2min chapter

Eat Your Crust cover image

Asian (American) Beauty Standards

Eat Your Crust

CHAPTER

Tattoos in Korea

I kind of feel like the piercing the strictness about piercings might be more for Asian guys. I think tattoos are definitely so taboo in Asia. They're so associated with gangsters in Asia at least in Korea that my mom literally told me she was like I'll disown you and I'll carve you out of our we have like a family to.

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Speaker 2
And maybe we talk about the infrastructure first before we get into the exploration upside here on the project, because there's quite a bit of land there to be explored that hasn't been properly explored in its history. So let's table that, but let's talk about this infrastructure. You have you have a permitted 3000 tons per day mill with two float circuits. You have a tailing storage facility. You obviously have access to a human capital and workforce with its very close proximity to the Matagami town and the city there. You know, where is this infrastructure at as far as being able to utilize as far as production? Is it well-maintained? Is it something you can just flip the switch and go here, Peter? What needs to happen? Yeah,
Speaker 1
I think you've got to be careful these days because having infrastructure sometimes could also just mean it's some concrete and rusty metal. The Matagami mill is not that. The Matagami mill was operated by Glencore until June of 2022. And Glencore is an incredibly good operator. The zinc group did a phenomenal job there, and they operated that mill and ran it well until the end and left it in very good condition. And so the mill was shut down, as I say, in June of 2022. And so it is in very good condition. There is some work to be done on it, but really it's very minor. They maintained it to the end. There's some of the infrastructure, some of the components in there, some of the key pieces of equipment are really not that old. And so we've got a great piece of equipment there, you know, the mill, as you say, is 3,000 tons per day. Two float circuits, there's a lot of capacity, there's capacity to actually run it faster than 3,000 tons a day, that's typically what they were running it at. But, you know, to get another, you know, 500,000 tons a day out of it is actually quite feasible and at times it was actually sort of peaking there so there's a lot of capacity there and it's in great condition we had third-party review done by G Mining on it so you know this isn't just us looking at it and and and waving our arms around this is we've had some people in there to actually have a look at this and give us that third-party review of it. You mentioned Talens facility. Now, actually, we don't get the Talens facility, but that's actually a big benefit to us. The Talens facility on the Metagami property is, as I say, 60 million tons has been mined there. It's all gone into that Talens facility, and it's really, it's essentially full. It was due for an expansion and Glencore, because they were closing it down, obviously didn't do that. that the downside is that we don't get a tailings facility with it, but the upside is that we don't get the liability that goes along with it, and Glencore remains responsible for that liability for the closure of that site. And so we're working alongside them on the property, and they are focusing on the closure of the existing tailings facility. But a mill without a tailings facility is somewhat useless, and so we actually started back in 2023, we started looking at the permitting of a new tailings facility. And obviously a lot of that revolves around environmental baseline work that has to be done and that's seasonal. And so we started that back in 2023. So we've kind of got two summer seasons already we've had the biologists out in the field we've had this year we did some preliminary geotechnical drilling and hydrology on two preferred sites we've actually evaluated a total of five sites but we've got two preferred sites which you know we we're communicating with the with the local community as well in terms of what is best for them as well. So we've been advancing the idea of permitting a new tailings facility. And on our current schedule is that we could have an environmental impact assessment for that facility completed by the end of 2025. So that then de-risks that piece of infrastructure we don't have. Existing infrastructure that we also have is the Bracemac-McLeod mine. So that was the last mine. They operated just over 9 million tons mined from that. There was a modest resource of about a million tons, or not resource technically yet, but it was a Glencore resource, historic resource, that about a million tons that Glencore left behind there that they never finished mining. They remember they picked a date and then they shut the mine down and there was some resource left there. We've actually discovered an extension to that. So we're adding to that resource. So we see that infrastructure permitted, built, being of value to us as not really, you know, it's not a long term, we don't believe there's going to be another, whatever it was, five, 10 years of mining coming out of it, but it will be something that will be low capex, get that back into production without the burden of having to permit that mine as well. It comes with ventilation, electrical shops on surface and everything else that is all in place. And again, it was built by Glencore, so you can imagine the infrastructure is world class. So then it's everything else in between, right? It's the pumping system. It's the roads, the security, all of those pieces, the electrical infrastructure. So often juniors are faced with a case of, you know, you barely got a road onto the property. You know, we've got Hydro-Quebec having power on the property. We've got water. We've got roads. Everything is on the property. It's all there. It's all at our disposal. And the town, less than 10 kilometers away, it was built around the mine. And so that gives us access to a community that was there for the mine and so you know a number of the people still live in the town actually to my knowledge at this point nobody actually left the town a lot of people are working outside of the town but they never left so the town is town is a great place there's there's it's it's actually a very, very nice mining town. The management there do an excellent job in creating an environment that people actually want to stay and they'll travel for work. So I think we can win those guys back again. Peter,
Speaker 2
with this tailing storage facility or potential new facility and the permitting work that happens, Is that, and forgive me if this is a naive question, but is that a whole separate permit with the province of Quebec or is that kind of an amendment to the current permit that you currently hold? No, it will be a new permit and it is provincial. And so
Speaker 1
it is a new permit. It's a separate tailing storage facility. You know, working with Glencore alongside them is that really there wasn't an opportunity that could work for both parties in terms of just adding on to the existing tailings. You know, there was no way of kind of dividing up that liability there. And so we opted for the route of something completely new.
Speaker 2
Okay. And so with the concentrator site that you have and all this infrastructure, I mean, it's obviously great to have it. But without the tailings facility kind of in place, it's a moot point because it doesn't sound like you can actually produce anything until that's taken care of, which leaves you kind of a year runway here. Maybe kind of walk us through the cost of maintaining the facility alone. I know you just did a raise. You did a flow-through raise, I think, late last month. And I'm not sure if those funds, can they be used for maintenance of a facility or is it specifically for exploration? So maybe talk about that burn rate and how you go about
Speaker 1
funding that. Yeah, so let's just touch on the financing. So we actually did a series of financings leading up to the RTO going public and then the flow through financing. So we closed a special warrant private placement at the end of July of last year. And then we did a subsequent sub-receipt financing, which was a concurrent financing with the RTO, which we closed as well together with the going public on the 17th of December. And so that was $9.2 million in the sub-receive. Then we did the flow-through financing, and that was just a small round of flow-through, which we closed on the 30th of December. And that was just a small group of mainly some of the original shareholders that came in and that we did that small round of flow through. So you're correct in that you can't maintain the mill on flow through financing, but everything else we did, that was all hard dollar financing. That was all hard dollars. So we currently sit as at the end of December, we sat with just over $12 million Canadian, $12 million in the bank. And so two of that is flow through and the rest of it is all hard dollars and that that is really then you know the hard dollar financing that the money that we raised is really aimed at not just you know the the cost of actually current maintenance or carrying maintenance let's call it on the mill at this point we don't really have any costs we We spend about $50,000 a year, maybe $50,000 to $100,000 a year on keeping pumps running in sumps in the mill itself. But generally, the building is locked up. It's in, call it, cold storage. There's no power on the buildings at this point, but the buildings, we do a little bit of pumping of inflow water into subs. But other than that, there's a very low cost of maintaining the site. At this point, Glencore is basically, they carry the cost of that because they are still working on that site. That's their base for the closure. So the financing that we have right now is going to go predominantly into, for this year, into exploration and then also into the continued work on permitting, de-risking, metallurgical work, infill drilling, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2
Okay.

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