hydro-Québec.
They had taken a whole bunch of land in the area, and they had put it off limits for people to do anything on it. They had, in early days, different ideas of their land necessities for things like flood plains or additional hydro facilities. Nobody could get a hold of this stuff. Us as a company out of Ontario, we would be a decade down the road trying to get this stuff on our own through the Hydro-Québec bureaucracy, which is one of the largest ones on the go. We went to the James Bay Cree, the chief, and said, "Hey, listen. We've got a pretty nice discovery here, but it has way more potential to be a very serious project, and we really need this land." They stepped up to the plate. They interacted with Hydro-Québec.
At the end of the day, we got this stuff. We just had our first sort of drilling work done on this a number of weeks ago. Some basically fan drilling on it, putting some equipment down, like a borehole EM, which has been a great tool for us. When we get back from the goose hunting season, we'll be pretty active putting holes in the ground there, exploring what we think is something substantial. Good, bad. Next is the ugly. At the beginning of this year, we were trading around CAD 1.70. Before we knew it, we were trading down around CAD 0.90, and this was very frustrating for us. You could point a finger and sort of say all this activity with President Trump and Iran caused a lot of action in the marketplace that was negative.
We also thought, well, let's look at what the naysayers are saying and deal with this and go from there. Three things that sort of typically came up from people being negative on our project. One is the concern or worry that metallurgy will be bad. You've seen some disasters in the polymetallic world, especially in Australia, where guys who didn't really have substantial grades had just absolutely terrible metallurgy results come out and harm them terrifically. Not the case for us, and I'll explain that. The other issue is some people thought this is too small to be a mine, and it'll never get going. We take umbrage to that, and we can prove that up that it is not the case. The third thing is capital intensive needs. If you look at copper projects in the world, they're typically 0.4%, 0.5% copper numbers.
They cost billions of dollars to put into production. They need an awful lot of equipment, energy, infrastructure, et cetera, to get going. It is not the case for us either, and we'll briefly go through that as well. Those are the three issues we wanted to deal with. Since we've gone out and started presenting these ideas to people, our stock's up about 50% since then. You always want to be de-risking, and we did a substantial job and also dealt with the first issue on the previous slide. SGS did metallurgy for us. They're the best that SGS has ever seen. These numbers are almost perfect. Copper is almost 99%. Platinum and palladium are in the mid to high 90s. Gold and silver are substantial. This slide basically tells people this is going to be a mine. That's the bottom line. Pretty fantastic stuff.
We are a bit surprised that we didn't double or triple in the market when we put this out, but we'll continue to put more substantial information out to people, and we think that'll do the trick. This is a great start for us on progressing this project into a revenue-producing entity. When you take a look at money, how do you make money in these things? Really the key is to be someone like us with ultra-high grade rock. The guys who have problems are typically the low-grade and medium-grade porphyry projects. Their ROI numbers are typically pretty low. Their capital is extremely expensive, and that's not the case for us. We'll put out a PEA this year in December, and that will put some numbers on the page and go from there.
We'll have a mineral resource estimate out in July. That should show that the rock that we have is worth well north of a billion dollars. We're running out of time there? Yeah. Okay. Real quick, we'll put data on this. These are analyst aspects. You can run AI programs on this data. You can get this information off of our website. You'll come up with a substantial number for what we're valued at. Essentially, comparisons, there's only two really in the world for us. Oktyabrsky, which is the richest mine in Russia, and the Sudbury footwall deposits. They're all major mines, multiple mines, and that's what we look like. Just real quick, in summary, we've got six rigs on the go. We're cranking things up.
The environment is great with rising commodity prices or metallurgy, PEA will really put substantial data out there for people to appreciate us. We're continuing to look for more goodies in the ground and more ground. We did a spinoff of our Chilean and B.C. assets. 50% went out to shareholders. That's public now, That's going to get ramped up in the next little while. As Lyndsay was mentioning earlier, we've got a subsidiary company in Saudi Arabia. We've got a 200,000 km project. It looks great. It's early days, this is the next frontier, we just did a substantially important deal with one of the Saudi royal family groups for our next acquisitions there.
The last point I'm going to make is we expect to be listed on NASDAQ as we go forward, probably August to September, and that's going to be very helpful for liquidity, and we're seeing an awful lot of attention from U.S. investors. That's going to be helpful for us. That is essentially the world of Power Metallic as we stand today.
There is so much happening over there, and I'm actually so excited. Just the more the news flow that comes out, the more excited I get about the company. That's 100% for sure right there. Now, I'm going to jump over just to a few quick Q&As here.
Okay.
Where is a noticeable difference between a company releasing strong drill results and a company internally realizing they may be sitting on something much larger than the market understands? Now, I know there was reportedly a moment where the grades coming back were so significant that your team actually had to double-check the data because they couldn't believe what they were seeing. Can you take us inside that very moment a little bit and just explain what it told you about the possible scale and significance of this discovery?
I hate to say it, but it's actually a constant problem for us. It's not really a problem.
It's always one problem.
It's an issue, right? When we first did our hole on Lion, the guys were like, "Holy moly, what's this? It's, like, too large." We'd go back to the labs and sort of say, "Can you run this thing again?" The labs all have parameters of what they can measure, and they typically go in ranges. What we're finding almost constantly is we're doing over-ranges, they're called. We're exceeding what they're able to measure. The guys have to put all the goodies back in the lab, remeasure them with different scales, and come back. Again, we saw the same thing with SGS when they did our metallurgy. They actually did that three times.
Wow.
The numbers were so, from their point of view, over the top. It's fantastic when it happens because you know you got some nice rock. It's a time issue in some cases. Some people, I think, have misbelief on this stuff. Hey, it's not us. It's what the rocks are, and this is what the labs are telling us, so it's a fantastic problem to have.
It is definitely a fantastic problem to have. We want to hear more of those problems, for sure.
Absolutely.
A porphyry system, as I was mentioning before you were able to join us, it's not an easy story to tell, and it's not an easy story for the market to fully understand early on. A lot of investors, they tend to gravitate towards that simpler one asset or one target narrative because it feels just easier to quantify. Some of the world's most significant mining discoveries have come from much larger, more complex systems that require patience and vision early on. What do you think investors may be overlooking or dismissing too quickly when it comes to understanding the long-term potential of a porphyry-style discovery?
Yeah. Well, we're not really a porphyry so much, but it is highly complex. We've had analysts come up and spend time with our geos on site and going through our rocks, and they're going, "Man, this stuff is complicated." What we do get is fantastic feedback from these guys who, A, understand it's complicated, and B, that our guys can figure it out.
I would say this one point. I had a discussion with Joe Campbell, our head geo, maybe six or seven months ago, and he basically told me, he said, "Duncan, I think we figured this out." That's important. You step back a bit, we haven't seen one of these discoveries in 20 years. The last one was Sakatti in Finland.
The guys who really understood stuff like Sudbury way back when as analysts and such, they're all retired or dead. We have an education curve we've got to work through with an awful lot of investors to explain this stuff is so unique, and it's different, and its creation is fascinating, and here you go. If you understand it, even basically, you'll have a terrific appreciation. The guys who do that are guys like Friedland and McEwen.
They're writing checks, right? They want us to make them a lot of money.
Absolutely. Well, we've run out of time here. You know what, Duncan? Thank you so much. Thank you so much for telling us your story. It's so exciting. I'm going to keep saying that because there is a lot going on. Keep the news flow coming, keep that education coming, and we're going to talk to you.