Hycroft Mining

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Good afternoon everyone. I'm Diane Garrett, president and CEO of Highcroft Mining. I'm really excited to be here presenting to you at the European Gold Forum. I'd also like to take just a moment and give a shout out to those who are in the virtual audience, to Andy, Justin, and our entire ape community. You have been here with us from the very beginning. You believed in our journey and mission. Thank you for the diamond hands and thank you for your support, and this is for you to the moon. And for those of you in the audience who have no idea what I just said, you can ask me about it later. It's quite an amazing story. This is our disclaimer. Which we will not read. We are located in northern Nevada. This is the Highcroft mine, which some of you may recall because it has been a successful heap bleach producer off and on since the 1980s, but this is not the Highcroft that you used to know. We have come into what's always been known as a world class asset but low grade, and we have turned it into something extremely amazing. We were drawn to this company because we recognized there was an opportunity to find out what was feeding this massive resource, and by doing 2 years of meticulous technical work we have discovered not one but 2 very, very high grade silver systems. We're now finding high grade gold, and the story is just beginning and evolving. Key investment highlights we are among the world's largest precious metals deposits with over 16 million ounces of gold, over 500 million ounces of silver. I'll show you more of that in a moment. Two high grade silver discoveries, only 8000 m of drilling in 14 months, and we already have a resource of over 100 million ounces of silver, 300,000 ounces of gold. We increased. Our resources over the last two years by 55%. We have 189 million cash in the bank, no debt, and we trade on multiple indices, notably the SILV, the sole active silver, and the GDXJ, which is interesting because 60% of our revenues will be generated from gold, 40% from silver, but we are traded more like a silver company. We have a management team that has a very good record of success in delivering wonderful value to our shareholders, which is why these institutional investors came in last year once we were able to clear the debt that we inherited and propelled us from a market cap of about 200 million to 4.5 billion at one point. Today we sit about 3.4 billion. market cap. We were extremely undervalued due to that debt as a developer. Eric Sprat today, who is the quintessential precious metals investor and one of the biggest silver bulls you'll ever meet, owns 43% of the company. Black Rock came in. They said, we want 10%. That's Evie Ambro out of the UK and of course a whole host of other institutions, so we're really pleased to have them in. As I mentioned, our gold increased to 16 million ounces in the M&I category, over 5 million ounces in the inferred category, silver, over half a million ounces in the M&I category, with an additional 132 million in the inferred category. And if we look at this on a gold equivalent basis because we have such a substantial amount of gold and silver, we're almost 23 million ounces in the M&I category and another 7 million in the inferred category and this is where it gets very interesting, almost 2 billion, well, 2 billion ounces of silver in M&I on a silver equivalent basis, another 600 million in the inferred category. This is what our project looks like. You can see that it's had a long history of operations. We don't have any reclamation environmental liabilities. The resource still sits in this area, but what's great about this is that we have all of our permits for heap bleach and milling. Of course you're always modifying permits as you go through operations and expand your scope, but we have permits for heap bleach and milling, and we have a substantial amount of infrastructure on site. Our two new high grade silver discoveries, brimstone and vortex, look like this in the mineral resource footprint if you're looking at it from the sky. There's just the details. This is the brimstone deposit, beautiful high grade silver veining, very typical of an epithermal system, which it is. Our silver is well distributed throughout the entire ore body and the silver that you see, here in these areas is, sorry, silver that has yet to be factored into the resource, similar with gold, sorry, that was a bit much after lunch, and to show you the scale of this, this is the Eiffel Tower that sits right here. you can just see how large this system is compared to the Eiffel Tower. Our land position is a total of 64,000 acres or 26,000 hectares or 100 square miles, and the resource itself just sits within this blue area. We have a lot of potential targets outside the resource area, but this area is what we're currently permitted on and where we're currently drilling and expanding. Our land position is bigger than Manhattan. Manhattan is about 22 square miles. We're over 100 square miles, so we have a lot of availability. But we are different from most developers because we have a substantial amount of infrastructure on site. We have a fully operational lab. We have truck shops, maintenance shops, warehouses, admin buildings. We also have 3 stages of crushing, which will be utilized in the next phase of operation, that's the tertiary crusher, this is the secondary, and this is one of the world's largest primary crushers that FLS makes. We have 2 processing facilities. This is the this is the rimstone processing facility. And this is the Merrill Crow processing facility. We have a rail line that runs right through the property. This is Union Pacific. It is operational today. This is gonna be a great benefit because if we produce a concentrate and wanna ship it, we have a rail line. We'll bring in a couple of spurs to the main gate, excuse me, but it's also gonna be very beneficial in bringing reagents in. And we also have a brand new leach pad that is ready to receive ore because in about the 1st 20 years of the operation we'll still be in and out of heap leach material in addition to milling material. So what we're doing now is advancing. All the engineering work because the operation shut down when they were depleting the oxide and oxide material which is for heat bleach and getting into sulfide. So now we're going to be building the milling operation for the sulfide ore. Excuse my voice, I've been talking a lot lately. So looking at this at a bird's eye view. This is brimstone and vortex. And here's how the high grade systems are looking. This particular image has not been updated with the recent drill results, but I'm about to show you that. So when we talk about high grade, what do we mean? Well, the best hole, our discovery hole, best hole ever drilled in the 40 year history of Highcroft, was 85 m of over 500 g of silver. Half of that 40 m was over 1000 g, and within that first hole we had many intercepts over 2000 g 1 10,000 g. Then we drilled the best hole ever again, and that was 21 m of 2800 g of silver. That was really spectacular and in that hole we had 80,000 g intercepts and what I would invite you to do is please go look at our website because all of our drill results are on our website. They're also in our PowerPoint deck. I know you want me to walk through all those with you today, but multi-thousand gram intercepts, not just over small intervals, but 2030 40 50 m intervals. This is staggering for us and for this ore body. And then brimstone is. Always been known and typical of multi-thousand gram intercepts, and vortex has been equal very high grade but slightly less grade, but they've recently shown up and Vorortex has said don't forget about me. And not only did they deliver a phenomenal intercept with almost 3000 g of silver, but 33 g of gold. We have never seen that anywhere at Highcroft, so we're real excited about that, and I want to show you a little bit more. So we're first gonna talk about brimstone. we are doing step out drilling now. We already have a nice resource. We wanna see how large the system can be. We wanna wrap that into a new resource and then we wanna complete the economics and the technical study. We have a massive resource at Highcroft. But what we want to do is start mining on the high grade, and that is our focus right now make them bigger, get the engineering work done, put out a preliminary report with economics, and start studying this from an underground mining perspective. Brimstone starts within 30 m of the bottom of the brimstone pit, very easy access. We are working right now with an engineering firm that is looking at putting in an exploration decline so that we can drill from underground, but also it would be large enough that we could use for production, so we're already. Seeing the opportunity for mining this underground or we wouldn't be spending this money. We're also drilling 4 with 4 core rigs, 2 on site, 2 on their way. And we're drilling 3 times the size of the program we did in our discovery year, so over 20,000 m. That's an indication to you that we think these systems are going to become much larger. They're still open in all directions and at depth. This was the last hole that we reported, so we're extending brimstone down depth, but we also have an opportunity up here to start mining that open pit and then diving on the deeper portions of brimstone. And this is from our wire frames of our most recent modeling of brimstone, which again, you can see comes very near to the pit bottom. One of the things that we're targeting at Brimstone, if you'll look in our news and on our website, is we have identified what we believe is a potential feeder system for brimstone. We're now looking at brimstone southeast, so it's in your view, looking as if it's a different direction. But we stepped out and we found 11 m of 385 g in this area. We are drilling deeper. We have more drill holes pending on this. We're seeing a lot of fluid flow coming up through the core, which are always good indicators and very significant structural controls on brimstone. On vortex, we have now extended this system to the west, to the south, and to the north. Vortex Looks like this, it's much more flat line than brimstone. vortex and brimstone are two entirely different systems. They were formed at different times. Highcroft has had at least 3 mineralizing events occur on this property that we know of. That means that we didn't just have 1 event that deposited precious metals, but there have been 3, lots of fluids moving up and down through this system. That is great excitement for us because we see opportunities of high grade silver, high grade gold. And again, vortex and brimstone were formed at different times. Vortex, a lot more flat lying, if you will. It's much more brecciated. We don't see the discrete veining like we do in brimstone, but very much high grade. On vortex, similarly, we are following the structures we believe, well, it's still open in all directions and at depth. We're doing big step outs on both these systems anywhere from 100 to 200 m. Those are very large step outs and we're still in great continuity and brimstone. We're still in the vein. And vortex, it's much more breccciated. We're still in high grade silver, and as we go deeper in vortex and deeper and vortex does sit deeper than brimstone, we're starting to see high grade gold in that intercept that returned the 22,890 g of silver and the 33.7 g of gold. It was about 1 m. Unfortunately we hit a structure that's actually good news to hit a structure since all of our mineralization is controlled by structures, but when the hole entered that structure, it twisted off and we lost the hole. So we're coming back in to re-drill. So we don't believe that mineralization is confined to just that meter. That's just where the drill hole ended after it. So we will be coming back in and drilling there. And we've already begun looking, as I mentioned, at this from an underground perspective and what we would do. Is coming in through the bottom of the brimstone pit. We can ramp down, take brimstone. We would love to put a platform across here that we could use for drilling. We can save money. It would be much more efficient and you're actually seeing the structures and the mineral. ization as you're drilling, so it's always desirable if you've got an underground target to be able to drill from underground and then we can come in and and take vortex. We also could come in through the the side of the vortex deposit as well. So we're really excited about this. we have many other targets in the property as well. Our focus right now is on these two high grade systems, but we've taken what we've learned at Brimstone and Vortex, excuse me. And we're applying it to other areas and we're seeing some very interesting things so now we understand you know what is feeding this massive, low grade resource and we think that we're gonna see much more potential on the high grade throughout the district. If we look at ourselves from a resource benchmarking perspective, we are, on a silver equivalent basis. We're the 2nd largest resource among silver producers among silver developers, the middle column, we are the largest deposit and among gold developers. As a gold equivalent basis, we are 2nd largest behind Sea Bridge. Of silver projects we are by far the largest silver project and keep in mind that if you're investing in silver, there's very few opportunities in the United States. Most silver mines are Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, so this makes it very unique and certainly not a company that is of our size and is well advanced as a developer. You're either a very, very large senior producer of silver or you're an earlier stage explorer and developer. And if you look at how many ounces of metal you own for every share you own of Highcroft, by far and away of the silver producers, you own 22 ounces of metal for every share you own, and then the next largest would be Fresnlo at 7.8 ounces per share. We're also the largest of the silver developers on a resource per share and second largest amongst gold developers. So what do we have going on this year? We have completed the new resource. We completed all the metallurgical work for pressure oxidation. We got fantastic recoveries on that. That has been disclosed in February of this year, so I invite you to look at that press release. We are completing a PEA with economics, but we started this work prior to the discovery of the high grade systems, so we're going to complete it, and that will come out very soon. In our recent news, we were delayed getting it out because when the new resource came. Out it was such a substantial increase that the engineering firms had to redesign the tailings site facility in order to accommodate the extra material from the increase in the resource. That's a good news bad news story that we were delayed getting it out, but for a good reason. We're expecting that work to be finished up any minute and then we'll run the mine plant, excuse me. And finalize all the cost for that and then we'll get the economics out. We do not intend to build a massive operation on the entire project. We intend to start on the high grade somewhere 3500, 5000 tons a day. That is where we'll start mining this ore body and then we can scale up just like we did at our last company, expand the facility, and take in the other material in good time, but we want that best cash flow, that best material up front to deliver value for our shareholders. We are assessing a restart of the heap bleach operation. We have a lot of material that is still leachable in this commodity price environment. We do believe it's economic, so we're looking at that as a potential revenue source as we bridge our way to the sulfide milling, and our motto is drill, baby, drill. We have an RC rig, 2 core rigs, and we've got 2 more core rigs coming and again over 20,000 m this year and is always maintaining safety and ESG performance. Another quick note I'd like to add, not only has China limited or banned their exports of silver, but if you've seen the recent news today and yesterday, they are banning exports of sulfuric acid. We are completing our metallurgical work on roasting. The reason we would look at roasting is we have a substantial amount of sulfur, and we would be a meaningful producer. Of sulfuric acid, very significant, which adds a third revenue stream to our gold and silver, we're going to see global supply shocks with this ban of exports that's going to happen in China beginning in May is what they've said. That means it's going to hit fertilizer. It's going to hit the copper industry from copper if. Those mines don't produce, they're gonna start sacrificing their byproducts, which is gold and silver, and you're gonna see it affect agriculture and all of those things are going to be very good for silver and the commodities, so we're really excited to finish that roasting work that is going to be amazing for our project and the ultimate economics so you should see that out soon. Again, this is an evolving, developing story. It has been an amazing discovery. Our share price has reflected that value, but we've only just scratched the surface and we have so much further to go. So thank you for your time. Please check out our website with more information, and if you have any questions, I'll be around. Thank you very much, Dan. That was a great presentation. We are out of time, but yeah, I'm sure, Dan is gonna be around, if you have any questions. our last, presentation, for the day, is going to be Perpetual Resources, and presenting Perpetua is gonna be John Cherry, president and CEO. Got a clicker up here.