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Tolu Minerals Limited

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September 17, 2024 at 4:00 PM (MDT)|Broadmoor Hotel & Resort

John (Iain) Macpherson

CEO and Managing Director

Iain is a seasoned mining executive with more than 40 years’ experience in senior operational management and executive roles in both the junior and major mining sectors. He has extensive operational, project management and project development experience at top management and executive levels in West Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Russia and the Asia Pacific. This includes a number of restarts, turnarounds and project delivery under tight capital constraints.
He has a track record of building businesses, operating, developing and financing mining projects, including involvement of a number of mining start-ups and turnarounds, leading the development of new projects and running significant stock market listings and financings. His recent focus has been the Asia Pacific region and in both Francophone and Anglophone Africa, but he has also successfully operated in Western and Eastern Europe and Russia.
Iain trained as a mining engineer at the Royal School of Mines. His early career was with Gold Fields in Southern and Western Africa, where he rapidly rose to senior operational roles, including maintain operations in aged mines and responsibility for managing a large expansion at West Driefontein gold mine.
He was transferred by Gold Fields to Tarkwa as Mine Manager responsible for commissioning and ramp-up of Gold Field’s new flagship gold mine at Tarkwa, but at the same time maintaining the mature and financially stressed Tarkwa underground mine in production for a number of years, pending the commissioning of the new surface mine.

He then moved to the junior sector in 1999 and held senior operational and executive roles in Eastern and Western Europe and Russia including the turnaround of two mature mines: Chelopech in Bulgaria and Almagrera in Spain that supported the construction and development of the Aguas Teñidas polymetallic mine in Spain.
He then took the role as COO for Trans Siberian Gold and led the exploration and feasibility study of the Asacha epithermal mine in remote Kamchatka.
Iain then moving to South Africa as a member of the executive team that set up UraMin Inc. As Chief Operating Officer he was central to building the business, developing a number of uranium projects worldwide and established and led the highly effective operations team that was instrumental in raising in excess of US$450 million to develop UraMin’s uranium projects and ultimately led to the sale of the company. In mid-2007, when Areva acquired UraMin for US$2.5 billion, Iain was retained as Managing Director to ensure that UraMin’s proven entrepreneurial approach was carried through into the new entity.
In early 2008, he left Areva to investigate a number of opportunities in the West and Central African mining sector, including what eventually became Elemental Mineral’s Sintoukola project. From late 2009 to July 2014, he was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Elemental, leading Elemental’s TSX IPO and building the team that took the project through exploration into project development and raising the finance to support the successful fast-track project strategy. This included setting up the in-country corporate structure with associated agreements, conventions, tax regime, etc.
In 2013 he founded Madini Minerals with a team of experienced mining professionals to build a new, multi-commodity mining business focussing on near term mining projects in need of capital and strong operational and corporate management. Current Madini focus on is on projects in DRC and Zimbabwe, leveraging strong local relationships and structures.
In early 2021, he was appointed as MD & CEO of Lole Mining Ltd (now renamed Tolu Minerals Ltd.), focussed on the acquisition and development of high value gold assets in PNG. He led the acquisition and permitting of the company’s projects, raising significant pre-IPO seed finance and led the IPO of Tolu Minerals on the Australian Securities Exchange completed in Q3.
Throughout his career Iain has been involved from time to time with distressed operations, but in particular, over the last 2 decades has focussed largely on restarts and distressed turnarounds.

This is an automatically generated transcript. Denver Gold Group cannot accept responsibility for mistakes, errors, omissions, or any action taken in reliance thereon. Use of this transcript is governed by Denver Gold Group’s Terms of Use.

Without further ado we get started here. So we got Ian mcpherson here from Tolu Minerals talking about their project in PNG. So I'll hand it over to you there. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to this presentation this afternoon about Tolu minerals and the refurbishment of the very exciting historical Tolu Kuma gold mine and the very large footprint exploration footprint around the mine that we are we're developing by leveraging the existing infrastructure. Give you about 10 minutes to read that. Then we'll move on Tokuma gold mine. It's in PNG. It's a, a well known, probably one of the great gold silver copper provinces in the world in the Pacific Ring of Fire. very substantial resources and operating mines historically but underdeveloped and, and definitely very much open for business. PNG over the years has perhaps had a little bit of bad press, but there's no doubt at all now that there's a real drive to get the, the the mineral sector going and to supplement the historically dominant oil and gas sector. And certainly we're getting a lot of support in order to get Touma mine back up and running back to the previous glory days, we've secured a very large footprint as you can see on the central, central province of, of PNG. and the central mountains, we're about 100 kilometers due north of Port Moresby, the capital city. And while we don't yet have a road in there for the next month or two, we're actually very close to the main north South highway. We're about 70 kilometers from the main North South highway and that will be addressed over the coming months. We've got a significant footprint of projects centered on the on the refurbishment of the Tolo Kuma gold mine, which is a historically very high grade low sulfur epi the gold silver producer, a footprint leveraging that asset onto the, the broader Tolo Kuma epidermal structure, which is largely low sulfur as epidermal but also includes high sulfur and some significant porphyry and indeed porphyry scar and targets. We have a pipeline of acids including Mount Penk on New Britain Island, a couple of 100 kilometers to the east of the mainland of, of Papua, New Guinea. Also a low sulfur as epi the very traditional but stra structurally very complicated and with serious showings of a significant polymetallic resource as well as being a low sulfur as copper. gold silver. I beg your pardon, not copper so much. And we also have secured Iy river, which is a an application slightly to the north west of that bulk of assets on the Tolo Kuma structure which is a pretty well known porphyry scarn. Again, part of our pipeline of assets going forward, there's a shot of the Touma gold mine. It was built in 1995 by Senko for dome resources. It was initially 100,000 ton a year gold plant with a shallow underground mine and very rapidly stepped up to 200,000 tons a year in its glory years. In the early two thousands, this mine was producing at a recovered gold grade of 23 g a ton recovered with about three times that of silver into a Dore. So that's a that's a significant grade, obviously. It is a low sulfur a epi the so relatively simple metall recovering into a pretty nasty truth be told gold, silver Dore, but nonetheless a very valuable product. and are those grades very, very substantial revenue stream. The mine was run in the early two thousands by DRD gold, the South African group that was and it was part of their globalization strategy. And in fact, it was the cash cow for the entire DRD group. They were rebuilding two deep level gold mines in South Africa on the back of the revenue stream from this mine. And there in lies the start of the of the problems for Takuma because essentially it wasn't recapitalized in those early years when it should have been. And specifically, Drd didn't build a road, they didn't maintain a three megawatt hydropower station that belongs to the mine. They didn't put a bottom entrance in for the sake of one kilometer of tunneling, which would have enabled the water, the the mine to dewater itself naturally. And worst of all, they neglected that hydropower station consistently. So that by the late two thousands, this mine was operating only on diesel power and bear in mind that there's no road either. So that diesel was flown under a helicopter as was everything that you see there in the in the picture. At at a time, there were 220 or 30 helicopter round trips here every single day. So you can see the you can see the fact of the the benefit of the of the grade at Tolo Kuma, but of course, that didn't become sustainable in the latter years as diesel prices rose, we've secured a a very large pipeline of assets as I mentioned earlier on the Tolo Kuma Structure specifically but also elsewhere. The Tolo Kuma structure itself is northwest trending. We have so far in addition to the mining lease, which is the little comma shaped polygon you can see in the middle there, we have secured also 1500 odd square kilometers of exploration leases around the mining lease on the Toloa structure following the strike of that structure which is northwest trending. And there's a very deliberate reason for that. We're busy putting a road in here. We're gonna ref return this mine to production and we want to be sure that we have the dominant position so that that we can grow the resource base regionally as well as on the mine itself. So very significant footprint and a work program that's now well underway focused on the accelerated development of the project as well as local online exploration, which is significant in itself but also regionally, a very large exploration footprint which I'll talk about in a moment. That's what the mine looks like. The mining lease itself is around about seven or eight square kilometers, so relatively small. But as I say in the center of this very much larger structure, the mining was focused on a central third of the mining lease on two main essentially vertical structures, the Tola Kuma structure to the to the west and the Z structure to the east. And the image on the, on the right hand side is a a 45 degree down look oblique, look east to west into those structures. So you can see the Xenia in the front and the Touma at the back and you can see the historical mining areas within that structure so quite contained. So even within the mining lease, you can see that there's significant opportunity for, for scale up as we go forward, we secured the, the asset in 2022 at the end of an exhaustive due diligence process. It came with a historical resource that it was a formally J 2004 resource that had been had allowed to be not to be code compliant. So a historical resource that we we converted to a jog 12 resource of half a million ounces over that central section of the, of the mining lease. So already, and that's, that represents approximately eight or nine years of the typical production rate of this mine in the early years, which was typically around about 50 or 60,000 ounces. So a significant resource base on the books already and very high grade. Very importantly, we are focused on the, on the near term upside of the extensions of that resource going to the South. We have continuity of structure that's been confirmed by Geophysics and, and and drilling in in the last 20 years or so, we have continuity of grade confirmed by drilling further to the south and also surface sampling where for instance, we've got a couple of historical holes in that southeastern section that, that return 300 g a ton, there's one trench over a channel width of just over a meter and 1000 g a ton. It's a very significant upside continuity of the of the known historical structures of the mine to the south and the southeast. And that's where our short term resource exploration is taking place. And in fact, we just completed a a small drilling program there on the tower structure about two kilometers south of the mining lease we own. By the way, the exploration lease surrounding Tola Kuma. So that will eventually fall into the the portfolio of the mining lease itself. We have also recently started a an airborne Magneto Teleri survey over the over the mining lease and over our broader footprint and that has also confirmed the the continuity of the structures going south. So very, very pleasing upside, very, very exciting resource uptick immediately around the mining lease. So what is our strategy and, and what are we going to do to address the reasons of the failure of the mine historically, which was really around about the the loaded cost base because of helicopter logistics, diesel fuel and inflexible mining. First thing is to fix the high logistical costs and it's very simple, we have to build a road and that was an absolute prerequisite when we started looking at this project a couple of years ago. And indeed, we start the very first project we started was the road construction Post, the IP O in November, December last year. We estimate that and it's a 70 kilometer road. It's a relatively simple, structure. It's a PNG Department of works rural spec which is a gravel, 5 m gravel road with lots of drainage protection, high wall protections., but basically a very simple road, we estimate that that road is gonna have a very, very significant impact on the cost base. probably reducing the cost base by a factor of about 30 times. And if I point to the fact, as I said earlier that there were around about 20 or 30 helicopter trips running a day back and forth to this mine to keep it going. You can appreciate why that would be the case. The second thing we have to address is the return on the refurbishment of the hydroelectric power station. It needs a little bit of TLC. The turbines need to be refurbished. The axis road and the infrastructure of the water feed to the turbine house itself needs to be repaired. That's a slightly onerous task and will take us about six months to complete because it's dependent on the road coming through to the mine because there's some pretty heavy equipment, we need to continue that work so that power station will only be refurbished during the middle of next year. And in the meanwhile, we've replaced the the old very heavy, very diesel inefficient generates sets with a couple of lighter sets that are far more efficient So we are reliant on diesel power at the moment. But that's got a limited life and we'll recommission that power station in due course, the other key issue we have to address is the operational flexibility. Any of you who have operated in epidermal gold mines will will know very well that one of the key success factors is operational flexibility. The old timers and it goes back to a WASI, for instance, in Ghana, that has been mining ethers for about 100 and 50 years, the old timers will tell you that regardless of what the resource blocks tell you because of course, resort blocks are a function of GEOS statistics and analysis, regardless of what the resource blocks tell you. The reality is that you're either in the gold or you're not in the gold. And for that reason, efficient and good experienced epidermal miners always maintain a high degree of operational face flexibility. which means ensuring that at any point in time, they have about two years of inventory of face available ahead of the operating mine. Now, that's a key discipline. It was obviously a major operating cost in the, in the early days and became, it was neglected in the late two thousands by subsequent operators. because because they were looking to drive the cost down. And the reality is what they did was they, they destroyed operational flexibility and that was part of the reason why the head grade, if you look at the, the historical profile of the head grade, although the resource didn't change at all, the recovered head grade went from the 23 of the early years when the mine was run by good epidermal operators from Southern Africa, DRD to seven. By the time the mine was shut down in 2015,, a key discipline and a and a significant cost as well to make sure that we redeliver that sto face inventory to ensure that we have that operational flexibility as we go forward. And the final key cost driver for this mine that we have to address is the cost of dewatering and pumping. The mine was sunk from the top of a mountain about 3 350 m down into the mountain. There was never a bottom entrance put in which is crazy for the sake of one kilometer of development. The mine has around about 90 kilometers of tunnels already. So to put a bottom entrance in really wouldn't have been a major task, would have required a little bit of capital, but it wasn't a major task that has to be addressed as quickly as possible to ensure that we get away from the not only the costs of pumping but the risks associated with pump failures in a and bear in mind. This is a narrow vein, shallow underground gold mine, but narrow vein means the the spaces are small and, and pump failures can be catastrophic with there were occasions when when the pumps failed and this mine was flooded for the best part of a month before they could recover it. So we have to get that bottom entrance in. So four or 54 key drivers that we will address as we move forward. And there is a as you can see a pretty comprehensive list of tasks that are underway. It's a mixture of exploration and refurbishment. First of all, near mine exploration, which is on the go at the moment, as I mentioned earlier, we've just completed a a drilling program at tower a couple of kilometers south of the mining lease. Very importantly though the real upside here, the real the money prize here, if you like is the regional exploration, we sit on a very large footprint on a pretty well known epidermal structure with some very significant hits over it over life. So the regional exploration is a, is a major element of our strategy going forward. And to that end, we've recently commissioned an airborne M Magneto Tale survey which is a a airborne Geophysical server that looks at the conductivity resistivity, magnetic fields in the crust and enables you to develop a pretty high resolution image of what's down there from, from surface to about a kilometer and a half down. which obviously enables some pretty effective target generation. And if you think about how drilling is done here in, in PNG surfer, drilling in steep mountains, tough mountains helicopter service where you have to fly a bulldozer up under a helicopter, you fire the drill up under a helicopter, you fry the driller and his sandwiches up under a helicopter. And if you're lucky, you might get two holes from one pad. So you really want to be sure that your exploration, drilling, regional exploration, drilling from surface is well targeted. And that's what the airborne MT does for us and that is underway. And I'll show you some of the, I think it's fair to say spectacular results we've been achieving there up till now. Axis Road, an absolute prerequisite that road will be through by the end of the year. And it's going to be a major change to the the cost profile of this operation, both both the mine itself but also the regional exploration which is also serviced by the road. We've we've commenced and are fairly advanced in the environmental baseline assessment. The mine has come to us fully permitted, but of course, in taking over any operation, the first steps are to understand the environmental baseline, make sure that you assess it properly and make sure that you're you're poised with, with environmental and social management plans moving forward, that survey is underway and then a whole suite of tasks around about planning the restart of the mine, planning the regional exploration refurbishing the existing plant, this plant for instance, and the mine itself and the accommodation camp, the canteens, everything have been in care and maintenance since 2015. So there's an element of refurbishment that's taking place at the moment to to return those, those facilities and infrastructure to operational capability. And I'm pleased to say that's progressing very well. And then of course, the hydropower generation will kick in once the road connects to the main site. In fact, that was the original plan, but I'm pleased to say that we've started accessing that hydropower station already because we managed to refurbish one of the pieces of yellow metal on the mine site which we're using to refurbish those roads down to the hydropower station. So we've actually stolen a bit of a march there, the road, 70 kilometer road, You can see from the map there. It's a fairly tortuous road with a, a pretty serious set of switchbacks. It's a 5 m wide gravel road through rainforest and fairly tough mountainous terrain that slide at the top is is a fairly benign section. It's there's some pretty tough sections that we've gone through already there. Very important road. And you can see there, the community support, there is no access road to this area. Th this road, by the way, is part of the Asia Development Bank connect PNG infrastructure program financed, as I say, which is a about an $8 billion program over the next five years. But of course, junior miners, any miners for that matter, you wait for the governments or the Chinese or whoever to build roads at your peril. So we've taken the decision that we will build this road ourselves. The government are supporting us and they will come behind us and upgrade the road in due course, I'm confident of that and, and in fact, they are supporting us already. But nonetheless, we've, we've, we've engaged one of the top civil contractors in the country to build this road for us. It's it's one of the top independent power producers. He's built six hydropower stations in PNG over 30 years and that of course includes hundreds of kilometers of roads in the mountains. And of course, the reason he's doing it is he wants to build our future power station as we ramp up the mine, the existing power station is one thing, but as we scale up the operation, which is very much part of our strategy. We need a larger power station. It's been designed, The A G the company is surveying the site at the moment, but that's something that we'll address going forward the airborne Magneto Taric survey. I'm not sure how familiar you are with this survey. It was it's been, it's becoming one of the, the, the world leading Geophysical survey techniques. It's advanced rapidly in the last five or so years. We've engaged a company called Expert Geophysics out of Canada. who are the absolutely the global leaders to fly this survey. You can sort of see in that photograph, there's a helicopter up near the top and about 100 m below it, there's an orange array which is flown on a very precise set of flight lines, 200 m grid, flight lines pretty much perpendicular to the strike of the of the structures. And the the map on the bottom left, for instance, you can see the the grid lines, 200 m grid lines. And what it produces is a we just guide, we should wrap it up fairly. I think we pretty much the end what it produces are very high resolution images. 100 m slices from surface to about 1.5 kilometers and sections every 200 m. So a very, very key important tool in defining the in in basically drawing a picture of what's down there down to a kilometer and a half to really enable targeted drilling, which as I said earlier is pretty horrific. There are, there are the early results from the first phase of it, we've flown about 700 of our 2.5 1000 square kilometers. I won't dwell on the picture, but suffice to say that it's busy and it's throwing up some tremendous targets already, including some significant expansions immediately around the mine. Never mind the regional targets. So very, very exciting. This was released just a week ago and that survey continues to this day. So in summary, we're leveraging an existing major capital infrastructure, plant infrastructure on the site itself to get the mine up and running. The replacement cost of the plant is, is probably around about $200 million and the mine maybe 100 and 50 million. So very significant investment sunk investment that we're levering to create value rapidly, you know, I will have to wrap it up here. Ok. Yeah. Thank you very much. Sorry about that for a question. Yeah, I I think he


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