All right. Good morning, everybody. My name's Adrian O'Brien, Vice President, Business Development for Midnight Sun, and I want to welcome everyone to our webinar today. Of course, we put out a news release yesterday, June 29th, announcing results of 77 more holes from Dumbwa, and exciting times as this deposit begins to truly take shape. We start to see what the shape of this is, the strike extent. We're up to 6.7 km now of drilled strike, and we're putting this thing together into a really nice, cohesive picture and developing a really beautiful system as we go. The fellow that is leading that, I'm sure anybody that's been on one of these webinars before, you've heard from him, and of course, we talk about Kev a lot, is Kevin Bonel.
Kevin is a fantastic geo, has done a great job unlocking Dumbwa and starting to show the world just how big this brand-new system is, and super exciting time for us. As we continue now with our drilling, everybody understands this is a very aggressive plan, but we're starting to explain and show the strategy behind this. This really is about showing a true picture of Dumbwa, making sure that you see it for all that it is, you understand where the high-grade core is, and you understand where we're taking it. That's exactly what Kevin's going to explain to you today. This should be a very interesting presentation. Without any hesitation here, let's throw Kevin on and let him go through Dumbwa and latest results. Kevin, are you ready to share that presentation?
Sure I am, Adrian. Good evening, everybody. Well, good evening my time, not necessarily your time. Let's get going on this.
Excellent.
We're good. Yeah. Okay, this is an update of our previous webinar. As Adrian alluded to, we've had 77 holes reported in the last month. We've taken the problem with the labs head-on, and we're getting much more regular updates and assays now. I think it's important for everybody to understand a couple of things. This project's presentation really has a couple of goals: to demonstrate how we are following and growing the Dumbwa mineralized system ever northwards, and moving towards the conclusion at around about the 12-km mark of strike, that we are hitting in the main, depending what part of the system you're testing at any one time. Grades can be low if you're in the outer kind of halo of chalcopyrite mineralization or quite high if you're sort of sitting right in the middle of the high-strain zone.
Also we've started the process, which is really exciting, of 3D modeling the Dumbwa mineralized schists, and we're going to have a chance to have a look at the very early results from that modeling and where we're going in the future. We've also now fully planned and fleshed out our phase II exploration program. We're going to have a brief look at that as well to keep this thing going all the way up to the 18 km mark, where we feel there is some potential for significant mineralized material addition. Where are we? We're at 267 holes. We've got five ongoing at the moment, so you could call that 272 if you wanted to. We recently also drilled six geomech holes. We've started working on the geometallurgy in the southern block, if you remember from my previous webinar.
If you're new, don't worry, we're going to look at the southern block again. We've taken six metallurgy holes, which are representative of our low-grade zone, medium-grade zone, and higher-grade zone in the Dumbwa system. They're going to Intertek in Canada for full metallurgical assessment, comminution characteristics, QQ, and recovery, and everything else. They'll be dispatched very shortly for confirmation assay and metallurgical testing. We have five holes drilling at the moment. We've covered 56,034 m of drilling to the date that I wrote this presentation, which was a couple of days ago.
In the Sondash block in the far south, the met drilling is ongoing and completed to date. We've started on the east-west extension drilling. We're going to spend a little bit of time talking about the necessity to do some east-west drilling to add more mineralized material. The West River drill block, we have planned more metallurgical drilling there. We're treating it as a separate kind of resource area within the same Dumbwa system. We're going to do the same there as well, but we need to finish up in the south first. We are actively drilling now north of the famous copper clearing, which we've explained is a lobe of thick, higher-grade mineralization on top of a topographic high, which has bled copper into the soils downslope. The north block is really where the sort of strike extension drilling is focused.
The team continues to perform superbly. They're 97% up with the lithological logging and the mineralization logging structures. We now have well over 7,500 alpha/beta determinations on the gneissic banding. If you will recall from previous presentations, structure is key and everything to understanding the Dumbwa opportunity. In terms of assays, we now have reported 208 assays from the 254 holes we've sent. Obviously, the holes after 254 are still being logged and sampled. By and large, I think the statement that the laboratory has caught up assays is pretty defendable.
I always like to take a step back when I do these kind of presentations and remind everybody what we started with, because it sets the kind of benchmark to where we are now in terms of how much better we understand this system than we did when we started drilling back in August last year. We're only 10 months into this program, and I feel we've achieved a tremendous amount in what's really a very short exploration timeline. Dumbwa started life as a long linear high tenor copper anomaly. There was a little bit of 2007 FQM drilling that confirmed copper sulfide mineralization in bedrock. We conducted a VTEM survey that indicated a north-south striking fault disrupted conductive unit in the Solwezi Dome, which has transpired is actually the Dumbwa mineralized system.
I think using my experience from Lumwana, the early application of the Lumwana model reaps dividends for us. Indeed, it's now beyond dispute that the two deposits are virtually indistinguishable. Everything Lumwana has, we have, everything we have, they have. And it's a model that's holding together really well. It's beyond dispute. This presentation really kind of updates from the previous one and informs on where we are now after 10 months of really intensive exploration. In terms of the drilling, yep, we are up at about the 6.72 km mark. We're just over halfway. You can see the blue dots in the north where we're planning to keep following the soil anomaly northwards and keep targeting really the central high-grade zone, but also define right out to the edge, to the margins of the lower grade, kind of less strain-related mineralization.
The black dots is where we have actually drilled. In the south, the white circles with black dots are the metallurgical holes. Orange is the last bit of the copper clearing drilling that we're doing to fully delineate the mineralization in that area. Blue is planned, as I said, and the red stars are where the rigs are actually right now today. We have two rigs working on extension drilling right down in the south that's growing the mineralization out eastwards quite significantly. We have two rigs finishing up the copper clearing block, the Zeta block. We have one rig working its way systematically northwards and proving up the mineralization in that particular area. We expect that program, the phase one program, to finish around about late Q3 2026, say towards the middle of September.
We've only got about 12,500 m of drilling remaining in the program to get us all the way up to the 12.15 km mark. At the same time, we've initiated phase two, and we're going to come back to that a little bit later on. The southern block extension drilling, why are we doing it? These are the two holes that we're drilling at the moment. You can see we're trying to take two fence lines that we drilled right on the southern edge of the Dumbwa mineralized system, and literally just above the concession boundary. Why are we doing that? Well, these are not the best images. I have some trouble with my scanner, but hopefully it sends the message that we stopped drilling on this particular fence line, and we left open 28.85 m at 0.53% copper, a highly significant intercept.
We need to push that out to the east and close it off to the east. The result of that is we drilled DBW-266, and visually it was mineralized really well and will almost certainly add more mineralized material to the southern block. We've put in 271, and 271 is already showing positive signs at 13 m. This was as of this afternoon, with trace bornite in a metasomatized schist, kyanite metasomatized schist. That's the reason why we're drilling out eastwards and in certain parts of it, westwards as well. Although we did a very good job of closing this off to the west, we did leave a few gaps in the south, and we are filling those in with the full expectation of adding more material to the eventual MRE on the southern block. In terms of structures, nothing really much has changed.
Where we have predominantly east-west strikes, we don't tend to get very good mineralization. This is where the deformation zone, the shear zone, isn't as strong as it is in other parts of the system. We know very well, especially to those who've been listening to my webinars over the last few months, that strain equals copper mineralization in this particular deposit type. Where you see the red strike lines really intensely rotated around to the north compared to the general east-west strike of the gneissic banding in the Solwezi Dome is where you see the best mineralization. We are dealing very much with a mineralized corridor defined by strain in Dumbwa. This was really the interplay of a major deep-tapping crustal structure forming where the east part of it moved relative north or south, moved relative to the western part.
That generated the schists and the concomitant development of dilation, micro thrusting, and micro voids, which allowed the later copper mineralizing fluids to penetrate. That really is as good a model as Dumbwa as I can possibly present. We know strain equals copper. We know how to target now the high-strain core zone. If we wanted to just drill out and prove that, I think we would probably still have a very good resource. It wouldn't tell the whole story. It wouldn't tell the story about how in the core of this deformation shear zone, you get very good thicknesses in copper grades, proven now by assay, which then just steadily decline and decrease as you move east and west away from the central core.
However, the low-grade halo around our central high-grade mineralization is up to 1.2, 1.3 km wide, and it is necessary to test that full width east-west. That's really what guides our drilling program at the moment. In terms of PXRF anomaly and drilling update, as you can see, this is a very simple slide. I'm not going to dwell on it. Everybody's seen this before. We do try and confine our drilling to within the kind of higher grade soil anomaly area. From historical. What you're looking at on the screen is actually our work. We resampled everything, and it's really helping guide the drilling. There is a very intimate, very strong relationship between intensity of bedrock mineralization and what's going on in the soils over the top.
Some of our recent drilling has demonstrated, if you look in the north, it looks low grade. That's the 250 ppm shell. However, that's because there's a raft of barren granite separating the schists from the soil and the weathering profile. That really explains why the soil anomaly is not very good. However, as you'll see in a bit, our logging is showing actually quite good mineralization in this zone. The distribution of bornite and an actual observation mineralization. This is not an assay map. This is simply where we see bornite in the system. Bornite is very good at defining the higher grade core of the Dumbwa mineralized system, all the way up to the 6.72 km of strike that we've tested so far. You can see these gaps, some of this is because it's not been logged.
They're very recent holes. On the other hand, we know we have the southeast-northwest striking structural corridors, which have heavily negatively influenced the mineralization. That's really what's breaking up Dumbwa into a series of kind of mineralized blocks separated by lower grade, marginal sub-economic mineralized areas. In terms of sort of visual observations on copper, the team is very good at relating what they're seeing in the core to what comes out three or four weeks later in the assay. Again, you can see the kind of southern block, the central block, and we're starting to go back into good stuff in the northern block as well, albeit separated by these corridors. When we say that we've drilled persistent, consistent copper sulfide mineralization, now up to 6.7 km in strike, this is the long section that shows it.
This has always been one of my favorite images. This is a mix of observed mineralization and assay. It's just really to reinforce that this is a long, persistently mineralized system, and we're still only about halfway through it. We need to get phase one finished to the full 12 km, demonstrate that this is a long, linear, consistently mineralized system, although grades vary north to south and east to west, depending where you are in terms of strain. This really shows that, and this is what really gets me out of bed in the morning, is growing this thing ever northwards. You can see we're right up at DBW-250, DBW-227, and we're just going to carry that on all the way up to the full 12Ks.
Back to a concept that I introduced in the last webinar was the way that Dumbwa, due to the strain relationships of strain and copper mineralization, is kind of starting to subdivide itself into blocks. We need, and we're focused on treating these blocks on an individual manner. You've got your southern block, you've got your central block, and you've got your northern block, and what we're going to do now, actually, we call it center north block, which is the copper clearing. What we're going to do now is actually have a look at why we think we're defining these higher grade, intermediate grade, and lower grade areas. Blue being lower grade, red being higher grade. If you look at the southern block and you just pick out what we consider to be higher grade material. On its own, it's a decent size.
It's 990 m long. At its widest point, it's 226 m. At its narrowest point, it's 25. The depth goes to over 200 m. As we've explained before, we tend to stop at about 200 to 225 because our strategy is to demonstrate the strike extent of Dumbwa rather than what might be going on at depth. Taking it down to 200 to 225 is still a very decent depth. The shallowest intercept there is zero m. More often than not, the mineralization is right at surface or within 10, 15 m. This is where you see some great grades. Right there in the middle from seven m, very shallow, 26.85 m at 0.53, 17 m at 0.44, 11 m at 0.44. These are directly comparable with what you see in Lumwana, in Chimiwungo. Nine m at 0.58, 38 m at 0.63.
It kind of reinforces that the schists are variable both east, west and north, south. If you stay within your zone, if you stay in your lane and you drill within this red margin, these are the sort of things you're going to be drilling, which gives a great deal of credibility that this is a genuine kind of higher grade opportunity within the overall Dumbwa system. To step out a little bit and pop on the yellow zone. The yellow zone we generally log and mark as not quite up to what we're seeing in the red zone mineralization, but still quite good. 9 m at 0.58, 16 m at 0.31, 28.5 m at 0.21. I'm not going to talk about the northern block yet. We're focused on the southern block. It's just a scale thing on the map. 9 m at 0.41.
That's typically what you see in this slightly lower grade kind of thinner schist development, not quite as intense copper mineralization, and it tends to hug the red zone quite close. The next image really explains why we report so many low-grade intercepts, and this is key to understand because you've got to understand it in context. When I put the blue grade up, look at the number of intercepts we have in the blue grade. Some of them are not terrible. 10 m at 0.27, 15 m at 0.26, 9 m at 0.36. Again, as you move away from that central core, the schist's thin. We can see it in our sections.
We can see it in our very early 3D modeling, which I am going to show you in a bit, how everything kind of thins and becomes lower grade away from the key central high-strain, good proper intersected area that we see within the red zone. That's the southern block. We're going to revisit the southern block a little bit later because we have started doing some 3D modeling. We've recently hired a very good Kenyan resource geologist who's experienced in these systems, and he's putting together a great story for us right now, but very premature. To have a look at the, what we call the central block, this is where we've now jumped from the sort of 990 m to one kilom of yellow material, medium gray material to what we call the central block. Again, we see some really good stuff in here.
This is where we had the fantastic DBW99R, which was 93 m at 0.4% copper. Genuine blowout, very similar to what you see at Lumwana in the Equinox and Roan shoots, where they see all of a sudden higher grades and thicker intercepts. Just one of those extremely high-strain zones in the system. Generally speaking, pretty good. 40 m at 0.5% is there. 29 m at 0.5% is a very nice intercept. 74 m at 0.28%. 0.28% is getting below 0.3%. What really scores there is the sheer volume of mineralization that hole represents. To a certain extent, pretty consistent across the zone or within the zone, from 128 m, 45 m at 0.17%. Again, the grade is not fantastic, but the thickness and the metal content is really what makes that get through into our high-grade classification. It is about 1.1 km long.
Its widest part is 240 m, it is growing east. We have an extension drill program here as well. We know we left a few fence lines short. The narrowest part, kind of a neck down here in the south, is 87 m. Again, it is multiply stacked schists. We know exactly what it is. Then you add in your yellow zone as well, which grows things out east, west, north, and south. As you would expect, because you are moving away from the high-strain zone, things become a bit thinner and low grade, but still significantly mineralized. 11 m at 0.33%, 8 m at 0.44%, 17 m at 0.33%, 14 m at 0.23%. You are starting to see some consistency over kind of like the 10 to 12 diluted intercept range, and that really tells that story of the central block. Very nice.
Finally, the blue grade halo, the low-grade stuff that encapsulates the entire system. Not spectacular stuff. We never expected it to be from our modeling and from our drilling, but still it is good to know the precise margins of your system and be able to report, "Look, this is our grades as they move away from the main part of the Dumbwa mineralization." You have got eight m at 0.13%, 4.2 m at 0.19%. This is why when we publish a long list of drill holes and assay results and 77 new holes, because the blue low grade envelope around the higher grade mineralization is so big, I mean it is 1.3 km wide, and we drill this at 50 - 100 m spacing.
You are only ever going to get a few intercepts in your 100 - 400 m wide high grade area or an intermediate grade area, you are going to get a lot more in the massive kind of cloud of lower grade copper mineralization that surrounds the high-grade core. What is going on in the north? This is bang up to date. This is where we are actively drilling right now. You can see on the right where the three rigs are. What we are trying to do really is piece together the higher grade core and the lower grade east-west defined margins of the Dumbwa ore deposit. You can see right in the heart of the copper clearing, we got 24 m at 0.27%, 13 m at 0.51%, 20 m at 0.2%, 27 m at 0.4%. We are drilling in the center here at the moment.
You can see the orange holes are plant holes. For some strange reason, the laboratory jumped over a whole sequence of holes. We submit them in hole order and sample number and decided to report a couple of holes right up in the north and we've immediately detected very shallow mineralization from 36 cm down, 21.64 m at 0.43%, then a kind of a more yellow zone, 15 m at 0.43%. That in itself is not the whole story. I'm confident these zones are going to link up, they're going to join, and they're going to carry on to the north.
It does seem the northern part of the system has sort of compressed down to maybe 200 m wide, 250 m in the higher grade stuff, but still staying stubbornly at about 1 km to 1.1 km along the entire width of this thing, including the low grade shell. One of the controls we have on our drilling and our planning is qualitative mineralization logging. These are released to me at least twice a week by the five geologists we have dedicated to keeping up with the drill rigs. Five rigs, five geologists, no coincidence. We do form internally a qualitative term to the thickness. Now, for those who might question the difference between qualitative and quantitative, assays are quantitative. They're real numbers. They're controlled, they're QA/QC'd, whereas qualitative is more the geologist's opinion. Am I looking at a good intercept? Am I looking at potentially good copper mineralization?
That gets reported to me and allows me to create maps like that. There's two key takeaways from this qualitative mineralization logging. This is literally as far as we've drilled so far. Everything north of that is still in the planning stage. You can see where we have orange is where we think we've got intermediate to well-graded intercepts and copper content. We've got the reported hole here, which is red, yellow, and blue, which seems to be part of that system. Then purple is where we have the geologist is singing and dancing and saying this hole is absolutely great. The second key message from this is that we are starting to identify and pick up higher grade opportunities outside of the main Dumbwa mineralization. We're starting to see these.
We don't know how north-south limited they are, we are starting to see, with some extension drilling and some expansion drilling, some reasonably to well-graded, visually satellite bodies, which appear to have formed in sympathetic kind of north-south orientated shears and schist development to the main Dumbwa body. This is an exciting avenue that we're exploring right now. One thing which you'll see when I present you phase two is that we did an orientation high-resolution ground magnetic survey, which we will be reporting in the next week to 10 days. We're just waiting for the final interpretation to come through. Preliminary results from that are really interesting. They confirm our structural interpretation, but they also seem to help us define these kind of eastern or these east offset opportunities that definitely are worthy of further exploration.
In terms of phase II, which we have started on, even though we're drilling, we have the capacity to do this. We are going now to grow our own PXRF grid, which is the copper contours or copper in soil contours that I presented earlier. We are going to do a 100 m by 50 m PXRF grid, which will give us 4,606 samples plus QA/QC, as we do as routine. That will really cover the remaining strike length of Dumbwa. This is a key part of the phase II program and will help us focus in where we need to be drilling this on terms of fences on this last remaining six, seven km of what we think represents the full strike length of Dumbwa. We need to complete the phase I drilling, of course.
That's ongoing, and we do intend to finish that by middle of September at the latest. Then we will start on phase II infill. You can see how up here in the north, these lines are getting quite wide spaced north-south. This was really to push the program, accelerate the program into demonstrating the mineralization is continuous over the first 12 km. Phase II will see us come back once we've identified the mineralized better graded zone in the center and focus on these infilling these lines. The completed ground magnetic survey we did was a 2.5 by 2.7-kilom grid. As I stated earlier, that interpretation is ongoing, but I know Adrian is working on it, and we'll have that to you in the next week to 10 days. It worked very well, I will tell you that.
I don't think I'm breaking any rules by saying that. The preliminary results are very interesting indeed. We are going to continue the ground magnetic survey down to the southern concession boundary. Even though we've already drilled there, we feel there is opportunity in the east for additional discovery, and we're going to complete it all the way up to the north, pretty much where you see the soils are now and this slight gap. We've also planned and costed to continue the original IP survey, the 500-m space dipole-dipole IP lines. We feel at the end of this process, which will only take us about six weeks to conclude, that with soil results, with ground magnetics at a high resolution, and with IP, we can really nail down the final part of Dumbwa and finish this story. This is the last chapter, really.
After that, it's just detail and infill. That's kind of exciting. To move on to our very early 3D modeling. This is the southern block. I am just going to flick up a few slides to show you what we're looking at. We're looking at the southern block down here, if you can see my mouse, right from the concession boundary up to about a kilom or so in length. This is what it looks like. These are the mineralized schists. You probably would have an idea of this already from seeing our sections, our east-west sections, and this is basically what Dumbwa looks like in the south. The mineralization, it starts right at surface, and you have these multiple stacked lenses. The lenses are not representative of grade. We've just separated out the schists as individual units.
This is basically what it looks like when you look west. If you go back to my long section where I showed the mineralization continues over 6.7 km, this is the first kilom of it, and that's exactly what it looks like in cross-section. Nice thick schist development. We know we've got decent grades down here, but please understand that the colors are representative of different schist units rather than grade. Also it shows that the mineralization goes down to a depth of around about 200 m. To have a look at it, looking from south to north, looking at the You can see Dumbwa goes slightly northeast. This is what we managed to get done in time. This was literally finished at 3:00 P.M. this afternoon, Lusaka time, and I quickly took some screen grabs and pushed this together. This is an evolving model.
This is just really to give everybody an intuitive understanding of what we're drilling, why we're drilling it, where we're going, and why we continue to be so excited about Dumbwa. This is, like I said, looking north. There's a big plain of interpreted mineralization here, going out almost another 600, 700 m west. It was reasonably That was hole DBW 19 and 22, and the grade there actually was okay. We have no drill evidence that these two actually join up as one single unit. We need to pop a couple of holes in here, and that will form part of the upcoming extension drilling. That's it. That's pretty much the end of it. I guess we're open for questions. Adrian?
Excellent. Thanks, Kev. Maybe I'll get you to go back to, I think, the bigger plan map that shows the drilling. I think that the grade shells is going to be a good spot to start for some of this information. The first question I'm going to read out here is coming from Andrew Neal, asking about the focus on north-south strike length. Are you able to get those shells on the plan map there, Kev?
Yeah, sure.
Quite a few slides back.
That one. Yeah.
Any of these ones work.
Any of these ones? Yeah.
Andrew's question is about focusing on the north-south strike length, but wondering if he heard you correctly in saying that the east-west mineralization dimensions are in the order of 1.2 to 1.5 km.
Low grade. If you take the low-grade material. The high-grade material typically is between 200 and 600 m wide. Although you get necks, like here, you can see it tapering out into one of these.
It pinches and swells, right?
Yeah, it pinches and swells.
Exactly.
Yeah. Typically, what we're picking up in our drilling in the low-grade shell is around about between 1 and 1.5 km wide, and that seems to be fairly consistent along the entire strike. You can see it in this image here. That really defines the mineralized corridor. As you go more into the corridor, you get higher grade material. If you incorporate the sort of 0.1s of the world, you're out at 1.5, 1.6 km. If you only want to focus on 0.3, 0.4 and better, then you're in the 200-600-m-wide core of the Dumbwa system.
Excellent. I'm going to move on to a question here regarding testing holes. We talk a lot about our drill strategy, I think this is really leaning into that, you can answer that pretty directly. Asking if we'd be able to drill holes right up at the top of the exploration license. In other words, jumping right to the top of the 20-kilom system and punching a few holes to test the outer limits. That goes against our model and our plan. Maybe you can explain that, Kev, from your standpoint about what we're trying to do here.
Yeah. From day one, I'm sorry, I've forgotten how to speak English. We've taken a systematic approach to our drilling.
Yeah.
We agreed as a strategy and as a team that we would start in the south and work our way north.
Yes.
The problem is the data we have in the north is just soils. That's all we got, just soils. Soils are a dynamic, active environment. They move around. They flow downhill. They get shifted around. You get dispersion halos. When I drill, I like to be sure that I'm going to get an intercept, this is why we have so few holes with no intercept. We have a lot of holes with low intercepts in the Blue Zone because we're defining the edge of the Blue Zone. The more north you go, the lower is my geological uncertainty about where to put a rig. The plan has always been designed to be agile and adaptable, before we get to that full kind of 12, 15, 18 km, I need to know where I want to drill.
As you can see, what works very well for us at the moment is we pick up our higher grade core mineralization, we extrapolate that 100 m north, 200 m north to the next fence. We get a good idea about what we're going to see east and west of that, even though we don't have high-res ground mag, we don't have IP, or it's between IP lines and things like that. I think this is why we're pushing the phase II program now rather than waiting to finish the drilling, is because I want a better drill program in the north. I don't want any wasted holes.
With the IP, with the ground mag, with the soil geochemistry that we're adding on, by the time we get to these areas of uncertainty, we'll have much, much deeper data layers, we'll be much better able to focus our drilling.
Perfect answer. In short, yeah, it's about getting all of the data ahead of time so that we can most accurately do the same job we did in the south and doing it the same way.
Yeah.
Which is.
That's it.
Really, it's proving to be so effective. Why mess with a good plan, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
One quick thing before we go to the next question. If anybody does have a question, please type it into the Q&A. It comes up in a channel here that I can read the questions out and address them. If you do have something, by all means, hop in there and type it in. We have a question jumping a little bit over to the Kazhiba stuff, which we really haven't talked about on here, and we can't dive into. Just a reminder to everybody, many active negotiations are under NDA, we can't address anything to do with it. Moving on to just a question quickly about looking for more deposits at Kazhiba. Kevin, I don't know if you even want to address much about it or if there's much you can say, but-
No
you know.
I think we did a pretty good job at Kazhiba.
Yeah.
We tested our outlier geochem anomalies. I think in a couple of instances, even though we RC drilled them down to bedrock, we didn't explain the anomaly, so there's still some work to be done there. Because when you have copper in partial ionic leach, there's usually copper in the bedrock-
Yes
Malachite in the overlying soils, we didn't really fully explain those. I think if we get the opportunity, we need to go back and work on the sulfide target.
Yes
That we drilled south of the Kazhiba deposit. I'd love to go back and do those in the future. I think that's going to end up being a moot point. We did prove up a resource and good grade at Kazhiba, I think whoever's lucky enough to take it will have some exploration opportunity there. I think with our focus on Dumbwa being what it is, I can't see us going back and doing much more work.
Excellent. Well answered, Kev. Moving to a question about the blue zone, so getting into the grade shells you have here. The question is whether that blue zone is equivalent to anything that's being mined at Lumwana. Tough for us to say, obviously from your experience.
Yeah
Knowing what they're doing.
That's a really hard question to answer.
It is.
I think Dumbwa is starting to take shape. It's going to be a series of pits rather than one large, big one. Really, if you can take in your mining model the lower grade material and blend it with the higher grade material and maybe give the mill a consistent feed, some of this becomes payable ground.
Yes.
For sure. Certainly most mines operate on blending ore to provide mills with a consistent feed. That's all to be modeled. Again, your ultimate mine design and pit design is going to depend on your cutoff.
Yes.
If you are going to cut off at 0.3, you are going to have to stay in the yellow and red zones. If you are happy at 0.2 or you are going to be like Lumwana, which cuts its reserve off at 0.16, you are going to see big tonnes but low grades. Yeah, that is a really far future-looking question.
Yeah.
From my experience in the mining industry, I think that is how it will eventually be addressed.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you perfectly answered the secondary part of that question, which is what are the grades looking like in something that is being mined? Lumwana is the one to look at. They have a cutoff of 0.13 in their resource and maybe 0.16 in reserve. Is that about right, Kev?
That is correct, yeah. 0.1 geology, about 0.12, 0.13 for resource, and 0.16 for reserve.
Yes.
Almost certainly we're going to MRE this to the same standard.
Yeah. Totally fair. Another question that came in here, that I think you've kind of answered it. They were just asking about Lumwana mining all the low-grade material. Maybe what we can just really, really briefly talk about is the Super Pit plan that Barrick has put in place that they're underway on now. It's a CAD 2 billion expansion plan. They put in 23 km of conveyor belts, and essentially they're taking everything in one giant pit. Is that how you would describe it, Kev?
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah.
I don't think they're planning to bring Kamisengo online anytime soon, certainly Kamaranda, Kababisa is part of that plan. The Super Pit wasn't something I was directly involved in. I was more on proving up Lubwe and Kamisengo, Kababisa, so I can't speak to that with any authority. Sorry.
Totally. Kev, there's a question here about the direct analog to Lumwana.
Yeah.
Can we talk about the analog to Lumwana, and maybe in a brief snapshot, you can describe where that analog comes from in your work there and what it is that makes these a direct analog.
Okay. Well, we did put a comparative table out in a press release, didn't we?
Yes.
Okay. All right, very quickly, very briefly, the host rock of Lumwana is grey pelitic gneiss. The host rock of Dumbwa is grey pelitic gneiss. The mineralized zones in Lumwana is two mica biotite muscovite schists. The majority of our mineralization in Dumbwa is two mica biotite muscovite schists. S1 fabric is the main mineralized unit at Lumwana. The S1 fabric is the main mineralized unit at Dumbwa. Where we depart really from Lumwana is the relationship to garnets. At Lumwana, when garnets grow, there's no copper mineralization, whereas to us, it doesn't seem to make much difference. That really is the main departure. Otherwise, I cannot draw a distinction between the geology of Dumbwa and the geology of Lumwana.
In fact, there was an SEG meeting in Kitwe about a month ago where, I didn't attend, but I was told somebody gave a presentation that they are planning to write a paper defining a new copper deposit type called orogenic copper, and Lumwana and Dumbwa are intended to be the type examples of the new deposit classification. I don't know if that answers the question. Same rocks, same age, same strain-related mineralization, similar grades, probably similar tonnages. Yeah, they're like for like. They're twins.
They're a direct analog. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Direct analog. No doubt about it.
I think that pretty much describes why we refer to them as an analog. Looking at the kill zone, we had a question here about.
The expectations around the kill zone and what you see up there. Do you want to describe maybe that schist that's coming right near surface and how you kind of understand the kill zone?
Yeah, sure. Actually, we're on the right screen. Is my mouse visible?
It is, yeah.
Can you see my mouse? Yeah. Okay. This area of red zone mineralization is the copper kill zone. It sits off on the eastern margin of it, the slopes are to the southwest, following down into a valley. Really you've got an at-surfaced, fairly well-graded schist. I think we published those results. I can't remember them off the top of my head. We've got 273 under holes. It was very, very good grades and it defines this kind of red area here, which was two or three holes. I've explained already the scale of our drilling compared to the scale of the ore deposit. It's just bled over the last 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years, high-grade copper mineralization into the soils. To the extent that the copper content in the soil gets up to around 5,000, 6,000 ppm.
Although it's not a barren area, there's grass and shrubs there, trees can't grow in it. That defines the copper kill zone. We've now demonstrated the copper kill zone to be near-surface, high-grade, quite thick, schist-mineralized with copper, which has bled downslope and because of the high copper tenor, it won't allow significant plants.
In short, it's exactly what we thought it was. We bounced it up.
It's exactly what we modeled it as.
Yeah. It's always good.
Always a good result.
There's two quick questions here that I'll answer. We have one about our cash balance right now. We're still sitting on CAD 25 million cash, so we're in great shape. I always talk about this in presentations. Our drill costs here are only about CAD 160 a m, CAD 165 a m. Very inexpensive. It goes a long way. Even at the conclusion of this phase one program, we'll be in a great spot with lots of cash left in the bank. We have another question here regarding the MRE that we plan to undertake this fall, whether it's going to be on the southern zone. I think just to clarify, the goal is that this MRE will be focused on the 11 and a half km we're drilling right now.
If you take what we're accomplishing in the phase one program, that's where we'll focus on an MRE, which is why we want to push all the way to that conclusion before we undertake that process. That is the plan. One more question here regarding great results and positive outlook. I want to read this one exactly. "With all these great results and a very positive outlook, why is the stock taking such a hit?" Look, the reality is it's impossible for us to understand the sentiment directly from shareholders, why they might hit the sell button or make that decision. Certainly what we're doing here is exactly what we set out to and we're executing on that. We're starting to develop a really good picture for a brand new, very large-scale copper system that Kevin has just shown you.
We're really pleased with the results. The system is very big. We're talking large scale. We're looking at something that's hanging together. Our model works. We're delivering results. Certainly I think the delays in delivery of results hurt us, no question. The grade of Dumbwa is a bulk tonnage target. That's what we always set out to. That's certainly what we're seeing. If there was expectations or hope for higher grades, that's certainly understandable based on some of the assets around us. Kansanshi is sitting at a higher grade. At the end of the day, we're out to prove what Dumbwa really is. We're doing that. We're doing it quickly. I think this is a case of we need to do the work, give the market the results, show what Dumbwa is, and that will be reflected in our share price.
Liquidity events combined with results are nothing new in our sector. Countless examples of situations where that's been the case. I think that's probably just market dynamics and let's not overlook the macro right now. Certainly, you can combine that with a really tough macro look right now that's sort of unfolding and seems to ebb and flow, and that certainly seems to hurt us, and not just us, every copper junior that I can pretty well see or a lot of them, and bigger companies as well. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight from our side. Look, our goal is very simple. It's for Kevin to be out there with the team doing exactly what we're doing, drilling Dumbwa, getting it there as quickly as we can. We've drilled 56,000 m so far.
The amount of drilling we're doing month to month is extraordinary. Five drill rigs underway, running nonstop. This is an incredible drill off. Not to overlook the fact that this is an exploration program. Yes, we're defining Dumbwa. We're doing that very quickly. We're getting to the east-west extents. We're getting to the north-south extents. Look, we've still only drilled, would you say a third of this, Kevin? Is that accurate?
A third of the entire strike lens.
Yes.
Half of.
a third of the first phase
half of the main kind of soil anomaly. We are starting to understand that there are two controls on the soil anomaly. The first one is just genuinely low-grade bedrock mineralization, and the second one is sometimes there's rafts of barren granite, 10-20 m thick over the top of the mineralized schists, which suppresses the geochemical signal. Above the 12 km, again, it's a question waiting to be answered.
So-
That's why we're doing ground mag IP and more soil geochemistry, so we can properly plan our drill campaign up there. If you take the full 18 km, we're a third of the way there. If you take the full 12 km of significant soil anomalies, then we're halfway there. There's two answers to that question.
I think where I was going with it is more to make the point that The exploration side of this still allows for lots of surprises. We're already seeing that. There's areas that are showing up that maybe we overlooked to begin with or that are turning out to be better than we expected, and that can happen. We have a long way to go. The story is not written on Dumbwa, but what we've shown is that it is a very large system. We're starting to understand it. There's higher grade areas and lower grade areas, and we're going to let the drill results speak. It's why we're going at this so aggressively and we're going to get there. Moving on to the next one.
We have a question about Lumwana, this might be a little past your time at Lumwana, Kev, I don't know how much you want to answer, but I can't answer this directly. They're asking Lumwana at 0.52% copper, with a lot of low-grade material, how do they get to the 1.6 billion or 1.62 billion tons at that higher grade when they do have a lot of lower grade material there too?
Oh, no, I haven't been there.
Too tough
for over two years.
Yeah, too tough.
They've done a lot of drilling since I was there. A lot of drilling.
Yeah. I think that's the fair way to look at it. Talking about Lumwana and Dumbwa being closer to surface, just quickly, can you address the amount of overburden you typically see at Dumbwa and what you saw when you were drilling Lumwana?
Okay. Lumwana has greater dips. It does daylight, and that's where the mining started. Lumwana is right at the surface. It takes a 15-degree dip east. Obviously, the further east you go to mine out Lumwana, Kamisengo, the more barren material on the top of it that you're going to have to remove. Far from what we've seen with what we've drilled is that the majority, not all of it, but the majority of our mineralization is right at the surface.
Yeah.
This is why we say we're shallower than Lumwana. It depends on what part of Lumwana you're in. When they first started mining, they started mining at surface, and they've just steadily followed the deposit down dip. We know we've got easterly dips that steepen as you go east. The system also weakens because you're moving away from the central core. We know we've got slight westerly dips to the west of the corridor. Again, you start looking at digging through a lot of barren material to get at the mineralized stuff. I think the grade maps do a really good job of, at a very early stage, of showing you where the pits will be. Certainly, I would say, just a general guess, probably more than 50% of Dumbwa that we've drilled to date is sitting right at the surface.
That's excellent.
Right at the surface.
I think there's a second part to this question which I think is helpful, and I'm going to steer it a little bit simply because I think it's an important thing to talk about. You mentioned early in the presentation that we've undertaken metallurgical drilling so that we can do proper-
Yes
full mat testing.
Yeah.
They're asking about the cost difference at Dumbwa and Lumwana. I think that's an interesting thing when you look at deleterious. Maybe, just talking a little bit about what the effect of things like talc, uranium.
Yeah
pyrite or arsenic can have.
Dumbwa's one of the things that makes it a bit odd is we don't have any credits. I'll talk about the credits first. We don't have any. We don't have any silver. We don't have any cobalt. We don't have any gold. On the other hand, we don't have any deleterious metals. We've got no bismuth, we've got no uranium. We do assay for it. We've got no bismuth, we've got no uranium, we've got no cadmium, we've got no mercury, we've got no arsenic. The only thing we have is copper. In terms of talc, we have very, very little talc, certainly less than I saw during my time at Lumwana. We have a tiny amount occasionally in very strongly weathered zones associated with structures, but not enough that I think it's going to have a negative effect on the processing. Yeah.
We don't have any good news on bonus byproducts. We have only good news on deleterious products. We don't have a lot of talc, and talc's a problem, it's all in our favor.
Yeah. To my understanding, that makes a difference at a mine like Lumwana. That can be CAD 0.50 to CAD 0.60 of production cost per pound, when you think about that. It's very significant, and it adds up. Having a system that isn't showing those is a huge benefit and certainly a nice thing to show. I think to Kevin's point about undertaking that drilling now and undertaking that testing, this is all part of a bigger picture plan for us to show Dumbwa at full fleshed-out form very, very quickly in the continuum. Part of that is showing that we've undertaken those steps. We've undertaken the met testing early in the process so that we can knock that out and show right off the bat that that's the case. I think that's a really positive thing to demonstrate.
We're getting to the end of the questions here. Give everybody just a quick minute longer to submit any if you have them, otherwise, we'll wrap this up pretty quickly. I think this is really an incredibly good view now. Sitting on this slide in particular, we've talked a lot about this. We've shown some really early graphics about what Dumbwa is, what Dumbwa looks like, what Dumbwa's turning out to be. My presentations always feature our first drill hole, 007. Showing where that drill hole was, or not our first drill hole, but our first big intercept. In that very early iteration, which shows very clearly those lenses, those stacked lenses that are flat-lying, we talk about Dumbwa being a flat-lying structure that's going to run for a great distance, we think most of the strike length of our anomaly.
This graphic is so perfect in demonstrating that and showing it exactly the way that we envisioned this from day one and the way that Kevin laid this out. You're seeing those stacked horizons, you're seeing those stacked beds as the way that we've described them in clear form. It's really nice for the very first time to be able to see that in three-dimensional format. We look forward to getting more of this three-dimensional model done. This is only the absolute tip of the iceberg as far as that goes and putting it together. It's certainly getting there, and I think it really goes a long way to demonstrating what it is that you're developing here, Kevin, and really nailing it.
I agree. The 3D model like this is going to be a phenomenal visual aid to help people understand Dumbwa. The next two, three, four weeks, we're going to focus on this, and we're going to grow it along the full drill length. It'll be something that'll be great to release to everybody that they can manipulate and model themselves and really see Dumbwa for what it is. I'm excited about this.
Yeah, you and me both, Kev. I think I can speak for our whole team when I say we're really pumped. This is exciting. We set out with a vision. We're executing and we're getting it to fruition here very quickly. There's a couple of last things that I'm going to hit just in the questions. We had one come in-
Sure. No worries
Just at the end here. We had one come in around timeline, and I think it's a perfect way to wrap up. I'm just going to lay out a few of the catalysts for everyone. We're continuing on the drilling right now. Drilling, let's call it 6 to 10,000 m a month. We're hammering this thing and getting it to the finish line. As Kevin mentioned, we're looking to finish up the phase one drilling by the middle of September.
We're looking at the beginning of that phase two program earlier than we had originally planned, certainly setting out to get all of our geophysics and geochem finished on that northern part of the deposit, or northern part of the target, as quickly as we can so that Kevin's armed with every ounce of information he needs in order to call those drill targets, lay out our plan, lay out our fence lines and our drill plan effectively so that we can execute and drill off that northern half of Dumbwa the same way we have in the south. That's just going to keep things moving at a very quick basis. In terms of timeline, we're looking at finishing the first phase of drilling by middle of September.
Starting immediately on that second phase of drilling or close to it, starting one into the next. Getting started on all of our geophysics earlier and looking to start that first maiden MRE right after the phase one drilling is completed. It gives us a lot to look forward to and a lot to execute on. The final one was just a really kind comment here from Thomas, regarding putting on these webinars and really appreciate that. I just want to say that it's great that everyone's signing in and taking the time to listen to these and get a better understanding of what we're doing. I think it speaks to the whole reason we launched these webinars and why we're doing them. Gives you a chance to hear from Kevin directly.
Gives us a chance to explain things in greater detail than we otherwise would be able to in a news release and really show you the nuance behind every one of these news releases and what we're doing and the attack plan at Dumbwa and how it's all unfolding. With that, I want to thank everyone for joining us today, we'll bring this webinar to an end and we look forward to the next one and having you all on here again to see what we've done. Thanks a lot.