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Ok. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to this next session of the Denver Gold Forum. My name is Dave Ratcliffe. I will be adjudicating the session. I am the managing director of Global Mining Research and today it is my great pleasure pleasure first up to introduce West African Resources and here to present is Richard Hyde to present the story. Richard is a geologist and as a fellow geologist, that means he's gotta be a good bloke. So, Richard over to you. Thanks very much Dave as a good bloke and a geologist as well. So I'm here to talk about West African Resources projects in Burkina faso. And we are the, the region's mid-tier or emerging mid-tier producer. So have some forward looking statements. This presentation will be on our website also on the A sx. This is a lovely photo to start off with. We've been in production since 2020. We're one of the few companies to make it through from a junior exploration company into production on time on budget under budget. First gold was poured in March 2020 that's our million ounce poured a, a month or two ago, just one snapshot on the company. We've managed to assemble some excellent projects in, in Burkina faso. We've got nearly 13 million ounces of unhedged resources, nearly 6.5 million ounces of unhedged reserves. We're tracking really well to this year's guidance. We're tracking over 210,000 ounces of production at the moment at substantially less than 1300 us an ounce. We've got a 10 year production target. So we've, we've managed to put a lot of drilling into our projects over the last few years. We we, we're looking to produce over 420,000 ounces a year from, from this year and, and we believe that will increase over the next few years with further drilling and bringing on some underground mines on our current projects. We've got over 1300 square kilometers of really prospective ground in, in around our projects in Burkina. And we are getting back into the drilling business recently purchasing five drill rigs. We've got a market cap of a bit over 1.6 billion Australian at the moment. just under 500 million Australian in, in cash. We've got a 250 million debt facility that's fully drawn. So over the last few years, we've assembled a a really high quality board and management team. So we've got a board of seven. we've got two geologists, two engineers. We've got hr a banker and an accountant, lawyer, so very well balanced board. We've got an excellent,, executive team as well. with all with ex extensive experience in, in mining and also in West Africa. and I, I believe they're, they're all experts and sort of first class in the discipline just quickly on capital structure. We got about 1.1 billion shares on issue. So we did start off as a junior. So we did have to issue some shares when we were in the exploration days. You know, I started this company 18 years ago, we listed it in 2010, took over a company in 2014, made a discovery in 2016, funded our project in 2018 and poured first gold in 2020. So it's been overnight success 18 years in the making. So look, I've already run through some of the highlights around market cap and cash. We've got a really healthy sort of following now with six analysts co it is six analysts covering us. So apologies to, to counter cord they should be on there as well. And we're truly a in institutional company now owned right across the globe. So our projects are located in Burkina, Faso, South and central, about an hour and a half east of, of Ouagadougou and about two hours south west southeast of Ouagadougou for our two key projects in Burkina. We, we've been a significant sort of contributor over the last few years to the Burkina economy. And we've got a very good relationship with the government there. You know, always paying our royalties and taxes on time which, you know, keeps us, keeps us in good standing. We've actually managed to really grow the company over the last few years with some o originally with some excellent exploration and success. And then with some smart acquisitions. so reserves in blue and, and in gold there, you can see our resources. This is our 10 year plan. So, because I'm a geologist and we focus a lot on drilling. What we, what we do is we put a lot of, a lot of effort into, you know, building out resources and reserves. So currently, we, we will be over 420,000 ounces from, from this year for the next decade. We're averaging over 480,000 ounces from 2026 for a number of years. And I believe we can actually take this, this company to, you know, more than 20 years that more than half a million ounces of production per annum, just with the assets that we've got and the exploration upside, it's a shot from the open pit at M five, which is our main open pit. So a quick snapshot of San Brado, which was our flagship project. We, we've got nearly 5 million ounces in, in resources. It's a conventional open pit underground operation. So we've got a low grade open pit right next to a very, very high grade underground mine which has been tracking close to 9 g for this calendar year. We built this as a 2 million ton per plant in 2020. We de bottle necked and we've now got it at a run rate of 3.2 million tons per annum. It's got a mine life for 15 years and we believe we can take that further. All the pro all the the deposits on our project have got very strong vertical continuity and every time we step back and drill deeper, we keep hitting the same mine organization. I've already mentioned our guidance that we're tracking above guidance in in production. Notwithstanding all the issues that I have to talk about every time I come to this place to talk about, you know how challenging West Africa can be, but the deposits actually make it worthwhile being there and sorry, the deposits down the people. We've got a predominantly bike and abbey workforce. Over 93% of our workforce in Burkina is is Birk and Abbey. We've got a triple which is trending well below the West Australian average for safety as well. So, very, very good, safety record. So the next 10 years at Sambrano look like this or based on, on the, the latest study that we put out every, every March, we put out a 10 year plan, which not a lot of companies can do. We might even look at a 15 year plan for the next update because we're having that much success. So we currently got a run rate of about 3.4 million tons per annum annualized. We've already produced about 100 and 8000 ounces for the year. This is the to the end of June this year. We're unheeded. So we've been selling the first half we sold at, at 2200 us and it's obviously gonna be a lot higher this, this half as well. And we're using this project Sambrano to fund our next project as well. So towards the back end of this sort of 10 year plan, we believe we can actually add a lot more underground material. So we've got drilling programs that are active at the moment and we will, the next update is gonna be probably averaging 250,000 ounces a year from about 2030. So this was the engine room that we discovered in 2016, we've taken this project from surface down to one kilometer in drilling. Currently, we've got a drill program where we're converting inferred resources into indicated measured resources. And we'll convert that into all reserves later this year. You can see some, some of the results recently from our resource definition drilling. 45 at 716 at 8, 23 at five. It's a cracking project. And so far this year, it's averaged about 8.5 9 g per ton. So I've mentioned that all of our deposits have got very strong vertical continuity. The M five open pit, the southern part of that pit, which you saw in an earlier photograph has got a very high grade sheet in the, the southern end. We've modeled that in the open pit and run a simulation with the grade control data from the open pit mining. And we believe that's gonna be our next underground mine. We've drilled that down to about 400 m below surface. We're currently driving across from M one across to M five. And, you know, there's even a chance we might find more in between because, you know, there, there's a good chance that we can see repeat structures and we're getting a few sniffs, you know, in the underground development. But by the end of this year, we'll be drilling off the bottom of M five and we bring that, we'll bring that into the mine plan, hopefully by the fir end of the first quarter next year. And that's where we think we'll bring the average production up to about 250,000 ounces per annum at San Brado. This is what the, the kind of underground simulation looks like in the bottom of the open pit, very, very solid data. It's you know, very consistent mineralization. I won't read through all the results there, but you know, 20 m at four and 11 m at 11, those sort of results are gonna work very nicely underground. And this is only one part of M five. It's a 2.5 kilometer long structure. We have been in development mode for nearly four years, so we haven't done a lot of drilling. We just recently purchased five rigs, so three underground rigs, sorry, three RC rigs, two diamond rigs and we'll be actively drilling this deposit from early next year. We're looking to take that down to 200 vertical meters. Our reserves are run at 1400 us an ounce. So we could actually run this at a higher, a higher gold price and look to either cut the pit back, but we have found a lot of high grade shoots in the grade control data from the open pit. We may look to, to take it underground as well. So the, the southern end of that, you can see you were just looking at on the previous light. We believe that there's no, no reason why that won't continue down to a kilometer as well. Which is what we've, we've shown at M One South. Our third project for the San Brado Complex is, is to AGA. This is a project we purchased off B two gold in 2020 so 2020 we've run, it's a 1.3 million ounce resource. At 1400 we've got about 600,000 ounces in a pit. It's about 6.5 year my life. We're currently running an underground scoping study on this as well and with the grades like 47 at 4, 88 at two, 22 at five, we believe we will take this underground as well. So again, we believe that there's, you know, at least 1520 years of, of production left at San Brado. using the existing deposits that we've got without doing too much more regional exploration. We'll have an underground study out on this by the end of the year our growth project. So we, we purchased another project off B two gold in 2021. We kind of settled in 2022 and we've taken this from, you know, absolute farmland to two thirds complete inside four years. Sorry, three years. You can see the photo from last year and the photo from this year, we've had a very wet, wet season, but notwithstanding that we're on track,, we'll be seeing this project up pouring gold by the time we come back here next year, Kia is a massive deposit. You know, it's, it's an opportunity that, you know, I guess if, if Burkina hadn't been such a challenging jurisdiction, we would nev never have got the opportunity to, to build this project. We've done the first grade control on this project, the first drilling probably in 10 years and it's exceeding our expectations. So grades like 30 at 4, 29 at 2, 30 at two, all from surface. And the model that we've got on this project, you can see we depleted the top of the, of the ore body for overburden. So we're straight into free dig, 100 and 8200 m wide. It's a very, very solid deposit. The starter pit on this is 0.8 to one. So less than 1 to 1 strip ratio. One of the challenges that we've got is, we've got to find more waste to build infrastructure out of. It's a quick snapshot of of Kaka, we've done a fair bit of work compressing the site. We've designed this at as a nameplate of 8.4 million tons per annum, but we believe we'll take this up over 10 million tons per annum. And that should see Kara with a much higher production rate than what we've got in our, in our last study. Capex is 447 million. We did the original Capex on this project in in August 2022 and that was 432 million. So we've already brought one project in on time under budget. This would be our second one by the looks of it cos it's very, very close tracking, very close in a high inflation environment. Our most recent pivot is that we we're changing to owner mining, so we raised 100 and $50 million in July and we've gone ahead and purchased our fleet. So we've gone for big trucks, 785 trucks, 100 and 50 ton dump trucks, 60 tw, 6020 diggers, so big 200 ton diggers. So we're gonna get the economies of scale with big big equipment and also we'll get the the efficiencies of having a brand new fleet. So first production is, is scheduled for about a year from now. If we have a bit more sort of success in country, maybe a bit earlier. So just quickly touching on the feasibility studies, this has been refreshed in July this year. So we're gonna produce 4.5 million ounces of gold at 90%. So it's very simple metallurgy. nearly 260,000 ounces a year for the first five years. I think that's conservative and 234,000 ounces over life of mine, which is about 20 years. So I, I think if we can compress this, we're running our reserves at a $1400 gold price. So still quite conservative. Well, and costs under 1200 and free cash flow with 2500. I'm not a mathematician, but it's gonna be higher than 3.4 billion us. We're currently tracking the first gold in about a year from now. The project's currently two thirds complete. We're over two thirds complete on concrete. We're, we're tracking to budget all the key equipments on site. We'll start having fleet arriving in Q four. We, we've partnered up again with Lycopodium who's had a lot of success in West Africa. We built our first mine with Lycopodium in 2020. You know, we've got a member of Lycopodium on our board as a director, so no conflict, no interest, you know, we work together very well. And that's got us. The the, the schedule has got us, you know, ramping up a first gold in Q three next year, some quick snapshot from sites. So those tanks are now finished and being water tested. You can see the the platforms for the mills and the, and the bond deck and on the right hand side, you can see the,, you know, the Crusher Tower and, the reclaim chamber. I'll just, just touch on e ESG it's very important and, and what we do in, in Burkina is,, you know, we work very closely with our communities. You know, our operations provide a lot of funding to the, to the government just last year. We paid $97 million in royalties and taxes. We're a very safe company. You know, we've got great people. Over 20% of our workforce is female. Over 30% of our senior management is female. We hire locally. We've got some excellent programs with our, our seedlings revisit for re revisitation and also gifted to communities. We done a lot of training as well. So completed over 25,000 hours of of Australian accredited training. We're also running a university scholarship program, which is in its third year. So we, we're selecting a male and female student, a high school student from s from the San Brado region and funding them through university. So we, when we talk about ESG it's about integrating sustainability into our operations for a long-term view. So, and that's a genuine statement you can see on the right hand side, we've already started re revegetation, the W M one waste dump. You can see the shot of the, the seedlings that we grow. We grow about 20,000 seedlings a year. Again, we were a significant contributor in Burkina faso and that's why we're a good partner. And the Burkina government understands that. So we've already paid more than $325 million in royalties and taxes since we started mining. bringing on our second project that's gonna increase exponentially. We've invested in the local communities with 6.2 million paid into community projects, and other sort of benefits. We've built three schools, electrified five. I mentioned other programs as well. So very important programs that we do in the country. A workforce I mentioned previously. So nearly 900 m 900 people on, on site direct employees, 2000 in the company including contractors. I've already mentioned some of the other programs there and we hire globally as well. So why invest in West Africa? Well, we've managed to withstand the sort of the volatility of the region for the last few years. We've got a couple of good deals away. We're on time on budget on our, on our second project, which is gonna see us nearly producing 500,000 ounces a year. We believe they're long life assets. We have no hedging in place. We're doing all the right things with our community and with the government and country. We're already generating strong cash flow, which, which is help helping fund our second projects. We've got more rigs, so there's gonna be more drilling going on on our exploration projects. Creating value through the drill bit, which is what we've done previously. So it's gonna be good to be getting back into some exploration again, you know, once we get through this current period and I believe we can do better than four and 20,000 ounces a year over the next decade. So thanks very much for your time. Great. Thank you, Richard. Now we do have time for some questions if there's any questions from the room? Ok. At the front here. Hi, Richard two questions. Number one expropriation of assets in Burkina. That's kind of the fear of some investors. How are you seeing that? And is it like still in your mind a safe jurisdiction to invest? And number two, are you thinking of growing within Burkina as well if you've got assets around you that you want to acquire or is that something not in the, in the kites yet? No, look, I think it's really important when you're building a project is to deliver. The most important thing we can do right now is deliver Kara on time on budget, poor gold, make money. Simple as that on the first question. Absolutely not. The most recent transaction was not a expropriation. My understanding was it's the P KNA government's stepping in resolving a dispute between two parties. So, look, we've had a fantastic relationship with the government. We talk to them all the time. We had a delegation in Australia just recently. No, so it's a great place to invest and you know, it's got the best rocks in the world for, for a geologist like me. Alright, brilliant. Thank you very much, Richard. Thank you. Ok. Next up is resolute mining and here to tell the story today is managing director.