Our next presenter is Aidan Mills, President and CEO of Northstar Clean Technologies, symbol ROOF on the TSX Venture. Northstar, well known to this Kinvestor.com family, is a Canadian waste-to-value technology company focused on sustainable recovery and reprocessing asphalt shingles. One of our fan favorites, that's for sure. Had a big strategic update to his shareholders last week, that I'm sure he'll tie in some additional information on here today. Aidan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.
Good to see you .
Perfect. Let's get your screen going here and rip through it.
Let me share this and make sure that this part of my technology works and get this up and running.
There we go. We're live, buddy.
Okay. Hold on two seconds. All good. Can you see that?
Yes, we're good.
Okay. Well, look, Arlen, thanks as always for the invite. Great to join you guys. My name's Aidan Mills. I'm the CEO of Northstar Clean Technologies. As Arlen said, we've got a proprietary technology that addresses a massive market, and that massive market is the amount of shingles across North America that are going into landfill. We've got a patented technology. We believe we've got a first-mover advantage. The most important thing is that we have a commercial facility now constructed in Calgary that is ramping up. I'll talk a little bit about that today. We have a pathway to roll out these facilities all across North America. I believe that's a pathway to CAD 1 billion.
You'll hear a lot of CEOs talk about the valuation or the billion-dollar check for their companies today. We've got a clear pathway to be able to do that, and I'll share that with you. One of the things that's really interesting, actually we've kind of were discussing this today specifically obviously because what's going on in the hydrocarbon industry. One of the things that we actually are a manufacturing business with oil exposure as our major economic driver. Given today's all about kind of resources, that's one of the things as you look at the major driver for Northstar, it is literally oil price.
I'll discuss that a little bit in a minute. Listen, this is kind of the outline with respect to the market size. Across North America, you know, 16.5 million tons of shingles go to landfill each year. From a resource perspective, that's more than 20 million barrels of oil. There's an industry driver to reduce that number, reduce it by 50% by kind of 2035 and reduce it all the way down by 2050.
A bit like the oil company kind of carbon neutral statements, but ultimately that is the driver to reduce this figure significantly, and we believe we're one of the leaders in the ability to do that. As you look at our economics, what do we do? We take asphalt shingles either that have come off roofs or come from manufacturing waste. We take them through our facility, and out the back end comes Asphalt, Aggregate, Limestone, and Fiber. Older tiles, the fiber's organic. Newer tiles, it's fiberglass. And the revenue's split pretty simply, so 35% for tipping fees, we actually get paid for our feedstock, and 65% of the product revenue.
This is where the anchor to oil price comes because of that 65% out the back end. 95% of the value of that comes from the Asphalt. That is the thing that we're focusing on. If you think about Northstar and you think about what's important for the drivers, literally it's the tipping fee and the oil price. We are literally a manufacturing midstream hydrocarbon asset. Look, I spent, you know, nearly 20 years with BP, time with Goldman, at MEG and Husky on the oil industry side. We are literally like a midstream asset. But we're a midstream asset where actually the tipping fee means that we have a negative feedstock cost. The negative feedstock cost, that contributes significantly to the facility processing cost.
In some jurisdictions, that almost completely covers the cost of manufacturing the facility or the manufacturing in the facility. What actually happens is, if you look at the products out the back end, that is the remaining economic value, and that's where the pivot to oil actually occurs. Last point is, you know, the Liquid Asphalt price is fully correlated to oil price. It's essentially a hydrocarbon derivative, and that's where the pivot comes. If you think about, you know, 35% of the front end is the feedstock, you know, that we get paid for, 65% is the back end. And as I say, 95% of that is the asphalt price.
If you look at the overall economics, if we build a facility that just runs day shift, so it doesn't run 24/7, we would process about 40,000 tons a year. If we run it 24/7, and that is only, that's nothing to do with the facility size, that's only to do with the availability of feedstock, then we run 80,000 tons, we can run 24/7. The respective numbers are, you know, if we run just day shift, you know, CAD 10 million a year roughly in revenue, CAD 5 million of EBITDA. If we can run an 80,000-ton facility 24/7, it doubles the figures. You know, kind of CAD 20 million of revenue and over CAD 10 million of EBITDA. Obviously strong economics from running the facility.
The upside, of course, is if there are enough shingles in the region and we can have an 80,000-ton facility. I'm not gonna go into this in detail, but you can see from the industry partners, we've got strong market validation from feedstock, not only Ecco Recycling, but also the City of Calgary. In December, we announced that we will collect all of the City of Calgary's waste shingles for the next five years and get paid by the City of Calgary a tipping fee for that. For our offtake, McAsphalt, of course, part of, you know, the Canadian sub of Colas. And then from a shingle manufacturing, you know, TAMKO from the U.S.
All of these people have been involved in the R&D, and all of these people are looking at the asphalt that's coming out the back end of the facility. Financial partners, you know, well-funded. Then we've just announced in the strategic review a couple of weeks ago, we announced the compelling financing that's happening now. $10 million, 8% per annum convertible note, which is five years. You can see the conversion price and the key features. This is really important in terms of the way that it is, it's well geared towards Northstar with sophisticated long-term investors, a five-year term. You know, dilution minimized because there, of course, there is no warrant in here. It's a premium for the market conversion.
We have additional benefits for us with an acceleration clause, the ability to buy out at any time after 12 months, change of control capability. All of this is, I mean, I would describe as a well-negotiated deal with a sophisticated group of investors whereby they want the upside as well as us having, you know, lots of flexibility in the financing instrument. Of course, $10 million, which is great for the bridge. When I talk about the bridge, that's the bridge to get us to Empower Calgary, the Calgary Facility, fully up and running.
One of the things that's important as we think about this is, look, the first facility, we've moved from a pilot plant to the first manufacturing facility, the first commercial scale-up. That always throws out bottlenecks and processing bottlenecks, some of which you would never see in engineering and you never see in the pilot plant. That's only when you run the first full-scale facility do you know these things pop their heads up. We had three, two in transferred material and one in water processing. But the most important thing that people and investors need to think about is the Asphalt, which is the highest value product coming out the back end, is of excellent quality. TAMKO have said it looks better than they expected from the first facility that we've made.
All that means that the technology works. Now it's just about moving the material around in the most efficient way. Two steps. Interim production, step one, which is the ramp-up's happening now. Then in the fall, we'll do a facility upgrade, and we will get to the full production figures on the back end of that. But we expect to get to cash flow break even in this interim production step, as we come into the upgrade. The 2026 priorities, I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. It's all about this is why the font is, like, 4x the size with respect to Calgary.
This year is all about delivering the fully commercialized production through the Empower Calgary Facility. What we'll do with Baltimore and Hamilton, which people know are kind of follow-on facilities, is we'll continue to permit, we'll continue to engineer, and all the lessons that we've learned from the Calgary Facility, those get integrated into the engineering that goes on for the next facility. As we continue to roll these facilities out, we learn as we go. The biggest learning, of course, is to come from the pilot plant to the first commercial plant, and after that it will be incremental.
All of the stuff that we've learned from the construction of the Calgary Facility now get integrated into the next ones, which is the beauty of being able to roll this out again and again and again. We've talked about forecasted growth, so we expect to, you know, Calgary up and running this year and then build, you know, the build of the next two facilities, constructing next year, such that they will be up and running by 2028. Kind of like the road to CAD 1 billion and as I said earlier, if we have an 80,000-ton facility, and again, that's defined by the size of the city, it's not defined by the plant, we would expect to be kicking out an EBITDA of around $10 million per year.
If we think about a 10x multiple on the waste to value scale, that waste to value multiple is anywhere from kind of like six to 14. Just take 10 as a midpoint. Every single plant we build, in theory, should add CAD 100 million worth of EV to the business. What we need to do is build 10. We have the plans with TAMKO in the U.S. We have the MOU with them for four of the first four plants guaranteed offtake with them and guaranteed production from us. That's the MOU. We have Calgary.
We've got the potential, you know, retrofit of the pilot plant in Vancouver and Hamilton. If you look at that's immediately seven plants that we can see. That's the pathway to CAD 1 billion. Well, that's my billion-dollar pitch.
Good. Again, if you have any questions, please, type them into the Q&A box. I got a couple questions here for you while we wait for these to come in. Can you talk a little bit more how asphalt prices are related to the WTI in, like, a little bit more detail there?
Yeah, I mean, you know, Asphalt is no different to oil price than kind of gasoline or diesel or jet fuel. It's just a derivative product. When the oil price goes up, the derivative price goes up. Now, it depends on the various markets. People will know when refineries show as an example, you heard it a couple of weeks ago, refineries generally do their shutdowns in the winter because that's when gasoline demand is lowest. It's the same for every refined product. Asphalt's exactly the same. Nobody's paving roads in December in Boston. Nobody's roofing houses in December in Calgary, right?
Right.
The demand for asphalt goes up in the summer, and you'll see a seasonal curve where the price compared to the crude oil price will be a lower ratio in the summer. Sorry, a lower ratio in the winter and a higher ratio in the summer because there's actually just product demand within that product. Same with gasoline, same with distillate, you know, diesel. But you heard like a couple of weeks ago with the conflict in Iran, U.S. refiners saying, "We're going to delay our shutdowns, so we'll keep on producing refined products.
Mm.
We will not starve the market of refined products.
Interesting.
They've extended their shutdowns, you know, to today. What that will mean, though, is it means that the gasoline price, as you know, the gasoline price, when the oil price has gone up, you know, the major impact that you see as a consumer is the gasoline price. Asphalt will be doing exactly the same.
Mm-hmm. When you say, like, direct participation oil price upside with no exposure to crude input cost volatility, it's not only that, is it? It's also the fact that you might actually get the benefit of inflation on your input costs too as well.
Because-
Like, your tipping fees are only gonna go higher, right? In my opinion.
Yeah. If you look historically, tipping fees have never gone down.
Right.
You know, if you look at the U.S. figures, they're about 5% per year-over-year, because as you know, landfills are not emptying. Nobody's building-
No.
Nobody's building new landfills. Or sorry, even if they are, like, it can take, you know, 20 years to permit a landfill. So that's where if the space is, you know, 20 million or 16.5 million tons a year going into landfill, I mean, the diversion of that is a phenomenal step to be able to have landfill operators not worry about, you know, all of that volume going in there. So that's-
Mm.
The real benefit. Landfill prices are just going up. They're not going down.
Shingles are certainly bulky and heavy, right? We actually did have a question about that, and it came from, "What is, you know, being heavy and bulky, what is the effect of transportation to your processing costs, and what happens to the other materials?
When we look at our economics, they're always delivered, they're always economics at the site gate. We have the buyers pick up at the site, and the shingles get delivered to our site. The only slight difference is in Calgary, we're picking up the shingles from the Calgary facilities. But in general, what we want to do is we want to locate close to a landfill and then have roofers deliver there. Either a roofer or, you know, if you look at, for example, the Calgary facility, so IKO, they have a transportation company that delivers to us, and Ecco Recycling have their own fleet of trucks, so they deliver to us too. The real benefit of that is making sure that.
What you really wanna do if you're located in the city is you don't want to have roofers or the intermediate guys that are picking up stuff have to drive very far. You want to be located in industrial areas close to the landfill. That's always our strategy when we look at a city and look at where we're going to locate the facility.
Yeah. Okay. I've heard roadmap to a billion many times in my life, Aidan. Okay? I guess the concern is financing and dilution. Talk to us how you get to a billion dollars without constant dilution in this name.
Look, I mean, I think if you think about I mean, we have a view that probably when we have, you know, three to four of these facilities built, that in theory, if we're kicking out, you know, CAD 10 million worth of EBITDA, we will not need to raise again. Halfway along this road to CAD 1 billion, we should be in a position whereby we actually don't need to raise. The other thing, Arlen, that's really important about it is as well is the debt support that we have for the facilities. In the U.S., you know, we announced with kind of a couple of, you know, in the middle of last year, a deal with EDC for the potential for the first plant and three follow-on plants.
We have a letter of intent for BDC for the next follow-on in Canada. Once Calgary has demonstrated, again, back to the focus in 2026, when we can bring people in through this plant and show them that this is a kind of, you know, CAD 5 million-CAD 10 million EBITDA plant, you know, depending on how many hours it's running, that's the real benefit because then that demonstrates that we can service the debt appropriately and we can easily leverage 50% of that build with debt, whether through kind of, you know, the municipalities or the banks.
If you look at the number on the left-hand side, given what we know about Calgary, we're very comfortable with CAD 25 million to build the facility. The way that I would describe this is, CAD 25 million, you know, three or four plants in, this should be self-funding. The amount of debt that we should be able to leverage into this should be at least 50% per plant.
Okay. Awesome. No small feat to pull $10 million in this market at a premium. Do you want to talk about, I know you've said, global investors. Clearly, you can't name their names, but can you shed some light a little bit? Any more light at all at least?
Well, no.
Okay.
No. I would say if you look at the structure of the deal, you can see that these people are long-term investors, sophisticated investors who understand that you can't have a $10 million debenture which just is single-sided towards the investor or single-sided towards the company. It's a very balanced deal. It's five years, it's 8%, you know, very competitive. It's got to convert at, you know, $0.20 or whatever, CAD 0.275, you know, Canadian. We have the ability to PIK the interest. If we want to have shares instead of interest payments, we can do that. You know, there's a prepay, which is very straightforward. There's a change of control at 110%.
You know that when people do those kind of deals, that they are long-term investors, and they're not doing it to, you know. And of course no warrant, which, you know, of course there's dilution. But actually, you know, significantly less than we could have faced if we'd used a different vehicle because there's no warrant in this one. Again, it speaks to the level of sophistication of the investors, which has been very good.
In my opinion, it's a very friendly deal for both sides.
Very balanced. It's very balanced.
Yeah, it is very balanced, and it shows that these people cutting checks kind of want to see you succeed.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, for us, you know, people talked about, well, are you going to build a bridge to kind of get to the, you know, get to the end of the year and, you know, Calgary at full pelt? I'm like, "Yes, but let's not build a bridge out of paper. Let's build a bridge out of absolute stone and concrete." $10 million-
Yeah.
To me is a stone and concrete, very, very, very solid bridge for this company.
Okay. Aidan, that's all the time we have, and there's like 15 questions I couldn't get to, so we'll make sure that those get forwarded off to you, and you can answer those investors individually. Okay?
Well, as always, thanks for the invite.
Thanks so much.
Great to see you guys, and yeah.
Yeah.
Let's keep on moving this thing.
Right on. Thanks, Aidan.
Thanks.
Coming up next, we have Robert Vallis, CEO of Tiger Gold, who rang the bell today on the TSX Venture Exchange today, or the TSX Market today. Tiger is a growth-oriented gold exploration and mine development company focused on advancing its flagship asset, the Quinchía Gold Project in Colombia. We will be right back. We're just waiting for Robert to sign on in. I apologize that Robert sounds like he's just gonna be coming here. He did ring the bell this morning, so I think he might have been running from office to office. We'll make sure that he gets his fair kick of the can here. Robert, how you doing?
Hi. Apologies, Arlen. Lost internet access here 10 minutes-
Ah.
Before, so had the building techs scrambling to get it going. Sorry.
All good. We saw you open the bell today. Congratulations. We know that you're a newly listed-
Thank you very much.
company on the Venture board. Congratulations. Full disclosure, it was a shell RTO process that I was a board member of. I'm a shareholder, obviously a financial interest in the company. I want to see this to be highly successful. We'll let you take it from there.
Okay. Arlen, would you like me to share the screen and-
Yes, please. That'd be great.
Okay.
I'll stay on until you're up and live.
Yeah. Right there. Okay. Yeah.
Okay, sharing now. Sorry. Can you see that on the screen?
Yep. Yeah, it's converting.
Great.
It is converting. Just one moment here. There we go. Awesome.
Okay, great.
Thanks, Robert. Take it away.
All right. I don't know what I have, like, five minutes, 10 minutes?
About 10 minutes.
Then, uh-
We'll do some Q&A.
Look, thank you for having me. Very much appreciated. Yes, we've been very busy. Tiger Gold just listed on the TSXV late December. We're now DTC eligible and operating in the U.S. and churning through some significant volumes, of course, since then. We're well on our way in terms of generating interest and awareness of Tiger right now. Cautionary statements, you look at them. Look, we are predicated on having a strong set of legs to the stool, if you will. Strong proven leadership led by myself, 30 years in industry, long tenures with companies like Barrick Gold, Yamana Gold. I'm a mine engineer. I've been all over the planet, M&A, acquisitions, finding, building and acquiring mines. That is also the team around me.
What we have here, of course, is something of significant scale, over 2 million ounces in the ground. We've got a PEA that we completed on that late last year describing a very valuable opportunity here. From that, of course, defines where we are against our peers, and we're quite undervalued right now in the market against our peers. Moving up that ladder as well quite aggressively through the drill bit and through the ongoing awareness campaign that we're going through with us newly on the scene. Of course, we've got a significant upside potential, which I'll take you through very briefly. Again, the team we have, very cross-functional, very capable, global international experience, as well as in-country experience on the ground, poised to certainly take this from where it is today all the way through a construction decision and into operation.
We are in Colombia, of course, elephant country, I call it, where we are in this Middle Cauca belt, just surrounded with high-scale large-scale discoveries, which is south of Medellín and to the east of Bogotá in a very sweet spot of Colombia. Colombia itself has come a long way in the 12 years I've been there in terms of improving its geopolitical stability. It's incredible. Now it rivals any South American country in terms of its attractiveness, not only from, like, its clear geologic endowments, which right now the gold district in Colombia is outstripping every other gold jurisdiction on the planet over the last couple of years for its rate of discovery. It's definitely an emerging tier one opportunity here. Access to skilled labor, to infrastructure and, you know, global logistics is something that just checks every box here.
In addition, it's a temperate climate, so we're not dealing with northern Canada or Brazilian type rainforest. This thing is operable all year round. More specifically, on the ground, you see the enablers that I speak to, with respect to, constructability and operability. We have them all. Most projects lack one or more. We have them all. You know, a paved highway running by us there, the red line, paved roads going into our site. The town of Quinchía next door to us of 50,000 people. Great base of operations, logistics, and otherwise. We've got grid power running by us. Just to the north, geologically, you know, we've got Aris Mining, the 250,000-ounce producer, just announced they're going to 500,000 ounces by the end of the year. Obviously, a world-class producer in gold discovery.
Right next door to them, you have Collective Mining with their Guayabales project. They themselves have done an incredible job with, you know, defining an extremely rich and rare discovery that clearly has them valued now at I think just under a CAD 2 billion market cap. It certainly speaks to the geologic endowment of this immediate jurisdiction and the fact that we share at least with Collective a lot of the similar geology on surface as we now embark to go deep. We're certainly excited about continuing the discovery process as well. Speaking to that, you know, right now we've got three discoveries that define the 2.5 million ounces. We have 2 million of which are now currently compliant NI 43-101 resources.
That is what we built the PEA around, the Miraflores here in the center deposit, which is about 500,000 ounces, and the Tesorito deposit, which is about 1.5 million ounces, comprises the 2 million ounces that describe the PEA. Important to note that Miraflores is now fully permitted for construction and operation as of mid-2024. That bodes very well for our project of sort of having it pre-vetted, if you will, for not having any environmentally sensitive or resource-restrictive aspects to it, which in turn allows us to fast track subsequent permitting as we continue to grow that. For now, we've got three drills on site operating, two at Tesorito, one at Dosquebradas.
Tesorito, we're infill drilling aggressively and extension drilling to grow the size of the pit, pull it to depth, push it out on strike. More specifically to infill drill it to get it from inferred up to measured and indicated so that we can take it to the next level of engineering. Next to that, of course, we've got the Ceibal discovery, where we're gonna be moving one of those two drills from Tesorito over to in very short order, over the next day or two, to begin drilling that Ceibal. This is the discovery that was made just after Tesorito by the previous owner, but they stopped drilling there. You know, they ran into financial hardships and had to stop.
What was discovered here is mineralization right at surface that's consistently mineralized down to 500 meters depth with about eight holes they drilled. Now, there's also copper showing up in that, which has us very intrigued and interested. To have that consistency and scale to the mineralization immediately next door to Tesorito Miraflores obviously indicates a major extension to this gold system. We're clearly interested in two things with Ceibal. One is shallow drilling on surface to define a new surface resource, which will most likely be quite similar to Tesorito in the scale of maybe 1.5 million ounces. In parallel with that, we're drilling deep or will be shortly down through Ceibal, down to at least 1,000-1,200 meters.
That's, you know, upwards of 3,000 ft or more depth to really probe and answer one of those important geologic questions of what's feeding all of this on surface. We know there's what's called feeder systems beneath. We're just not sure where it is and how big it is. That's clearly sort of the size of the prize for us here as well, knowing that Collective did discover the feeder system in their project, sort of speaks to where this can go in terms of valuation as well. Even more specifically for us, where we need to go to get our arms around the scope and scale of this project and its potential to be able to then move to defining something that's constructible and operable. We have to know that first, obviously. Very exciting opportunities all around here.
I can continue to talk a lot about it, but I think to keep it short, final thing to say is true scale here. All of these dots are surface sampling. What we discovered last summer was a massive footprint just south of the Ceibal discovery that has not been drilled yet, but you can see the scale of that gold on surface that's relative to every other discovery. It dwarfs it. So we know there's likely a significant extension to this gold system. We'll be excited to continue to push the drills down there in time. Of course, this speaks to the proximity effect that I'm talking about and a lack of knowledge to depth. Huge opportunities for further discovery. That PEA that we did, it really was done at $2,650 long-term consensus pricing in September.
Now, of course, something like $4,600 makes more sense. We're rebooting this with Ausenco, by the way, who did the PEA, world-class engineering firm, to have it with a new price deck, 'cause we'll be putting that out over the next few weeks. At least sensitizing the model to that, we're at about CAD 1.75 billion post-tax valuation and near a 50% rate of return on the project. That's really from what we have today in the ground with Tesorito, Miraflores. It can produce about 140,000 ounces over 10 years at competitive prices. It's a very strong base that really shows why we're re-rating against our peers now aggressively, just as we're out of the gate since December trading and moving up that ladder. It shows that we've got a lot of stored value.
Of course, not only the potential for us to double our resources with bringing in the Ceibal resource of about 1.5 million ounces, bringing in the Dosquebradas resource at about a half million to start is where that 2 million ounces upside comes from that we're focused on for 2026. That would double our ounces. That speaks nothing about the discovery potential I've already spoken to at depth for much higher valued material, and that we think would certainly propel us well past our peers in terms of valuation. The opportunity here for re-rating for valuation gains throughout this year is substantive for Tiger Gold . Any way you slice that value opportunity, we're certainly poised to be bringing significant value that we already have done for the shareholders we have, but continue to do that through the year.
Our positioning against our Latin American peer group is very strong. Obviously, by the doubling our resources, we expect to move well past that. Of course, our capital efficiency through the PEA is demonstrating a very competitive project in terms of capital spend and requirements. Ultimately, to wrap this up, we've done a lot to position Tiger Gold through acquiring the project, developing a PEA, you know, securing CAD 16.5 million listing, getting three drills now up and running. These clearly present us for positioning for 2026 to produce more catalysts through the year. The first will likely be a reboot of the Tesorito resource.
That'll likely be much higher grade, more ounces, likely more tons as well, but also the beginnings in the second half of the year of initial resources for Ceibal and Dosquebradas is what we're focused on. Obviously, those discovery potential at depth as well. I should say quickly that in a parallel with all the drill bit things and resource things, is there ESG or environmental and social aspects on the ground? We are running full steam ahead with that, making great progress on that, and that will continue to be a priority for us in parallel.
Really back to the investment highlights, it really speaks to now more clearly, you know, the team that's here anchored by myself, bringing a tremendous amount of discipline to the table and know-how about what's required to unlock this in a way that's predictable and reliable from a producer standpoint. The scale we have already at 2 million ounces, our opportunity to double that in fairly short order is huge and significant. It not only speaks to the economics we have today, but our ability to really ramp up those economics in the coming months and year and really continue to re-rate against our peers. With that, just a quick word about our capital structure, our financial prudence is equally as disciplined.
I think we've kept this very tight. We're fully funded for the year for our drilling of 20,000 meters and three drills. We've kept around 100 million shares outstanding, just over 22%. Management did some buying just over the last couple of weeks given the dip in price and opportunity for that. We're somewhere between 22% and 25%. The retail that we have, at least 30% or half of that is very tightly held with sort of anchor retail folks that have been in from day zero with us as a private and then going into the public and reinvesting there. Very tightly held, you could say, is about 50% of the company for sure. Institutional investors, we're opening the book on that now as well. We've got two notable ones in there.
I think Delbrook and AlphaNorth as well is probably our two biggest ones. That, and I should say the warrants that we have are held mostly by that tightly held retail I spoke of. Really a tightly held package we have here. Now with that, we've just had a non-paid analyst coverage start with SCP Resource Finance with Brandon Gaspar. We'll likely have some others coming in as well, fairly shortly. I think it's a great start to who we are and what we've been doing. We've obviously been very busy and aggressive about positioning and moving forward now that we're listed and bringing that value to shareholders. We're excited about what this year will bring.
Awesome. Well, Brandon Gaspar is an analyst who's smart as a whip. That I know that for sure.
Yeah, he is.
Robert, we do have a couple questions here. I'm curious, I know that you drilled a little bit outside the MRE pit in the resource. Have you learned anything about that deeper drilling that kinda gets you more excited about what's at depth?
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I was running at speed and sort of skipped over that. The first drill hole, we drill at depth beneath the pit of Tesorito to extend it, but also probe what's at depth and start the early stages of finding that feeder zone, right? The secondary zone. We did hit. I mean, our grades quadrupled. Copper started coming in at the end of that hole. So we know we're getting close. We just finished another hole. If I put my fingers up, this is one hole that went beneath the pit, right? We just finished doing another one that's beneath that, downwards of about 800 meters just finished.
We don't have all the assay results yet, but what our geologists are seeing has us pretty excited in the way that it is continuing to open up a whole new mineralization, a type likely into that feeder zone, but certainly indicating huge potential beneath Tesorito that we're just beginning to see. Ergo, it's why we're moving a drill over onto Ceibal to start drilling deep with it in parallel with Tesorito. We really start attacking what's at depth while we continue to build out and go after, you know, the easier ounces on surface and resource growth.
Perfect. Thanks so much for your time, Robert.
Oh, no. Thank you.
I know you're a little late, but thank you for that. That's the great presentation.
My apologies again.
Yeah, no. All good, buddy. We're humans, and life happens.
Absolutely.
Have a great day. We got some more questions. We'll make sure that we get forwarded off to you that you can answer to them individually. That'd be awesome.
Please do. We will.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks so much, Robert.
Thank you, everyone. Take care.
Welcome.