Presenter
Scott Moore
VP Corporate Development, Q Gold Resources
No biography was supplied for this session.
Presenter
VP Corporate Development, Q Gold Resources
No biography was supplied for this session.
Q-Gold Resources is advancing a dual-asset gold platform focused on near-term growth and domestic gold production. With a transformational U.S. acquisition in Oregon and a high-grade, drill-ready project in Ontario, Q-Gold is positioned to become America’s next Tier-One gold developer.
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God. But, but you are with Google, Google. It is now my pleasure to introduce Scott Miller with Q Gold. Moore, Moore. Oh, sorry, yeah, no problem, sorry, Scott, there's a different name in the booklet. So, Scott Moore with Q Gold, can we just start over? It's not my pleasure to introduce Scott Moore with Q Gold Resources. The floor is all yours. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, my colleague Andreas, had to go see Mom in Frankfurt, so he was on the train earlier today, but, we were together in Hamburg earlier this week, so give him a bit of a break. I'm here to present Quartz, Q Gold Resources and its flagship property which is the Quartz Mountain Gold Project. This was an asset that was just acquired from Alamos Gold. It's an asset maybe even Haiko remembers. It's been around for like 40 years. It was Robert Frieden's first project, so it's been a long time getting to where we are today. We acquired the asset from Alamos last year in April and closed the transaction in October. I guess at the time, you know, gold's $2500 and permitting wasn't happening in Oregon, so we made a good transaction to acquire it, and we did a a a a financing led by BO that brought in a new institutional shareholder book here with Libra and Franklin and Merck and Alamos itself owns 9% of the company. So, Q Gold has two assets. Again, we'll talk mainly about Quartz Mountain today. We also have, what's called the Mine Center project in Northern Ontario. It's kind of a bulk, bulk tonnage gold, project, that's at least the, the expectation that we're working on this summer. It sits in between Rainy River and Hammond Reef, so it's in the right, area for, for bulk tonnage assets, but we're gonna focus mainly on Quartz Mountain today. So, we acquired the property, closed the transaction in October for Alamos for $21 million US, and, and, and 10% of the company. we paid them the 1st $2.8 million on closing, and we have staged payments over the next, you know, essentially three years, I suppose. Annual annual payment coming up this year in October. If we do a feasibility, we owe them $5 million. We get a permit, we owe them another $5 million. so not a big drain on cash resources going forward. The asset sits in Oregon in the United States. Down on the, basically on the Nevada, California border. We're about a 6-hour drive from Portland and about a 4-hour drive from Reno. So really, great location from an infrastructure basis. We sit on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains in kind of low rolling hill areas, very kind of sparsely populated, primarily timberlands. And in fact, our property sits on US Forest Service, land, and they'll be the ultimate, Permitting entity for the M permit. Just want to point out up in the corner there on the Idaho border, that's Grassy Mountain that's owned by Paramount Nevada Gold. that's an underground gold mine that just got its permit, in, January of this year. So you're back on permitting in Oregon, partly, I'll talk a little bit about later, but it's a good indication, and I'll talk about how it's gonna be better for us, to get permitting in Oregon. So 11 week ago, we put out our first PEA and in fact the first PEA ever released on this project. Outlining a fourteen-year mine life at 135,000 ounces a year of gold, all in sustaining cash costs of $1,216 capex of $290 million. NPV 5 at 3,265 gold, which was the two-year trailing average of $1.7 billion. So a very robust project that's just getting started. Payback 1.8 years, turnal rate of return 55%, and that included a new mineral resource which is now holding 2 million ounces indicated and 500 ounces in inferred, and we have programs for drilling this summer to take that 2 million ounces up into the measured category and also to take that inferred into the indicated. So you're sitting in with about 2.5 million ounces and measured and indicated by the end of this year. It's hard to see over the edge here. Yeah, the same problem, yeah. so again, in blue there on the left is Quartz Mountain. It's about 100,000 m has been drilled on that property over the years, by Golden Predator, by ORSA. Alamos bought it in 2012, drilled up until 2016, and hadn't done anything on it for a decade. And Angel's Camp, which again is an interesting exploration site adjacent to the Quartz Mountain project. It's had some good drill results, some kind of crazy grade stuff that we've had in terms of, you know, 60 g per ton of gold and then 1 kg of silver, but there's about 6 other anomalies on that property, which we've now already gotten the exploration permits granted by the Forest Service to work on that this summer. Again, you see the drill density here heavily drilled out. It's Quartz Butte and Crone Hill. They're essentially two bluffs that outcrop on surface. the advantage that on, on this project means that our strip ratio is 0.6 to 1, so extremely low strip ratio gives us an excellent economics. For the project, the project will be a heat bleach project to start for about the 1st 5 years and then moving into conventional milling. We have a pretty consistent average gold production at about 1350. There's a couple of peaks in there in the center at about 166,000 ounces a year, but even on year 14, it's like 125, so it's a pretty flat flat production profile. So here's the mineral resource. We're running 2 million ounces right now of indicated at about 0.78 g per ton, and about another 5000 ounces at 0.8. Again, this will all be upgraded into measured and indicated by the end of the year. So a very robust mineral resource to start with, and we believe that we can probably get, you know, at least another 500,000 to another 2 million ounces on this property. So it's lots of exploration upside. So this is to highlight again, this is 1 week old, you know, life of mine, 14 years, we're going to run 20,000 tons per day. 135,000 ounces of gold production peaking at 166. We have about 2000 ounces of gold equivalent a year in silver that's on top of the 135, but we really just focused talking about gold production ounces at the moment, cash costs of $1000 all unsustaining at $1200 but you know that strip ratio is quite incredible. That gives you an after-tax NPV of $1.7 billion. That's. Cappus Cassidy, who did the study here out of Reno, Nevada, one of the better, you know, I guess, engineering firms on, on, Heat bleaching projects picked a two year trailing average, so a bit of a conservative price point going forward and at spot, whatever pick your number, it's a $3 billion NPV plus at 90% internal rate of return, so a kind of crazy number. So you're sitting at $3000 or $4000 margin today, it's pretty incredible. And that initial cap again this being a heat bleach project, $290 million very financeable on that basis. Again, heat bleach, it's primary, secondary, two tertiary crushers, conveyor agglomeration of cement onto the leach pad with grasshoppers and and and and then pour a dore out of that. So a very consistent processing plan for the 1st 4 years and then we'll move into a conventional milling circuit by putting a A flotation circuit and after that for another 9 years. We're undervalued like everybody says, you know, but this is like, I, I, I, I looked at this and just because these are 3 companies that Cappus Cassidy just did recent PEAs for within the last 6 months. Lahnan and P2 Gold are in, Nevada. We're in Oregon, so close enough. Maybe they have a little bit better permitting structure than we do, but the economics on ours from an MPB basis, from a production profile, from a, you know, a, a, payback period. Superior project is is Q Gold, and their market caps are anywhere between, you know, 3 to 5 times what we are today. Last Tuesday our stock was 23 cents. Wednesday it was. 30 cents. So starting to get a little bit of recognition for where we are. This is an area in Oregon that's already been forested, so this has already been disturbed. It's secondary forest. Those are the mine roads or logging roads going through the property. Some are paved, some aren't paved, so the access is fantastic. You have main highway right beside our project, high tension power lines. This is in the US of A, so it's not in the middle of Peru or Chile at 4000 m. This is at low elevation and easy access, and we're close to about a town. About 20 miles from a town of 2500 people, so you don't have to build a camp. It'll be access to people to show up, you know, driving from the town to work. So a big benefit from from the Oregon location here. And again, we're 56 kilometers from the Nevada border. So bringing people across to build the mine, to operate the mine, and at least get it started, a lot of access to a labor force to to really get things going in in in this project. So I guess the big issue and an elephant in the room when it comes to this project has been permitting in in Oregon, which historically has been somewhat terrible. Grassy Mountain was trying for 12 years to get their permit for that project or Paramount Nevada Gold was. They entered in what's called FAST 41 program, which was for determining a permitting regime for federal permits. The Bureau of Land Management gave their permit, on this project. They entered into that in I think it was May of last year, and 9 months later they got their permit. So it, it, you know, fast may sound like it's meant, meant to be fast. It was actually fixing America's surface transportation. So it's been around for 20 years, but it's been kind of adapted to accelerate, particularly mining projects. It was designed for bridges and railroads and stuff like that, but now it's really pushing on the, on the, on the mining side of things. We're close with everybody on right now with the fewest Forest Service, that'll be the ultimate entity that permits the mine. Important too with Oregon, the governor of Oregon announced in December of last year, they're going to do their own FAST 41 program at the state level for permitting. So you now have a regime that says, Economic projects that can bring prosperity to the state. We're going to accelerate state permitting, pair it up with the federal side of FAST 41 to move forward on federal land permits, and people don't know this, but Oregon is like, it's 4 million people. It's not a big state. It's pretty small and it's. Bifurcated by the Cascade Mountains that run down the middle, all the economic, you know, money and everything is on the west coast with Portland and Salem and Eugene, and on the east side of the mountains, it's forestry companies and lumberjacks. It's pretty economically depressed, so our project would bring quite a bit of a job and economic activity to the state. Yeah, so on this project, we look at about 300 direct. And you'd have about, you know, 2 to 3 times that in indirect, so roughly 1000 people in, in a town area that has 2500 people, so pretty, pretty substantial. To wages. Yes, well, any mines pays, well above average wages, that's for damn sure. We're going to file the preliminary economic assessment within 45 days. It was just released a week ago. We're going to expect initial exploration permits at Quartz Mountain in May. We already received the exploration permits for Angel's Camp from the Forest Service, and we're going to drill 12 additional metallurgical holes to support the feasibility study which we expect to kick off in September. So in, in, in permanent activities in, in Oregon. You have to have an engineering study to start the permitting activity, so now we can go full bore with both the state and federal level. We're using a firm called SLR Environmental out of Portland who did all the permitting for Grassy Mountain. So we certainly have the right team to move this, move this thing forward. Our application for FAST 41 is already ready for submission, and we would expect to receive that by June. Essentially, FAST 41 is. Are you spending more than $200 million on a project and you're mining a critical metal, and in the US gold is a critical metal. So we believe that we'll be in that and and in that program by by June. management team, the CEO is a gentleman named Peter Tagaante. Peter and I have worked together for 20 years, with Central Sun, which we had the Limona and Libertad mines in Nicaragua, which we sold to create B2 Gold in 2008. We worked together in Sullivan Gold in Peru, which was the Shaindo mine, which sold for $600 million to Rio Alto, then sold to Tahoe, then sold to Pan American. So Pan American is now operating that mine. That's also a heat bleach mine at 0.5 g, and that's a very attractive economics for that project for them. We just had Jamsheed Mea join our board. Jamsheed was 35 years with BO, has left as vice chair. Doctor Romel, which was supposed to give this speech, was on a train to go see mom in Frankfurt, but, and, and Scott Parsons. Scott Parsons is the vice president of exploration for Alamos. So a really strong management team on this. And that's pretty much the story, guys. It's really simple. This is one no one's been thinking about for a long time. There's never been an economic study put on this project, so this is the first one. It's been around for a long time in a in a jurisdiction that has not been known for for permitting activities, but that's changing, that's changing on both the state and the federal level. Oh, I think any, any, any, any questions from the audience? Go ahead, Neil. I may have missed it at the start. How did Alamos get hold of you? Alamos bought it from Orsa in 2012. And then also bought it from Golden Predator before then and it's almost just sat on it so they did some drilling, they did some economics and looked at it, you know, and decided in 2016 not to do anything more. So they haven't done anything for a decade. And Scott Parsons, who came on the board, he's the vice president of exploration, joined after this project was put to the side. And Alamos, guys, is like a $26 billion company. They bought Richemon and the Isla Island project that's doing half a million ounces at 11 g underground. So that's really their focus on the, on the, so this kind of was just sitting around not doing anything. Anybody else? I'll, I'll give you 10, sorry. Could you comment why Oregon is so restrictive on permitting? I think generally it's just been that way for such a long time like. I'm not sure there's any rhyme or reason. There wasn't like there was a gold rush there like a long time ago, but you know nothing historic has been moving on on that side. It, it is a big resource state when it comes to forestry and you know, OSB mills and, and, and like, so it does have some heavy industry around the forestry business, but for mining it's just never been a big target unlike Nevada just to the south of us, right? So. I think, again, they've realized on, on the state level that the governor says we need a FAST 41 program for state level permitting activities, and I think that's a big step change for what's been happening over the last decade in, in, in Oregon. So I think, we think our permitting is going to go somewhere between 9 months and 212 years, that Paramount Nevada took, but I think we're lucky, I think we're in a good situation to be in the next 18 to 24 months be in construction. I'll follow up on that question then. I mean, Grassy Mountain in, in, in my view delivered a decent amount of permanent clarity and just certainty. And how exactly do you think we should, you know, breach that to the market and, and, and let everybody know? I mean, you've, you've had some of that in your presentation, but is there maybe a couple of things that, the market still underappreciates? well, I, I, I think, you know, again, they did a great job. They have a whole website just on permitting, right, because they were at it for so long they had to really, you know, that was certainly the, The main point of focus for it, but I think, you know, we're going to start marketing heavily over the next, you know, while here now to highlight the fact that it looks like Oregon is open for business when it comes to mining, gold mining in particular, because they do have a demand for economic activities on the eastern side of the Cascades. It's really just forestry and lumber, so they're looking for more job growth and, and. You know, a project like this bringing the tax base that it does and 1000 new jobs in a, in a, in a, in a, in a state of 4 million people, it's meaningful. and so it looks like we're aligning, and again, the state is bifurcated. It's Democratic on the West Coast and it's Republican on our side of the, but we're sparsely, populated, and that's why they really need to drive economic growth for that side of the, that side of the mountains. Anybody else, one more quick one then. We got 2.5 minutes. can you walk us through the, the drilling density and the disturbances that you're able to do at site? in my non-geological, degree, I can, again, if you go back and see that picture, like it's, over 100,000 m drilled on this property, right? So it's very highly drilled out, Because there's so many logging roads and drill roads around the project, it makes it much easier for us to get permitting for future activities for drilling. So we're getting, we just got a permit for Angels Camp right now. We've got a met testing and exploration program coming next month from the Forest Service using the existing roads, and this has already been forested once, so it's new growth forest. So it's not like heavily forested. It's quite sparsed out, so it makes it much easier for us to get. drilling and disturbances, it doesn't take 6 months to get it. We applied. It can take like 2 months, so it, it's pretty fast. Last chance. Thank you very much, thank you very much.
Recorded at Mining Forum Europe 2026, Park Hyatt Zürich, Zürich. Prepared for information only; it is not investment advice or a recommendation. Statements are those of the presenting company as at the date of the presentation. Market figures in US dollars, not as at the date of the forum.