Ngex Minerals Stock

I guess, let's get started. And then if anyone else comes in, they can come and join us. Thanks so much for taking the time to come today and thanks to everybody on the webcast as well. We're really excited to host our second Investor Day this year. The Investor Day will take a similar outline, I guess, to what -- how we presented last year, but we're really going to focus on 3 main topics.

The first is providing a Lunahuasi update. Bob here, our VP Exploration, will be doing that. And as part of that, trying to provide a little bit more information than what we've been able to provide in the past and in some of our news releases and give an update on what Phase 4 was able to show us and what we learned from Phase 4 and then after that also present our expectations for Phase 5.

After that, Woj will come up here and give a little refresher on Los Helados. Obviously, there's been some changes there at Los Helados from a strategic standpoint. And we want to just outline some of those and update or refresh everybody on where Los Helados sits in our portfolio and why it's an important asset. And then we'll finish off by talking about our most recent spin-out, which we're happy to announce the name of which will be Valiente Resources.

So just a couple of reminders. Obviously, this isn't a corporate presentation. We'll be providing more geological and technical detail than typically we would in our usual investor deck and in some of the news releases that we put out. The presentation is intended to put recent results into a broader context. And we'll also provide some form of overview on corporate strategy.

A lot -- we put a lot of work into interpreting those -- the results that we do announce and publish and our geological model is getting more sophisticated as we progress. And hopefully, through this presentation, you're able to see that.

As I mentioned, the presentation will give an update on Lunahuasi, a refresher on Los Helados and also talk about our recently announced spin-out, sorry, Valiente Resources. The presentation should take about 2 hours.

We ask that everybody hold their questions to the end of the presentation. And then after that, we'll open the floor up for Q&A. If anybody on the webcast, you can provide your questions through the Q&A tab at the bottom of the page and during that Q&A session.

I'll make sure to ask those questions for you. Also, just quickly, the presentation is on our website. So for anybody looking to follow those slides, it's on our home page.

So thank you so much once again for coming, and I'll pass it over to Woj.

Great to see everybody here, and thanks to those who are here in person, and welcome to everybody that's listening to us on the webcast. So my name is Wojtek Wodzicki, I'm the CEO of NGEx. I think most of you know me. And then you'll be hearing from Bob Carmichael, our VP Exploration, after me. So I guess when we think about putting together these presentations, especially an annual one like this one is becoming, we can sort of think about what we were able to achieve last year.

And then we put quite a bit of thought this year into what are the key questions that investors are asking us, what are the key things that people want to know about the company and how do we frame and I guess, better explain to you how we think about the company, how we think about strategy and how we're thinking about value going forward.

And I think that's particularly important for a company like NGEx, which has done really well. I mean we've been one of the best performing exploration companies year after year for the last 5 years.

I mean, we've obviously gotten to a pretty significant, if not unprecedented market cap for an exploration company, and that's all great. But it's always what are you going to do next? How are you going to continue to add value? So really, this presentation is about giving you some of that context and hopefully, to give you an insight into how we think about taking NGEx to the next level and continuing to add value because I think one thing that we hope that you take away from this is that there is a lot of upside still left in this story.

And we think there are still aspects of it as strange as it may sound that are underappreciated by the market. And then I think we all want to remember that for the first time in NGEx's history, this is all happening against the backdrop of really positive outlook for metal prices.

I mean we are at basically record copper, gold and not too far off record silver prices. Those are all 3 metals that our projects are going to produce. And of course, we don't control that and we don't count on it, but it's nice to be doing what we do with a tailwind behind us instead of a headwind as we have been for a lot of the history of the company.

So I thought I would start with just sort of a review of what we said last year, what we wanted to accomplish in the year and then go through what we were actually able to do and then just kind of go through plans for the future and sort of recent developments that we think are important. So this is from our deck last year.

I think the second line in there, stay focused, stay hungry was a real theme for us this year. We are now, at least by market cap, a pretty good-sized company. But I think what's been remarkable is that we've been able to do all of that. And our team has stayed very, very, very similar size.

Traditionally, NGEx was 35 to 40 people, most of whom are in South America. Our head office has never been more than 7 or 8 people. We're a little bit above that overall staff number now, but not a whole lot. So we're still a hungry entrepreneurial company, and everybody still thinks that way. We like to think like the underdogs that we were when we started out on this.

We have an incredible asset at Lunahuasi that is really, really high grade. So we wanted to keep that focus on grade and finding more high grade. We saw a huge opportunity to grow the deposit and to increase and expand it. I think we were very successfully able to do that. We talked about the importance of building a pathway to production.

And so that doesn't mean necessarily that we're getting ready to do engineering studies yet, like we still have a lot of growth at Lunahuasi, and we want to make sure that we've fully defined things before we -- but there are certain things that we can do to start shortening time lines. And a key aspect of that has been the permitting and imminent start of underground development to build an exploration at Lunahuasi, and I'll talk about that.

And it's just one of the little bits that we're doing kind of in the background along the way to try to shorten those time lines. And finally, we do want to stay entrepreneurial. We do want to keep thinking about the business side of exploration. This isn't just about doing technically good work, which we do, do.

I really feel that right now, we have one of the best exploration teams in the business. We're doing some really, really innovative stuff with how we manage and interpret our data, and Bob is going to show you some of that. But we are -- I think we are cutting edge in a lot of the stuff that we do. But there's a business overlay on that, and that has been a really, really important part of our success.

So we're not just running a technical business. We're running a business, business here. And I think that's been a key part of NGEx's success over the years. So it was a busy year as it always is at NGEx and really all of the lending companies, like there's no sense of great, we've kind of reached the top of the mountain, let's sit down and put our feet up. Like we're always going to keep doing stuff.

The year kicked off shortly after this Investor Day with a very successful private placement that raised $175 million. That would have been one of the largest private placements certainly for an exploration company in 2025. Shortly after that, we closed the spinout of LunR Royalties that was not just kind of clipping a royalty and putting it into a different vehicle to get the royalty company premium.

It was really about creating a new Lundin Group royalty vehicle, and that company was really strong right out of the gate, and it's continued to grow. NGEx is a shareholder. Unlike our other spin-outs, unlike the Valiente spinout, we did retain a stake in LunR because we thought it was -- and I'll go through why we thought that was such a good fit for retaining the stake in it.

So we hold 13.4 million shares. The company has traded really, really well. We are very bullish on the future of LunR. So that's a long-term investment for us and not something that we're planning on flipping.

I talked about the exploration adit. So we received the permits for that earlier this year, and we're planning on breaking ground and starting that underground development before the end of this year. A big development earlier this year in March was Lundin Mining coming in as a partner at Los Helados, and we'll talk a little bit more about the implications of that.

But Lundin Mining increased their interest in Caserones, which is the operating mine just to the north of Los Helados. And as part of that transaction, they also acquired the 31% stake in Los Helados that was held by JX Nippon, which is the other partner at Caserones. So Lundin Mining increased their stake in Caserones and then became our minority partner at Los Helados.

And we think that has -- and they've been quite open about their kind of thinking in doing that and acquiring that interest. We think it's super positive for the Los Helados project. We think it opens up a pathway to turn that into a really, really positive asset for NGEx, and I'll talk about that a little bit later.

I mean as we've gotten bigger, we definitely have more eyes on us. So we've upgraded for sure, our sustainability reporting. And our second annual sustainability report, I think, was a huge step up for us. And that has a real practical purpose as well as just being a good thing to do.

As we have gotten more and more institutional investors, we have more and more people that focus on that and in fact, need to see your sustainability strategy as part of their investment decision-making process. So this isn't just sort of something that we put in the -- it's kind of on a back burner.

It's actually a really important part of being investable, especially as we get bigger and we start attracting larger, more generalist funds that need to see that kind of reporting.

So that was also significant. And then we just a few weeks ago, we announced this plan to create a new exploration vehicle, Valiente Resources.

And much like we did with LunR Royalties, NGEx is providing the foundational assets for that. That's our Valle Ancho project, which has sat in the NGEx portfolio kind of quiet.

I mean, literally in the back of the presentation for the last 3 or 4 years. But we think it's a -- it's an exciting project. It just -- it doesn't compete for capital with Lunahuasi in NGEx, but we think it's a project that should be advanced. And it's not just about spinning that project out, just like LunR wasn't just about spinning out the royalties.

It's about building a new vehicle, a new Lundin exploration vehicle, which we haven't had for quite a while that's going to focus on South America and do the sorts of things that NGEx used to do but can't really do anymore because it would take our eye off the ball at Lunahuasi and Los Helados. So we're really excited about what Valiente can do.

We see a lot of opportunities that we just weren't able to look at, and now we've got the vehicle to do it, and it's going to be staffed with some of our very experienced exploration guys in South America. And then, of course, the foundation of everything that we do is the drilling and the exploration that Bob is going to talk about a little bit later.

So I just want to do a quick overview. I mean, not everybody is as familiar with the district or our projects, just kind of a refresher of what's happened over the last year. The Vicuna District, which remind everybody was really -- I mean, everything other than Caserones in the Vicuna District was discovered by NGEx and our team.

It's now -- we've got kind of evolving ownership in the district. BHP and Lundin Mining obviously bought Filo del Sol and Josemaria, both 2 former NGEx projects, and that's part of the 50-50 Vicuna joint venture, which is rapidly advancing. And I believe they've talked about making a sanction decision on that project within the next 3 to 6 months.

I'm not sure exactly when that is, but it's definitely coming up. So obviously, that's going to be a game changer on the Argentina side of the border. We're going to have one of the world's largest development projects just down the road from us. And that will be, I think, a rising tide that just improve -- gets eyes on the district, improves infrastructure. And I think it's going to be really, really good for NGEx.

I think we're going to be a significant kind of a beneficiary of it even if we're not exactly involved in it because it's just 8 kilometers down the road from us. And then, of course, on the other side of the border, I mentioned the Lundin Mining increasing their interest in Caserones and then acquiring the interest in NGEx.

And both of those developments, I think, are really creating new opportunities for us to continue to generate value for NGEx shareholders. And I don't want to like front run what Bob is going to present here, but at a high level, our Phase 4 drill program was really successful. And I think if anything, just reinforced just how exceptional and unusual Lunahuasi is.

We significantly expanded the mineralized footprint. As Finlay mentioned, our geological interpretation and our understanding of the -- not just the individual mineralized zones that we're drilling, but just kind of a better sense for the overall system, and Bob is going to go through that. That all significantly improved as a result of this program.

And the highlights really here were continued expansion of the existing zones, identifying new ones kind of within the high-grade copper, gold, silver veins that were the original discovery. I think we've now solidified or started to get a bead on the super high-grade gold veins, which are a separate event that kind of criscrosses through the copper dominant mineralization.

So we're getting a better sense that some of the early intercepts are not just kind of random one-offs, but we're seeing that those super high gold grades over a wide area. We don't know exactly how to connect the dots yet, but the fact that it's not just -- those intercepts aren't just clustered in one small area are telling us that, that's a potentially significant part of the mineralized system. And then we had some initial holes into the edges of the porphyry system that underlies and kind of drove all of this mineralization last year. We got a couple of holes this year that still haven't exactly drilled all the way into it.

But I think we've got confirmation that there's a -- and it's not a big surprise, but that there's a very significant and significantly high-grade copper-gold porphyry system that lies off to the west, sort of out on the edges of that drill pattern. So Bob will talk more about that. But overall, a super successful -- another super successful drilling season that significantly improved Lunahuasi.

And then we've talked about the adit. This is going to be, I think, a game-changing step for us. There's a couple of reasons for that. It is an exploration adit. I want to be clear about that. And its main purpose right now is to help us with resource -- eventual resource definition drilling. So I think there's a few people in the room that have been up to site. You know that our topography is pretty steep. So basically, this adit drives into that topography. It gets us underground. And probably the most important thing that it does is it will shorten the drill holes that we need to define the resource. So instead of drilling kind of a long way from the surface, especially as we move to the west, we're now going to be underneath all of that, and it dramatically increases -- decreases the number of meters that you need to test the same amount of mineralization.

So it's going to take 12 to 15 months, more or less to fully develop that. We're probably going to be able to start drilling a little bit earlier. We'll be drilling building drilling stations as we go down. But it's going to do a whole bunch of things for us. It will obviously facilitate that drilling. It's going to give us the first detailed look at the ore body from underground.

I mean we're going to cross our first mineralization in the first 300 meters. It will allow detailed underground mapping. We'll be able to collect bigger bulk samples for metallurgical test work. It's a lot of information that will be extremely useful. It's going to be sized at 4.5 by 4.5 meters, so kind of a good size. The equipment that we're using is kind of like regular mining equipment. So that's also important. And I'm just going to finish up with just, I think, talking about how we think about the portfolio, how we think about the company and how do we think about that important question of how do we continue growing, how do we continue increasing the market value of the pretty remarkable portfolio that NGEx has.

So at Lunahuasi, the focus is still on exploration. This is -- it's because of its profile and kind of how fast it's moved, it's easy to forget. It's really only 3 years old. The very first drill hole was put in just over 3 years ago. So we are still defining the full potential of that deposit. There's still a lot of exploration upside. And we do want to push that project down that pathway to eventual production, shorten those time lines.

The adit is part of accelerating that process. And one of the things that we definitely want to do is keep all development options open. So I don't think it's a secret that there are 2 different ways this could go. This could be a stand-alone development project for NGEx. Think about something similar to what Lundin Gold was able to do in Ecuador with Fruta del Norte. I mean this would be one way to do this would be a moderate-sized underground mine much like FDN is.

But then, of course, we've got the big beast down the road here that's going to be building a very large project, and we've got to keep that potential M&A scenario in mind, too. And that kind of colors the work and the way that we plan our drill programs and the way that we plan our we're agnostic about the ultimate outcome, but we want to make sure that the work that we do kind of respect all of the different ways that this could go at.

Los Helados, we've talked about that. It's one of the largest undeveloped deposits in Chile. It's about 17 kilometers from Lundin Mining's Caserones operation. Lundin Mining, since they acquired their interest has been pretty open in their public disclosure about their plans for eventual they kind of the stuff that we've been talking about for years, but their thoughts about potentially integrating those 2 assets. So kind of stay tuned on that. There's obviously a deal that needs to be done between here and there. Right now, they are minority holders, but we're very encouraged by how positively they're looking at Los Helados. So we see it as a really valuable asset in the portfolio.

I think one that people have kind of forgotten about. So I think if we're able to do something here, it would be super positive for NGEx. And then, of course, we retain that stake in LunR Royalties. Our 13.4 million shares are worth around $280 million today. We are holders of that. That isn't something that we're going to dribble out or sell. We think that company has a great future in front of it.

And I think one of the things that people don't really think about is that holding that LunR stake creates a bit of a virtuous circle. So kind of as Lunahuasi grows, as we shorten time lines to production for a project like Los Helado or Lunahuasi, we're kind of increasing the value of those royalties because right now, those royalties are sort of long dated. People don't really know exactly when things are going to go into production, but the value of royalties increases the closer you get to production. So as we -- and as you expand the underlying resource base. So as we advance Lunahuasi, and we kind of get two kicks at the can. We're increasing the value of NGEx and we're indirectly or increasing the value of our stake in LunR.

So we kind of build a virtuous circle there, and we get sort of two kicks at the can. And then Valiente is our latest effort, and I think that's a real opportunity to create a brand-new vehicle that's going to create a lot of value for NGEx shareholders. We'll talk a little bit more about the timing of that later in the presentation. So now I'm going to turn it over to Bob Carmichael, our VP of Exploration, to run you through some of the details on Lunahuasi.

Thanks, Woj. Thanks for the introduction. I'm going to talk about 2 things. One is the Exploration update, kind of what we've done last year with the drill program and where we've gotten to with our work subsequent to that. And then at the end, talk a bit about the metallurgical test work results. We had a news release out this morning. You might have seen it. And it's a really critical step particularly in this project to demonstrate that the metallurgy here is potentially one of the project's strong points.

Looking at the Vicuna District today, you've seen the chart on the left quite a bit. I think people still don't appreciate what the Vicuna District is. I mean I did this chart on the right here and put together just kind of adding up all the resources within the district, including Los Helados, Filo del Sol, Josemaria and Caserones.

And if you look at the last 2 lines there, particularly in the contained metal section, you start to get up to some pretty big numbers. I mean this is truly people talk about world-class all the time. But Vicuna is a pretty special place, and I think it's a real credit to the Exploration team at NGEx, as Woj mentioned, going back 10, 12 years, this is a lot of the work from the Lundin Group and NGEx that put this together. And it's truly one of the most amazing discoveries of a district in the last, I don't know, 30, 40 years. It's been a great story. Let's get there. Yes. Just a couple of geological sections here.

The one in the middle is kind of interesting. I mean one of the things that people look for on broad scales is these big northwesterly trending lineaments that cut across the Andes down here. And if you look at those, you'll see Chuqui is on one, Escondida is on one, the El Salvador Potrerillos.

They tend to focus on the locations of these giant porphyry deposits at the intersection of these cross-cutting lineaments and the main northeasterly trending belt. And you can see that Vicuna is right on one of those intersections as is Valle Ancho. I mean it also includes Vicuna along there.

And then on the right, just a little bit more detail showing particularly where Valle Ancho sits along this lineament right across the border from the Maricunga district in Chile.

Going back a bit to the Evolution. I think Wojtek's point is a really good one to keep in mind, right? This project is only 3 years old. And I think it's been a pretty high profile. It's been an amazing discovery. We've drilled some incredible holes. But I think sometimes people get a bit ahead of themselves thinking where we should be today in our understanding of the deposit and how far we're kind of moving it forward to production.

We're working hard on it, doing a lot of development work, but it's -- a lot of thinking has to go into this and interpretation to really understand what we've got. The discovery hole was released just over 3 years ago in April of 2023. Since then, we've drilled about 70,000 meters.

The blue boxes at the bottom are some important points. All of the holes in there have significant drill intersections. We haven't drilled any dusters within the deposit area. It's open in all directions, the whole system. And as we've gone through this and drilled it, we've had this continuous process of discovering parts of the deposit that were unknown and have done a pretty good job at predicting what we were going to find, where we were going to find it and then going out and drilling a hole into it. And that process hasn't ended yet. We've still got some really good targets in mind that we're hoping to be able to test this upcoming season.

We've got a series of slides here that just kind of go through each year drilling. You'll see the little boxes here have the drill hole name. There's a table in the back in the appendix with the full drill intersection, if you want to look at it in more detail. And it's just the intersection length and the copper equivalent.

So this is where we were at May 2024 after our first 2 seasons, the discovery season where we didn't get much drilled that year and then a follow-up season. So you can see we've just gotten into the Saturn zone. We had a couple of good hits there outside of Mars. The discovery hole was # 2 up here into Jupiter. Subsequently, we discovered Mars and then Saturn.

So again, that process of discovering new parts of the deposit as we drilled. Fast forward a year, Phase 3 was quite a bit more ambitious than the first 2 years and came up with a number of good intersections, continuing to grow the zone beyond what we had. And a couple of critical holes there were 43 up in the top, that's an edge hole. It's the hole that we drilled on the edge of our drilling pattern.

We had almost 50 meters of almost 10% copper equivalent. Clearly, we're nowhere near the edge of the deposit. I mean that's a very, very strong intersection open to the north. On the other end of things down here in the South, hole 29, we had almost 160 meters at about 2.2% copper equivalent, demonstrating that things are also completely open to the South.

We started that season to define our 3 main zones. You can sort of see them shadowed here in the different colors. But also out to the west, we've got a number of really good drill intersections that are further spaced apart. Of course, as we drill these holes, you can see the limited number of drill platforms that we have.

So they all start close together and then fan out as you get deeper. So by the time you get down to the end of these holes, there's some pretty big distances between them. And we've got a number of intersections down there that we're confident are going to turn into zones similar to the ones that we have closer to the collars of the drill holes. We just need to do more drilling to tie them all together.

And then here's where we are at the moment. Again, continuing to expand those zones to the north. We're still stepping out this hole here. We've got 3 really good intersections in that hole that are completely open up to the north. We haven't closed the system off in that direction. We did a hole down to the south.

Again, a couple of really nice intersections in there. And just that idea that the whole system is completely open north, south. We discovered a new zone in our geotech hole here and a bunch of clusters of good intersection of these holes. And those are quite shallow because, again, the holes start shallow and go down deeper as you go west. But this gives us a whole new kind of area to test at depth below that. So we're open at depth north, south. And then a critical hole for us was 64. I'll talk about that one later with another intersection into the porphyry, but not just another intersection into the porphyry, but a very high-grade breccia part of the porphyry, which I think has some really important implications.

Just try to do -- the planned views are great, but they don't really give you an idea of the distribution of the drill holes. So I try to do a 3D perspective here. And again, you can see that idea of the holes all clustered together at the top. And as they fan out, they get farther and farther away as you go down.

So some of these intersections on the plan view that look like they're quite close together are actually tens, if not hundreds of meters apart by the time you get down there. So those individual intersections that we're getting, we've got a lot of work to do to be able to expand those and tie them together. But we see similar styles of mineralization, similar grades and similar widths to what we see in our main zones, and we remain confident that with more drilling, we're going to discover more mineralization similar to Mars Jupiter and Saturn.

I'm going to get a little more into the geology here, just a quick refresher. I showed these slides last year, and if you're in the business, you would have seen this image particularly time and time again. It's from a Sillitoe paper in 2010, but it does a really good job of capturing what a porphyry copper system looks like.

One of the really interesting things at Lunahuasi is we have an entire system. A lot of projects, you might have 1 or 2 of these components together, but it's rare to have the full suite of porphyry copper system and related mineralization in one project controlled by one company. This is just kind of shown the lithology. It's a bit better shown with the alteration here.

But our main zones are in blue here, the disseminated and stockwork high-sulphidation and copper gold, and I'm going to go through each one of these in a bit more detail in the subsequent slides. The high-sulphidation massive sulfide veins. I mean those are a very unique part of Lunahuasi that really boost the grade and create a very special deposit for us. The high-grade gold is something that we got into in the last couple of years.

And as Wojtek said, it kind of exploits the same structures as the massive sulfide veins. Sometimes they're coincident and you get some amazing drill intersections. Sometimes they splay off and you get really high-grade gold without a lot of associated copper. And then the porphyry is has been a very important part.

We've only got a couple of holes into it, but it's been a really good exploration story in terms of predicting where it should be, what we should hit, planning a couple of holes that drill into it, proof of concept. And we've got a lot of runway to continue that discovery process there.

And then a big focus of the presentation is going to be what are we missing, right? And Lunahuasi matches very well this porphyry copper model. We've been able to predict what we're going to hit, where we're going to hit it. And as we look at this, we still see a couple of features of this and a couple of aspects to this model that we've not discovered yet, and we think we're on track to do that.

So one concept I want to get across is that Lunahuasi is a mineral system. It's not the Lunahuasi deposit. It's actually a cluster of deposits. We've kind of got 4 styles of mineralization. This has been a theme of ours for a while. And each one of those styles, it's significant on its own. If all we had was one or the other of those deposits, we'd be pretty excited about the project.

And the fact that we've got 4 of them and have the potential to discover more is really what gets us wound up. Each of those deposits is open to expansion. The entire system is open to expansion. I mean we're still early in the exploration phase on this project. We don't know how big it's going to be ultimately, and that's what we're focusing our effort on still.

So these are just some -- I'm going to put a lot of drill intersections up here. There's a lot of numbers coming up, but I think they're important. I think it's one of the aspects of this. I mean, you guys look at a lot of drill intersections, I'm sure, and it's a way to measure early stage kind of pre-resource projects. And again, if all we had was any one of these boxes, those are pretty exciting numbers.

The fact that we've got the 4 of them and you start to combine them and get these intersections down at the bottom in our 2 long holes that intersected the porphyry and the main bulk HS part of the system, you're getting to some drill intersections that you don't see very often globally. So the high-grade gold, we talked about this last year, we just discovered it in our Phase III program.

The title then was kind of the latest good surprise when Wojtek and Neil O'Brien, one of our directors did the Vicuna presentations a couple of years ago. One of Neil's points was in these systems expect to get surprises and expect to get more good surprises than bad surprises. And that was before we discovered these really high-grade gold. So it was kind of Neil foreshadowing what these systems can produce and what you're going to find when you get into one of these really strong, robust big systems. So this is a really important part of the deposit. A couple of analogs.

El Indio is quite a good geological analog for Lunahuasi. I think Lunahuasi is going to turn out to be a lot bigger than El Indio was. But one of the interesting stats there is they took 1.2 million ounces of gold out of 190,000 tonnes of ore. So if you start thinking about the volume of 190,000 tonnes in the context of our drill pattern, it's a very small part of it.

And that's one of the challenges for -- as we work towards developing a resource at Lunahuasi is we've got things something like that, that we're going to want to try to put together and piece it out in that hundreds of thousands of tonnes can be a very significant deposit and contain a lot of mineralization, a lot of gold, all the way up to a giant porphyry deposit, which are typically measured in billions of tonnes. And it's trying to scope out a drill program to kind of pick away at each of those components and drill it off to a resource level is quite a challenge. And just keep in mind, the grade there, 196 grams per tonne.

We've got a lot of those kinds of intersections with those kinds of grades. And again, if you look through this, if this was all I was showing you, if this is what we drilled over a couple of seasons, I'd be pretty happy. Like these are great numbers for a gold project. And the fact that this is 1 of the 4 deposits that we've discovered so far, I think, gives you an idea of what Lunahuasi is like in its entirety.

An important point that [ Woj ] mentioned is these aren't all just kind of clustered in one little part of the deposit. We're not drilling the same thing over and over again. You can see we've got a clear center in Saturn. In Mars, a couple of outliers out here that in these wide space drill holes that we haven't followed up on yet.

So we think with additional drilling, we'll be able to turn this into a pretty significant high-grade gold resource. The exploration adit plays into this a lot. This is obviously going to be a lot easier to drill off from underground than it is from surface. It's going to require some close space drilling with more targeted holes in different directions. So that's work that's much better done from underground once we get the exploration decline put in place rather than trying to tackle it from surface.

The next one is the high-grade massive sulfide veins. I'm calling it kind of the backbone of the deposit. If there's one aspect of Lunahuasi that's the most unique, it's this. I mean it's really, really rare that you see this kind of mineralization with these kinds of grades and widths in a deposit anywhere.

We've got massive sulfide veins in excess of 20 meters true width. And again, they're not just clustered. It's not like one vein. We've got these throughout the deposit area. Where they're coincident with the high-grade gold veins, you get some incredibly high copper and gold values in the same drill intersections. And we're still discovering these, right? The new discovery in the geotech hole. We didn't know it was there until we drilled that hole, 4.2 meters and almost 12% copper and 6 grams per tonne gold gives us a whole new zone to follow up on. Analog to this might be Timok, Lepanto, El Indio, of course, and Wafi-Golpu in the South Pacific.

And another feature of these, and it's kind of reflected in the metallurgical results that we released is that they're very simple mineralologically. So the mineralization is an enargite and pyrite. It's not a complex mix of different sulfides. We don't see a lot of zonation. It doesn't change into different sulfide minerals as we move around the deposit.

It's very consistent. It's very simple, and that makes the metallurgical processing of it much simpler. Representative intersections, look at the copper and the widths here. And again, this is all we had. I'd be pretty excited. This is a great project. And it's pretty rare to see these kinds of widths and copper grades in a deposit anywhere, you can see the gold varies from moderate values to very high values depending on how those veins intersect with these veins. And again, they're spread out. You can see the main cluster in Saturn and in Mars, Jupiter over here. But these veins, we really have throughout the whole system. And I think as we continue to infill those gaps and drill them off, we're going to come up with more and more of these. They're going to hold together, and we'll get more coherent zones of mineralization made up of this style.

Looking beyond that, the kind of broader envelope, and I went through this a bit last year for those of you who were there, looking at the drill intersections and just talking about trying to composite some of them and the fact that you get those high-grade veins in there, but the material in between the high-grade veins carries some pretty good grades as well.

This is what it looks like. The images there, you can see high-rate class and veins and then enargite veins mixed throughout that entire rock volume. And these are the kind of sample intervals through here and some of the grades that you get variable as you go down there, but good copper, good gold, some really good silver veins where you cut some of these -- silver grades where you cut some of these veins. And again, just thinking through potential production scenarios is the other in each one of these kinds of mineralization leads you to think about a different kind of mining rate plan method.

I mean it's complicated to figure out the optimal development scheme at Lunahuasi, but there's some pretty good options. Again, this table of representative intersections, hundreds of meters of between 1% and 3%, 4% copper equivalent, again, pretty rare and something that we feel is going to be really important in the future development of the project.

Again, they're well distributed down to the south, completely open, kind of a high-grade core here where we see Saturn. As we get up to the north, we tend to get more of the massive sulfide veins like Mars and Jupiter and a bit less mineralization in between. So kind of an interesting transition from south to north. I think we've got some ideas on why we see that. But again, this zone is completely open to the south. To the west, it transitions and but against the porphyry system. It kind of changes into the porphyry part of the mineralization as we go west. And it's still completely open to the east. Our holes enter into this mineralization shallow off towards the west, and we don't know where the boundary is looking out to the east.

A couple of different zones here in Hole 64, the top slides are kind of classic porphyry mineralization. The mineralization is disseminated and hosted in big quartz veins to there, very classic porphyry style mineralization. And then the bottom one is what got us really excited is this high-grade breccia unit. And you can see the little picture on the right, you can see a clast here with a vein cutting through it, which tells you that this is all happening at the same time.

You have the breccia being developed while the mineralization is being emplaced. And in the kind of porphyry model, that's quite an important point. This is an integral part of the porphyry system. And these things typically lead to some very high-grade parts of porphyry deposits worldwide. We've only got 2 holes into it to date, pretty excited by the grades, 156 meters of 1% made up of a good balance of copper and gold. There's some very good gold grades in there as well, which is important. And those 2 holes sit out here to the west of all this.

They're kind of the source of all this mineralization and integral part of it. And we think this is going to turn into be a really exciting part of the deposit. Kind of layering it all together on a combined basis, you can see the porphyry out here, transitioning into the disseminated and stockwork HS part and then all that is cut by the massive sulfide veins and the high-grade gold veins.

So when you put all that together, you get a very, very interesting series of deposits, a big volume of well-mineralized rock, but it's not without its complications in terms of trying to figure out what to focus on, different drill spacing and drill strategies to define different parts of the deposit into a resource category.

So there's potentially a fifth part that we're missing. I talked about this a bit last year. We did improve our understanding of this. You obviously can't read this, but as Finlay said, this is on our website. So if you want to go through and learn a bit more about it and reference some of the papers here. But the basic concept is that it's well known in porphyry deposits that they can develop a very high-grade component to it right over top of the porphyry.

So if these porphyries come in, there's vertical fluid flow moving upwards towards the surface, you get these breccias coming off as things depressurize. And around the tops of these porphyries, you can develop these very, very high-grade components of the deposits. And there's some really good examples of that worldwide.

A good analog here that I've noticed is The Lepanto deposit in the South Pacific. Lepanto itself is a massive enargite ore body that's been mined for several years. Later, after that was discovered, they discovered the kind of cognate porphyry to that and came up with a series of high sulfidation veins off to the side. So it's an interesting kind of an analog in that like Lunahuasi has, it has several components of a typical porphyry system, all combined in the same place. And what you see on the right is kind of a real-world example of the schematic in the middle. You've got the porphyry here, this breccia coming off the top. And the red line is the 1 gram per tonne outline.

This is a kilometer here. These are 250-meter grid squares. And you can see near the apex of the porphyry and surrounding that is where you get this high-grade mineralization associated with the breccias. So this is a section through Lunahuasi. There's quite a bit of interpretation on this, but it shows the relative location of some of these components.

You can see the Saturn zone in red there, a big part of our vein deposit sitting up in that location. Hole 64 -- hole 27, I guess, last year was the discovery hole into that, which came through and had 233 meters of 0.9. So we knew we had a good width, definitely clearly porphyry mineralization and some unusually high grades for a porphyry deposit. 64 was an ambitious hole that we drilled -- it was just about 2,000 meters, just over 2,000 meters in length. It started at minus 45 and ended at minus 10. And for anyone who's ever run a drill program, trying to convince the drillers to keep the hole going when it's almost flat, 2 kilometers down from surface.

There's a lot of handholding and telling them it's going to be okay. But we persevered and that was a critical hole for us because we didn't intersect a very high-grade breccia part of the system. Hole 66 was the other one that we drilled. We started up on the plateau here. This hole was -- all of our holes at Lunahuasi, you can see flatten as we drill them, and this was intended to kind of flatten and test this area.

Unfortunately, it started to go steeper as we drilled and we didn't get it exactly where we wanted to go. Nevertheless, it was really good proof of concept. And what that hole did was if we looked at predicting what we would have hit in that hole before we drilled it, we wound up proving our prediction very well.

So it confirmed the model. We got the right series of veins as we went down. Porphyry deposits are well understood. The zonation of alteration and veining around them, and you can use that to vector into where you want to be. We did hit mineralization at the bottom, almost 400 meters of good porphyry mineralization, something that you'd hit on the periphery of the main deposit.

But again, it confirmed the location of our target. And this is something that we're very interested to come back this season and get a hole in the right place here. If we just overlay that Lepanto section on here, you can sort of see the scale and the idea that we've got, which is these holes here are into the porphyry, a bit of breccia.

We're drilling this level of the deposit. And just above here is where we would expect to get the very high-grade component of it combined with that breccia that we saw in Hole 64. So this has been a difficult target to test for us. But this year, it's going to be one of the main focus is making sure that we can actually get a hole through here and see if we can confirm this or not.

It's also supported by our geophysics. We did a big magnetotelluric geophysical study a couple of years ago. It measures basically the conductivity of the rock. You can see the purple is high conductivity. It outlines the high sulfidation part of the system very well and continues well over into the part of the deposit that we're looking at.

The big gap in the middle is due to the topography they weren't able to kind of get full coverage over that area. So in summary, Lunahuasi is a combination of several deposits, and that's adds complexity, but it also provides optionality looking at conceptual mine plans. We're starting to understand the details.

Our team, it's nice still being seasonal because we have a very intense period where we drill, we collect a lot of data. But then once the drills are stood down, we've got a really good team of geologists in San Juan who can then sit down and start thinking, start doing the interpretation and putting it all together, building out the model.

And what that allows us to do is to be able to be very focused on planning the next drill program. And throughout the lifestyle -- life cycle of an Exploration project, you typically move from the beginning, especially if it's a new discovery, you don't really know anything about it. You're just drilling holes to fill in spaces in the drill pattern and step out.

And then as you start to understand it, you begin to be able to design your holes to test ideas, right? So you come up with concepts, you think, well, this is our idea. We should drill a hole here to see if our idea is true or not. And you start off with some success ratios. Some of your ideas are good, some of them aren't, and then you get better as you go.

And I think this season, we're getting to the stage where we're able to -- we've got some really good ideas, some really good focus holes that are going to test those ideas, and I think our success rate is going to be pretty good. It's still exploration. We've still got the potential for transformational discoveries.

I mean if we can prove out this idea of that high-grade breccia or porphyry zone in that location, that has the potential to change the whole complexion of this project. Each one of the deposits on its own is pretty exciting. And when you combine all of those together, you get something really special.

It does add to some complexity. As I mentioned, it's one thing drilling off 190,000 tonnes of high-grade gold compared to drilling off a porphyry deposit. Those are 2 completely different drill programs, different ways to look at it. And it definitely impacts how we view our planning for the drilling and for resource estimation.

And fundamentally, at this stage, the more we drill, the bigger the deposit gets. So the longer we keep gathering data. I think resource estimates are something that a lot of companies don't think through enough. They kind of get a certain amount of data. You just step by step, next step, put out a resource estimate in a way you go.

But it's really a fundamental change in the project, right? It's a big step. And we think about that a lot, and we're not going to put a resource before we're ready to do it. But when we will, I think it's going to be pretty good. What's coming up for Phase 5, really, it's very similar to what we did in Phase 4.

Logistically, we're looking at about the same number of meters. We've got the same 8 rigs. We're sort of settled into the logistical part of it there. We've got a good system set up. It will be a mix of some resource definition. We want to improve the geological model, continue to collect data. At some point, we will put out a resource, and we need to collect the data to do that.

As Woj mentioned, that's going to be much easier to do once we've got the exploration adit in place, and there's no point drilling a bunch of expensive long surface holes into an area that we'll be able to target much more effectively a year from now. Step out is extending both kind of the deposit scale, our 3 zones and trying to tie in some of those other zones.

And at a system scale, it's just trying to extend things and really try to step out. We went through the same thing at Filo, right, is stepping out to try to find the edges of the system. And in these big systems, it's hard to do. You keep stepping out or you keep hitting mineralization and you got to keep stepping out. But that's definitely part of it. And then pure exploration, we've got a couple of pretty exciting targets still to test.

So the short-range drilling is just mainly targeting the 3 zones that we've got, filling in key gaps there, testing some key ideas. The mid-range drilling, I showed a version of this last year, and I think it's a pretty interesting image. You look at the 3 zones, those are going to turn into deposits.

But you look at the intersections that are outside of those, right, 13 meters at 16%, 11 at 8, 10 at 10, 60 meters at 5%. Those are telling us that there's a lot of mineralization outside of these zones that has yet to be defined as we get more drilling into it, and that's something that we're going to pick away at over the next few seasons. The long-range exploration drilling is a couple of things. It's the target I talked about, trying to get a hole to behave properly and go where we wanted to, to test this idea. But beyond that, we've got another really interesting target up here.

So you see the scale bar at the top 3 kilometers. These are our zones, Lunahuasi here, the porphyry breadth of target is in this area. Sitting over here, we've got another hill that looks very similar to the [indiscernible] Aurora Hill at Filo. It's got the steam heated alteration, the massive silica. It's got all the earmarks of what you would see at surface above, again, one of these porphyry centers.

And we don't have any drill holes anywhere near it. We've got surface sampling there with anomalous surface samples. It's a pretty interesting area. And the next image is just a photograph taken from down here looking at this drill platform and over at that hill. To give you an idea of what it looks like. It's kind of shortened because it's a telescopic lens.

But you get up there and walk around, and this is a pretty interesting surface feature, and I think it's telling us a lot about what may be underneath there. And that to me is an example of the exploration potential that we still have here, like that high-grade breccia target that we hit with hole 64 is a great one.

But even beyond that, we've got potential for finding an adjacent porphyry system and high sulfidation system that we really don't know anything about yet. So that's kind of the exploration summary. I just wanted to go through the metallurgical test results and provide a bit of detail on the news release.

It's a brand-new discovery, as we talked about. There's no historical engineering work of any kind here. We're very early on. But the one thing we recognize is that the main copper carrier here is enargite, which is a copper arsenic sulfide. It's got arsenic with it, but it's also very rich in copper. So it's the mineral itself is 48% copper compared to 35% if you're looking at chalcopyrite.

And that has implications for your recoveries and the grade of concentrate that you can potentially produce. As I mentioned, the mineralogy is really simple and consistent, which is really important for metallurgical work. If you look at a lot of deposits that are zoned, each zone you get into has a different metallurgical response, and it makes things more complex.

The really high precious metals we have improved everything. So what we started to do was, I guess, recognizing that as we start to move into doing some engineering work, metallurgy was a critical part of it because we need to be able to show that the arsenic here is not a concern for us. And we need to be able to show what the because the mineralization is so consistent, any test work that we did here has application to the entire deposit outside of the porphyry and the high-grade gold, which there's no arsenic in the porphyry mineralization.

And the high-grade gold has got a lot of visible gold in it. So those 2 components we haven't tested, but we don't expect any problems in the metallurgy there. So Phase 1 of flotation test work, this classic sulfide flotation to understand what kind of a concentrate you can put together. Those concentrates as expected at high arsenic levels. So Phase 2 is then how do you clean that up and produce a marketable product. The program was very successful.

We wound up with some very nice concentrate grades. We wound up with extremely high recoveries for this kind of mineralization. And we wound up with a lot of optionality. So I think it's pointing to a path where we've got a bunch of different ways, levers we can pull and ways we can optimize the metallurgy when we get to the point of being able to do detailed engineering studies.

Sample selection is something a lot of people don't focus very much on. They just go and collect some material from the deposit and then do a bunch of expensive test work on it and then find out that it's the wrong stuff that they tested. So we put a lot of effort into that. Our focus was on our 3 main zones. The idea being that those are pretty characteristic of the rest of the deposit.

We've got a good distribution of grades here from 2.5% to 4% copper, a good range of gold and silver grades. And I guess one of the things that you don't see here, but it's -- the pyrite to an enargite ratio turns out to be quite important.

So Mars, for example, is mostly an enargite. That's where you get the high grades. As you get out to Jupiter, you've got more pyrite mixed in with it, and that has some implications for the processing. So the flotation part of it was really successful. We looked at doing a sequential float where we did a copper concentrate first, then a pyrite concentrate and then off the tails.

It was a very simple flow sheet. Typically, you do a rougher concentrate at the beginning to the big mass pull and get most of the metals into that. And then you have to go through several cleaning stages depending on the characteristics of the mineralization.

Each one adds time and complexity and capital and operating cost to the project. What we found is with the rougher concentrate, we were able to get most of the copper and gold and silver into the concentrate. We also looked at doing just a bulk concentrate where we just did a sulfide concentrate, which from the flotation side of things is very, very easy to do. So what we produced was the concentrate grades and recoveries that you see at the bottom.

So for example, at Mars, great concentrate grades, really high recoveries, 94% for copper. And then a pyrite concentrate, separately, which the grades are lower, but we've got particularly on the gold as you get down here, quite a bit of the gold is tied up in the pyrite. So there's a lot of value that goes in that. And we think we'll be able to capture that through a blending strategy.

The second phase was concentrate treatment. So you produce the concentrate and then you need to process it to get rid of the arsenic and produce a salable concentrate. There are several different ways to do that, Pressure Oxidation, Leaching. Ultimately, the best one that so far has been the GlassLock that's called by Dundee. This is used at the Tsumeb smelter in Botswana.

And then the Albion process, which is another Glencore process. All of them worked well. They all had some strengths and weaknesses. GlassLock was the one that's kind of the leader at this point. We've got a lot of work to do on this yet to sort of figure out what's the best option ultimately going forward.

One of the interesting things with things like pressure oxidation is it gives you the option to produce metal on site. So if you can combine it with an SXEW plant, you can actually produce copper metal and dore on site rather than a concentrate that you then have to ship and sell to a smelter.

We also did, as I mentioned, a bulk concentrate. So we just floated the sulfides and then ran that through the Dundee process. And the final results are at the bottom. So when you go through the GlassLock process, the mass reduces quite a bit. The recoveries stay the same, so that boosts the grade. And you can see Mars in particular, a 39% concentrate grade.

I think back to the mineralogy, you can't produce that kind of a concentrate grade if you've got a chalcopyrite deposit because here, chalcopyrite doesn't have that much copper in it. Very high gold values and very high recoveries to the final product. And then producing a bulk concentrate with really good grades in it and highest recoveries I've seen in any project that I've ever worked on.

So this is preliminary result. This is the first time we've looked at this. There's obviously a lot of optimization work to be done on this, but we're super happy to see the ability to produce these kinds of products through this test work. I think it's a huge step ahead for the project.

Next steps are more variability testing, trying to get a wider range of composition of samples, looking more at the combination, continuing to evaluate and do trade-off studies on the different concentrate cleaning stages and then starting to do some test work with the high-grade gold mineralization and the porphyry.

So that's the update for Lunahuasi and hopefully, a bit more information on the metallurgical test work. And I'll pass it back to Woj to talk about Los Helados.

Thanks, Bob. And I hope that through that presentation, we gave everybody who's listening an appreciation for the effort and the quality of the technical work that underpins everything that we do at NGEx. It really is -- there's a lot of complicated stuff here that our team kind of makes look easy, but it really isn't.

So there's a lot of thought and a lot of credit to our team for being able to figure all this out on a consistent basis. So we've talked a lot about Lunahuasi and very justifiably, but we want to remind people of the significance of Los Helados, our other asset. So this was drilled off a lot earlier than Lunahuasi. We did our last drill program here 4 years ago almost.

And then it's just kind of sat there quietly, kind of waiting really for a pathway to eventual production. And we now have a new partnership with Lundin Mining that I think kind of opens up that opportunity. There's still a lot of steps to go through, but I think it's just a good time to remind everybody of the significance of Los Helados. So it is one of the largest undeveloped copper projects in Chile.

You can see the resource base there and then the geological model, but it's a very significant copper, gold and silver deposit. This is a classic porphyry system. The main ore mineral here, copper ore mineral is chalcopyrite. So it produces a very clean gold and silver-rich concentrate, and those are the most desirable products on the concentrate market.

It's overall a large resource. It's around 2 billion tonnes of around 0.5% copper equivalent indicated and then a bunch more inferred. And then within that, there are 3 distinct high-grade zones, Fenix, Condor and Alicanto that are significantly higher grade, and those add up to around just over 500 million tonnes of about 0.72% copper equivalent.

And those grades are really important kind of in the regional context because Caserones, for example, is mining significantly lower grades right now. And it kind of gives you a sense for what Los Helados could do for that operation if we were able to reach an agreement that would combine the 2. So just a reminder of where the 2 deposits sit.

Helados is about 17 kilometers to the south of that operating mine at Caserones. And then just a reminder of the current ownership interest. So right now, Los Helados is 69% NGEx. We're the majority and operating partner and then Lundin Mining inherited or bought the 31% stake that JX had.

And then at Caserones, Lundin Mining is now the majority holder with 25% JX Holding the remaining 25%. So don't forget about Los Helados. I think it is a little bit of a sleeper asset in our portfolio. I mean we have some work to do, but we're encouraged by how Lundin Mining is talking and thinking about Los Helados, and we're optimistic that we're going to be able to work with them to find a way to move Los Helados forward.

And I think if we're able to do that, that's going to be very significant and valuable for NGEx. So I want to just quickly touch on Valiente and on the Valle Ancho project that will be its initial project. This has sat in the back of our portfolio, literally in the back of our presentations for a number of years.

We rarely get to Page 38 or whatever it is of our presentation. So a lot of people haven't heard about Valle Ancho, but it's a really significant and interesting project. It's a lot like what the Vicuna district would have been when Bob and I first got involved with this more years ago than I'd like to remember.

So this isn't just going to be about Valle Ancho, and I think that's a really important point. As I said at the beginning, much like LunR, the idea here is to create a new exploration vehicle. We're going to focus on South America. We want this company to be what NGEx was in those early years, so kind of light, lean, and full of people that like doing that early-stage exploration. That isn't necessarily all we're going to do.

I think this is a vehicle that can look at, especially with that Lundin Group backing can look at bigger and more advanced projects that maybe the original NGEx wasn't able to do. So we're going to kind of look across the spectrum, but focused on copper, gold and silver in the 2 countries that we know best, Argentina and Chile.

So I think it's a significant opportunity for NGEx shareholders. As our other spin-outs have been, it's an opportunity to get in on the ground level of a new Lundin Group vehicle. And we are going to have some of the guys that were instrumental, our local guys that were instrumental in all of the discoveries that we've talked about earlier today working at Valiente and trying to do it again.

So really, what we want to do here is build a new portfolio with Valle Ancho as the base of projects that have that strong exploration upside. So the Lundin Group has a very strong track record of value creation over the years. I mean, on the left-hand side, some of the historical returns from some well-known Lundin companies of the past, returns from inception through to whatever happened to that company at the end stage, and we see some big success stories 2 of which on this list are NGEx spinouts, Filo Corp and Josemaria. So kind of getting in -- historically getting in early on these new Lundin companies has been a good strategy. They're always backed by the Lundin family.

Typically, we're able to put together good management teams and the shareholder returns kind of result from that. NGEx specifically has been -- I think, has become known for the Spinout strategies that we've employed over the years. And it -- these aren't just done sort of for random reasons. There's always kind of a business logic behind it.

It's a little bit different in every case. But there's no arguing with the value that we've been able to create over time, starting out with that original NGEx, which is kind of like what Valiente is today or will be today once it's all fully spun out. At that time, it was a small junior exploration company. And when you add up the market value of all of the spinouts, it's a pretty impressive track record. I think it's always important to remind people of where the value in the mining industry is generated. And somehow, I think exploration gets overlooked a little bit. People are very, very focused on producing companies and are always kind of rushing companies to get to the engineering stage, but it's really that exploration stage and particularly the discovery phase where an enormous amount of the value is generated.

And I think 2 of the kind of NGEx family of companies, Filo and NGEx Minerals kind of illustrate that, just how much value can be created through successful exploration. So that's what we want to do or want to try to do with Valiente. So I want to just quickly go through Valle Ancho, which will be the foundational piece.

It's a highly prospective copper-gold project in Catamarca province, Argentina. So a couple of provinces to the north of the Vicuna district. We own it 100%. It's a very large land package of around 100,000 hectares. Just for comparison, that's pretty similar to the overall Vicuna district land package, including all of the ground held by the various players there. It's basically the Argentina side of the Maricunga gold belt in Chile. So there's some famous deposits there like Caspiche, Casale, Salares Norte, a very, very significant district that's seen a lot of work done over the last 20 or 30 years, and there's probably north of 100 million ounces of gold that have been found on the Chilean side.

So similar to the thinking that led to the Vicuna district. The geology doesn't respect the border. We see similar rocks and similar potential on the Argentina side, but much, much less exploration than what went into the Chilean side. So that was kind of the opportunity that we saw. There was a big land package available that we acquired.

There had been some historical work, but it basically lay idle for about 20 years until NGEx acquired it in 2019. We did a target generation program kind of just during and just after the pandemic that culminated in an initial round of around 3,000 meters of scout drilling that was really successful, demonstrated the occurrence of significant porphyry copper gold mineralization and then an interesting oxide gold target similar to what you see on the Maricunga Chilean side of the deposit. So -- what we did in that early phase through 2022 was a bunch of target generation work. We did some scout drilling on those initial targets, but there are -- this is basically a drill-ready project that got left behind because the last drill program here was 2022.

And then by 2023, we had made the discovery at Lunahuasi, and we never went back to Valle Ancho. So putting it into a separate vehicle and kind of focusing on it will allow us to move a project forward that we think has a lot of potential, but doesn't compete for capital within NGEx. So there's a whole bunch of targets that we worked up in that target development phase.

The first couple of scout holes were pretty significant. Kind of like Bob said earlier, if this was anywhere else in any other company, this would be a headline project for them. Some of those drill intercepts just from that reconnaissance drilling almost 600 meters of 0.5% copper equivalent from surface. I mean those are great numbers. There's a separate oxide gold target with 100 to 200 meters of about 1 gram in oxide from surface. I mean that's pretty interesting for initial scout drilling. So we'll start with Valle Ancho. That will be the foundational project. But the idea here is to create a vehicle that's going to grow.

So it's going to grow through opportunistic acquisitions. We're going to use the decades of experience that our South America-based team has and really where we want to end up with is a diversified portfolio. We're going to be focusing on things that have exploration upside, but that's not going to preclude us looking at more advanced projects that have gotten left behind or maybe sitting in the wrong company or have been sort of forgotten.

And I would characterize those as special situations where our expertise, our experience in the country can maybe unlock things that are currently sitting idle. We're definitely going to -- this isn't going to be something that's scattered across the board. We're going to focus on the areas that we know best and our team knows best, and that's Argentina and Chile, and we see a lot of opportunities still in those countries. And now we've got the vehicle to chase them. So we announced the intention to do the spinout just about a month ago, August 6.

The next kind of milestone will be the publication of the management information circular, and we'll start to -- we'll announce the key dates as those are defined and so look for news releases in the coming weeks that will provide those details in the exact dates. And now we're reaching the end of the presentation. So I just want to kind of run through some conclusions here.

As I said at the beginning, the macro trends are favoring assets like the ones that NGEx has. So large-scale copper, gold, silver deposits. I think our strong feeling is that we're in the early innings of a historic bull market for hard assets. I mean you hear that any newspaper, any kind of financial publication that you pick up or starting to talk about that's driven by all the things that we hear about all the time, the AI build-out, electrification, all of that is super positive for copper. And then just with everything that's going on in the world, I think, including sort of fears of the -- of what might happen with AI, I mean, it's definitely driving demand for and uncertainty in general is demanding -- driving demand for precious metals.

So demand is strong. Metal prices are pretty much at record highs. However, I don't think we're seeing development projects like the ones we have. We haven't seen those be revalued to match that increase in metal prices. And that's very, very typical. There's typically a lag time until people really believe that these higher prices are here to stay.

But when it happens, that revaluation can be pretty dramatic. So we don't control that. That's why we don't really talk about it that much. But if you look historically at these sort of bull cycles, eventually, these assets get revalued, and it can be pretty dramatic when it happens. And what people go for always at the beginning are the highest quality project in favorable jurisdictions, Chile and Argentina are definitely that. And those kind of projects are incredibly scarce and there's a scarcity value to them. So I think all of that is going to favor NGEx and then it doesn't hurt that our assets are in the middle of what's going to be the largest new copper development project in the world once the Vicuna project gets going.

So kind of finally here, I mean, what do we think about at NGEx? I mean, really, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we manage this portfolio to maximize the value of it to shareholders. I mean a lot of people talk about that, but I think we've done a good job of being creative and thinking about how do we take these unique assets that we've been able to develop to maximize their value.

And then equally importantly, to make sure that, that value flows through to the share price. And that's the ultimate measure of the value that we've created. So there's a lot of thought that goes into the business side of what we do. So kind of what does that mean for NGEx right now? It's grow Lunahuasi is going to be the fundamental driver that increases our value.

We need to make sure that, that full system gets defined. We sometimes forget about time, the time value of money. So there's definitely a significant effort that will go into finding ways to shorten those time lines to production. And just because of the particular situation that we're in within the Vicuna district, we want to make sure that we maintain optionality and keep the path open to different ways of developing Lunahuasi.

We talked about Los Helados. We want to find ways to work with Lundin Mining to put Los Helados on that track to eventual production. So stay tuned. I mean that's an ongoing effort and an ongoing conversation. And then I just want to reassure people that we don't ever stop thinking about how we can maximize the value of these assets.

I think the LunR spinout is a good example. The Valiente -- upcoming Valiente spin-out is another example of us kind of working the portfolio and thinking about whether we're getting full value in the current vehicle or should we do something different? Should we partner? So that's something that's going to be an ongoing part of NGEx's culture and NGEx's efforts. So that's it, and we're happy to -- Bob and I are both happy to answer questions.

Hopefully, this is all -- here we go. Well, thanks so much, Wojtek and Bob. I think we got through that presentation pretty quickly. So we want to give everybody the opportunity to ask questions if they've got any. We have to hand the mic around to this so that our webcast viewers can hear as well. I also want to let the webcast viewers know that if they have any questions, please write those in the portal, and I'll be able to get that on my device and can ask those questions for you. So do we have any questions in the room?

Craig Hutchison from TD Securities. I just want to ask about the metallurgical work you guys did. And can you just talk a bit more about the GlassLock technology and why it works so well here? And any kind of sense in terms of what that would add from a kind of cost perspective maybe on a per tonne basis?

Yes. I mean I'm not a metallurgist, but I can give you a bit of an idea. And there's lots of information available on Dundee Sustainable Technologies website. So it's basically a pyrolysis thing, which is heating it up in the absence of oxygen, and it volatizes the arsenic. And I think one of the things that's really important about it, it's great to be able to get the arsenic out of the concentrate, but a critical thing is you need to have it in a stable form.

And it's called glass lock because then the arsenic is combined with silica and it's actually encapsulated in a glass product. So it could go back underground as rock fill in the mine or it can be disposed of in the tailings. So it's a very good way to dispose of the arsenic in a very secure, stable form. In terms of costing, yes, we've not done a lot of work on it. I mean it's the way I look at it is the key thing about the metallurgical test work is that we had some -- there's a technical solution to it. What would have been a disaster is if we've gone through this and technically, it didn't work, then you're stuck.

So the technical solution is there, so then it becomes a cost issue. So it will add a bit of operating cost and capital cost. How much? I don't know. I mean it depends on how big we decide to go. Is it going to be a big plant, a small plant, where would be located. We're not in a position to do that.

But I think in the overall -- what capital cost, if I look at ore deposit, capital cost is essentially size is the way I look at it and operating cost is grade. So if you've got a big deposit with high grade, you can cover both of those. And I think we'll develop that a lot more through ongoing engineering studies, but I don't expect it's going to saddle the project with the cost that's going to be material to the overall project economics.

Can you maybe touch on the potential for this to be considered a gold -- consider the gold concentrate, which opens up opportunities.

Yes. As we've talked about, it's early stage, right? So what the ultimate product we are going to produce, there's lots of options to do that. And as Woj mentioned, one of it may be able to produce a concentrate that's got high enough gold grades in it that it's considered a gold concentrate and you can sell it as that, in which case, the arsenic level in the concentrate is not that important.

So we don't know yet what the best marketable product is going to be. We've got a range of options. Again, this is the first stage of metallurgical test work that we've done. The other one is the potential to produce cathode and dore on site if we wanted to do a POX, and that's an option that we're pursuing. The advantages are a very, very simple flotation product at that point. You want the pyrite in there to be able to fuel the pressure oxidation process.

So you have the potential then to have an SXEW. And again, you come into the cost. It's a trade-off between cost and value. But obviously, if you can produce cathode and dore on site, you eliminate a lot of your concentrate shipping charges. And the whole concentrate market itself has been upended in the last couple of years to the point where smelters are buying concentrate from mines.

So it's difficult to predict where that's all going to go in a few years. But I think the key message from the metallurgical test work is that we've got a technical solution, right? We can produce products that will be marketable, whether it's dore and the recoveries is exceptional, right? I mean recoveries are as important as metal prices or grade in the project economics and the fact that we can get those high recoveries, particularly in the precious metals is really important.

Bryce Adams at Desjardins. The first one is on Valiente. You mentioned copper, gold, copper and silver. Maybe I put those in the wrong order there. But is there a preference? Should we be thinking about it as a gold vehicle?

I mean I think we're going to be opportunistic. And the Valle Ancho property specifically has 2 separate kinds of systems. So what we've seen are these Maricunga type systems similar to, say, Caspiche and Casale, which are gold with a little bit of copper, and that's the Nordin target, that oxide gold target. And then we see a separate probably different age copper gold system that would be more like what we have at Los Helados or Josemaria.

So we see specifically on the Valle Ancho property, it's going to be a bit of both, a bit of gold dominant and a bit of copper dominant. As far as what that company is going to go out and look for, it will be opportunistic within those, I think, focused on those 3 metals. We're not going to, I don't think, go off into things that we don't know that much about. We'll focus on those metals, and we'll focus on the region, but it will be sort of -- it will be opportunistic. It will really depend on what is the best projects that we find.

Got it. We'll stay tuned on that one. Jumping to Lunahuasi and the exploration adit. You mentioned one of the advantages is year-round drilling. Is that your intention that you would drill year-round? Or is there camp considerations that limit that factor? And then the follow-on, is there a Phase 2 of the exploration at like the 12- to 15-month time line that you talked to for completing it when that's done and you're drilling from those platforms, is there an extension to the adit that you would want to go deeper or something like that?

Yes. We haven't thought about that yet. I mean we permitted what we talked about, something that's going to be somewhere around 1,300 meters of development. One of the limitations is ventilation. So we've specifically designed this so it can be ventilated kind of down the adit without the need for vent raise.

Once you start getting longer, then you've got to start thinking about that. So that will be a factor down the road. I mean we think what we've got planned will give us access for all of the drilling that we want to do. The question about year-round drilling, that will be an interesting cost benefit analysis.

So I think there's -- there are definitely some advantages to year-round drilling a news flow and just kind of making significant progress, but there are also some downsides. And I think Bob mentioned one of them and one that people don't think about a lot is the value of thinking time.

So the fact that, right, having a seasonal program means that your people just have -- and we all just have time to think about what we've just done is incredibly valuable. And when you're kind of in the rush of a drill season, in order to have that thinking time, you've either really got to grow your team and then you start -- you just run the risk of starting to lose continuity and quality in some senses.

So it's going to be a balance between the value of that thinking time. I mean we are in high altitude environment here. We -- this year, and you would have seen the news from that Lundin Mining has put out on Caserones is just how heavy that winter has been.

So there's an aspect of fighting the weather and fighting the climate. And obviously, being underground protects you from all of that, but you've still got to get in and you've got to get supplies in and you're keeping these supply lines open. And there are many winters that aren't like this and they're fine and there's very little snow and you can get up there.

So it's not an easy answer. And I think we'll weigh a bunch of different things. If we think there's value in running a year-round program and like we're not going to incur sort of crazy costs in doing it, then we will. And obviously, things are really going to change once Vicuna gets up and running and are keeping roads open and all of that.

So I think it's kind of to be determined. But I think what we realized this summer was the value of thinking time. And that thinking time actually translates straight into shareholder value because it allows you to be more efficient about the work that you do. I don't know, do you have anything to add?

I mean I think what it does is it gives us options, right? So once you're underground, it's obviously easier to extend it if you can permit that than it is to start it. So once we get down there, if we see a different place we need to go to do drilling or extend it, we have the option to do that or not. And the same with the winter drilling, it gives us the option to drill through the winter if we decide that's the best thing to do. So for me, it just opens up the options that allow us to exploit and explore Lunahausi in the most efficient way possible.

And then, Bob, while you there, I'm not a geologist, but when you had the hypothetical model and then the Lunahausi model up on screen, you're overlaying them. I was thinking about the western side of Lunahausi and the potential for massive sulfides on that side. But then when you fast forward a couple of slides, I think you were thinking of that regional target as more of a porphyry target? Or is it both?

That's a really good point. Yes. I mean we typically show slices through things and you think 2 dimensions, but porphyry deposits are 3 dimensions, right? It's a thing that comes in like this and would have a shell around it of similar alteration and similar rocks. And we've drilled -- because our drilling has been from a particular direction towards the center of the porphyry, that's what we know about. But there's no reason that you're not going to see similar veins to the north, to the south, to the west. Yes. I mean think of it as a shell around the main porphyry part of the deposit.

Yes. We've drilled 1 quadrant of that shell. We haven't drilled the top of it, drilled the backside, the western back side of it. We haven't really drilled the north side of it. We've kind of drilled, I don't know, about 1/3 of the...

Is that because of access or some other reason?

Yes, it's because of access. I think I have to talk into the -- that's because of access. The topography means that we're drilling sort of -- or we have -- from surface, we just have access to about 1/3 of that circle. So that's one thing. The underground development will help us with, and that's something that kind of drilling from the top into it, like much as we did at Filo, that's something that we can do from that -- those plateau targets.

Got it. Yes. And my last one, and I'll jump off, I promise. But -- and maybe you don't have an answer for it, but if you were to put a resource estimate out tomorrow or next month, you've got your zones that you would focus on. Have you given any thought to what you would use for top cuts for the different zones? Or is that just a distant sort of problem to think about?

Yes, that's more of the latter. I mean that's getting into the pretty detailed analysis of a lot of different things. So I don't have a sense of top cut. Probably a top cut on the gold, there would be some. Obviously, I mean, you get assays up to 1,700 grams per tonne, you're for sure going to top cut that. I mean copper -- we do that in the news releases, yes, we cut things to 90 grams per tonne.

The copper mineralization is -- and you do that because it's the nugget effect, right? You've got -- if you drill 30 centimeters away from that, you're probably not going to get 1,700 grams per tonne, you'll get something very high, but it will be -- the copper doesn't have that kind of variability. Those massive sulfide veins have good continuity. And so those grades are much more real. So gold, yes, we would top cut it in some capacity, copper, I'm not sure.

Fahad Tariq from Jefferies. Can you talk a little bit about the RIGI submission at Lunahausi and maybe what went into that and what we should expect as next steps?

Yes. So for those of you that aren't familiar with RIGI, it's a large investment incentive regime that Argentina has put in place and think of it as a fiscal stability regime. So the Vicuna project, BHP and Lundin Mining received their RIGI or were kind of accepted into the RIGI regime earlier this year.

And there is a lot of projects in the queue, including ours. So we submitted our application in April. And now it's in this government review process with kind of -- we're not -- it's just kind of in the process in the queue. So there's a lot of projects because I think something that people don't maybe think about that much is RIGI is not just for mining projects.

It's for any large-scale investment. So there's a lot of projects in the queue, and we're somewhere in there. So we don't really have an update right now. I think we -- and that's something -- I think -- I guess the milestone for that will be if and when we're accepted under the regime, I mean, obviously, we'll news release that. But no real update other than that we've submitted it, and we're somewhere in the pile.

And then can you share what went into the submission? Like did the government require an initial resource estimate or some sort of capital estimate?

No.

No. And then lastly, this time last year at the Investor Day, you mentioned that the way you're thinking about Lunahuasi was a starter operation, maybe focusing on the high grade. And I think you mentioned again today, the analog is Lundin Gold Fruta del Norte and how they developed it. Can you maybe just talk about if that thought has evolved over the last year? And yes, just how you would think about the starter operation?

Yes. I think we want to be careful not to stray into too much speculation about development options that these are still early days. This is an exploration project. I mean, obviously, we do sort of internal engineering scenario planning, and we run stuff, but it doesn't it's not kind of -- it doesn't reach a level that we can publish and publicly talk about.

So we use that to plan our work, and these are the sort of back of the envelope calculations that you do to help guide your work. I mean that said, I think you just look at the -- I think it's just more the nature of the mineralization, high-grade veins. I mean we -- I don't think you need to do a lot of work to understand that this is probably going to be an underground mine, the topography, the vertical nature of that high-grade mineralization, like it all kind of -- it is going to be an underground mine, like I think we can say that. Sort of speculating about production rates and all of that, I think, is a little bit premature. I mean we kind of use that Fruta del Norte analogy more not to be like, oh, it's going to be this production rate, but more just to kind of, I guess, illustrate that there is the potential because of the grade, because of the nature of the deposit where you could think about mining it at different scales and those different scales would be driven by how much capital you had available.

I think the grade allows you to think about different scales of production, but I think it's too early to say it's going to be this or it's going to be that. Like there's a lot of work that needs to be done before we're there, including a resource estimate.

Sam Griffin from RBC. Just a follow-on on a couple of questions that have already been asked. But just on the arsenic treatment, are you looking at similar options as to what they're doing next door, exploring at Filo? Is there any differences why it would be treated differently? So presumably, longer term, I mean, there could be one sort of central processing site for the arsenic?

Yes. I mean I think Bob was involved with a lot of that work at Filo, so he can probably give a better answer. But I think the short answer is it's pretty similar to what -- mineralogically to what some of the mineralization at Filo.

Yes. I mean we went through the same thought process, tested the same kind of options at Filo as we did. We just -- this was a very similar program to the first test program that we ran at Filo. The results were very similar. So the answer is yes, it's whatever system ultimately gets chosen there would work well for both deposits.

Okay. Makes sense. And then just maybe a bit more granularity on Valiente. Like do you have a budget for a drill program for next year at Valle Ancho? Is that sort of the priority out of the gates? Or is it in tandem with sort of looking broadly for other deposits? Just trying to get a sense for kind of the priorities as that kind of launches next year.

Yes. I mean I think it's going to be a little bit of both, and we need to get -- we kind of need to get up and running first before we decide on the long-term budget. I mean we'll have -- the initial program is, I think, focused on -- I mean, we've got drill targets development developed, but there probably needs to be a little bit of work done to fully line those up, and that would be the initial program.

Yes, but the intention would be to eventually drill them Valle Ancho is a project that has attracted a fair amount of interest. So one of the possibilities there is maybe to partner with somebody to do that first round program. So there's a bunch of things that are up in the air that we'll be able to give more clarity on once the company is up and running.

But the idea is to, like I say, use that as a starter project, whether that's initial work is ultimately funded by Valiente or a partner, we'll see, we'll see what we can do there. That company will definitely be doing both at the same time in terms of work on Valle Ancho and going out and looking for new projects. So I think we want to do both. And where the emphasis ends up probably depends a little bit on whether or not we bring in a partner to answer or to advance Valle Ancho or not.

Any more questions? Okay. We got one last question online, which was about some of the mechanics of the spinout for Valle Ancho and if Valle Ancho would be listed. So maybe I can just quickly answer that. I mean, with regards to the mechanics of the spinout, those will all be detailed to the best of our ability in future press releases. So we'll be able to provide those at a future point in time. And yes, Valiente will be listed, which will also be detailed in those future press releases. So keep your eyes out for those press releases because important dates and important details regarding those mechanics will be included in this.

Yes. I think one thing that's important is if you're an NGEx shareholder, you will receive Valle Ancho shares. So I mean, right now, the only way to kind of get those Valle Ancho shares is by buying NGEx stock.

All right. Well, with that, thank you so much for coming, and thanks to everybody on the webcast for tuning in. If you have any questions or any follow-ups, please feel free to get in contact with us. Thanks so much.