Skip to main content

Kinvestor Energy & Mining Conference

Amarc Resources Ltd (AXREF)

Conference Call date: 2026-03-26 Concluded

Transcript

· tap a word to jump the audio 18:24 Audio

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time today. I'm Dr. Diane Nicholson. I'm the President and CEO of AMARC Resources Limited. AMARC's sole purpose is to discover, develop and transact the next generation of high value copper, gold, porphyry deposits in our home province of British Columbia. To achieve this, we have assembled a team that has done this not only several times before in BC, but also on the global stage. And the team has delivered again with the new Aurora Gold-enriched Copper Porphrye Discovery, which is located within our Joy District. And we will be focusing on this discovery and the Joy District during this presentation. This is the usual cautionary and forward-looking statement information. Simply put, the Aurora deposit is advancing towards a tier one status. It is one of the most gold enriched copper porphyry deposits ever discovered in the near surface environment in British Columbia. And you can see in the top right hand box, the intercepts from our discovery drill holes late in 2024, which ranged from 1 to 3 grams per tonne gold, 0.4 to 0.8% copper with some interesting silver also. The aurora displays a rare combination of grade and continuity both in the lateral and vertical sense. Aurora is going to be the deposit which will unlock the value of our joy district But further than that, we feel it could be the catalyst to unlocking the next BC copper, gold, porphyry province. We're backed by Freeport-McMoran at the Joy District. And in terms of our share capital, I just wanted to point out that management and a single entity known as the Sutton Group, we own just under 40 percent of the company. We have to be a little bit careful, ladies and gentlemen, with this slide. It is comparing apples and oranges a little, but we just wanted to illustrate to you the golden-rich nature of the Aurora Discovery. On the left-hand side, in the columns, these are our Discovery drill holes, or some of them. The gold is represented in the dark yellow color and the copper in the brownie color and you can see how gold rich those discovery intercepts were compared to BC mines and deposits in the porphyry copper gold space while still displaying strong copper. Many of you will be aware of this map. The Aurora Discovery is located in northern British Columbia and you'll also be aware of an area of northwest British Columbia called the Golden Triangle. Now the Golden Triangle as we all know houses many great copper gold or gold deposits led by the likes of the Galore deposit and the Red Chris deposit the primary consolidator within the Golden Triangle in terms of mining companies has been the gold producer Newmont and since about 2018 in the Golden Triangle there has been about just under five billion dollars of mergers and acquisitions now the geology that you find in the Golden Triangle is the same as that in the red circled area called the Tutagon. And we knew this area was in AMOC, we knew this area was actually very prospective for good copper gold porphyry deposits, because back in the day, members of the AMOC team discovered, developed and transacted the only gold rich copper porphyry ever to been exploited in the Tutagon, and that was the Khmer South. So we have a lot of local knowledge. Our concept has been proven by the discovery of Aurora, which is changing the exploration playbook in this area known as the Tutagon, which is circled in red on this figure. And in the Tutagon, there has been in the same period as the Golden Triangle, you know, around $300 million dollars of mergers and acquisitions but we think the aurora will change this. To zoom into the Teutagon this is a map showing the tenure position of the main players. You can see the blue area that is our joy district. It is 630 square kilometers and it houses the significant aurora discovery as well as two other discoveries, two historical deposits and many high potential deposit targets that we are currently working on with our partners Freeport. To the south of us is the Comesse Mining District where the Comesse South deposit was exploited back in the day and on the back of that modern day mining infrastructure was brought into the Teutagon. The Comesse Mining District is currently owned by Sentara Gold. They have put out a PEA and they have in the range of about 10 million ounces of gold equivalent, primarily based on gold and copper. And then to the north of us, the main company is Thesis Gold, which you can see in the lighter color yellow. They have published that they have around 5 million ounces of gold equivalent in gold silver veins. They are backed financially by Sentara, but also very interestingly by Anglo Gold Ashanti who have put about 39 million in at the corporate level to thesis and in the dark yellow this is a company called TGG Gold they are backed by the very good BC company Skeena and they have about 1 million ounces of published gold equivalent at an old play called the Shasta that means in this district at the current time without Aurora and without anything else that Freeport and AMARC have within the Joy District, there is in excess of 16 million ounces of gold equivalent. So the question is now with the Tutagon, who is going to consolidate the Tutagon? This is the team I have the pleasure to head up every day. It's a very accomplished team. It's second to none in Western Canada in porphyry exploration. But briefly, I just wanted to draw your attention to the map at the right hand side of this slide not only do does amark have the joy district it has the duke district where we're backed by the swedish mining company boliden and also the ike district but we will be concentrating in this presentation on joy and aurora the deal with freeport uh mcmoran as of last year may last year freeport had spent 35 million under an accelerated time frame and earned their first 60 percent interest in the project they have put their hand up to spend another 75 million to earn an additional 10 percent interest in the assets of joy to take their total earned interest to 70 percent they have assumed operatorship but they have under a primary contractor agreement asked a mark to stay on and continue planning, budgeting and programs and executing them on the ground amongst other matters. So this is the tenure outlined in blue of the Joy District. It is 630 square kilometers. It is a very coherent tenure. The results here that are shown are those of ground-induced polarization or IP. this is the chargeability component and simply all these brightly colored pink and red areas which range up to nine square kilometers or so these are big sulfide systems that we are exploring and every single one that we've drilled of these so far we have encountered copper mineralization you can see where the aurora deposit is located in the top left hand side or northwest of the slide within the big nwg target i'm also going to bring your attention to the pine trend in future slides and we're going to look at the pine historical deposit and the twins discovery but noting in addition to the twins and aurora discoveries we also have a discovery at the canyons target we also have the brender historical deposit we have other sulfide systems we've just started to explore and the white area on this slide which is about 40 percent of the tenure has barely been explored if at all there is a lot more to come out of this district and aurora is going to be the key to unlocking that value but more within the tutagon we believe that the aurora is of great strategic value and anybody that consolidates the tutagon really should have aurora also. This is a view looking northwards over our NWG target which houses the Aurora Discovery which is outlined there in the yellow and red lines. It is open to expansion and you will note there that the road access is only about half a kilometre away from the deposit. Aurora is a tier one asset in the making. We're year on year we have expanded the drilling at Aurora from and the deposit area I should say from 6 by 600 meters to 1.4 kilometers in the northwest southeast sense and perpendicular to that by 800 meters now this deposit remains open all the way around and you can see two areas in the north of the slide and the south of the slide where single drill holes are outlined in a black dashed line these two drill holes are indicating to us that the deposit may extend 300 meters to the north of its known limit and a half a kilometer to the south of its currently known extent with further drilling now it may expand or there may be what we would say was nested systems there is a lot more drilling here to be done to find where the extent of this deposit it and this discovery extends to and we intend to be back out this year drilling at aurora so if we look at cross section 7900 north which is indicated on this figure through the guts of the discovery zone we can see not only is the discovery characterized by its high gold grades and good copper grades it shows tremendous lateral and vertical continuity it has a flat line geometry at the moment and if we just go to the next slide this is just indicating for you and reconfirming the continuity of the high grade this is from hole um hole 74 one of our discovery drill holes and you can see copper is in the brownie color gold is in the yellow and silver is in the gray and you can see here that we have 108 meters of over a gram per tonne and within that there is 57 meters of just about two and a half grams to eight grams of gold and many of the discovery holes shared these characteristics. Now the Joy District is all about Aurora. It is the key to unlocking the rest of the potential on Aurora but it is not all about Aurora. As I said before we have two other discoveries, two historical deposits that we are exploring and many other high potential targets we've just started to drill test. So we're going to look at that trend that I indicated to you on an earlier slide, the pine twins porphyry trend. This is now a cross section through that geophysics. These pink areas are the sulfide systems. You can see that this trend on joy is 10 kilometers in length the pine historical deposit is located at the northeast end we then pass through the canyon discovery to the twins discovery at the southwestern end of the trend in the lower part of this figure we are comparing this trend to the cadia red chris and camis porphyry copper trends porphyries in nature quite often occur in clusters along trend the cadian trend in australia and red chris in northern bc are owned and operated by newmont and the commess trend which is four kilometers is owned and operated by sentara and of course is part of the commess district uh immediately adjacent to the south of the joy district uh you can see the length of these trends they vary from three to five point five kilometers you can see how much drilling is required to drill off porphyries on these trends and importantly some of these deposits can occur at depth and can be underground mines they can occur in the shallower environment be open pitable and sometimes deposits that occur in the shallower environment parts of them can be down faulted to depth so we're first of all going to look at the pine historical deposit when we took this the joy district on and amark consolidated the tenure the pine deposit was known over about 900 meters we've expanded it to 1.6 kilometers and to depth now it is a moderate grade bc gold copper porphyry it is not where you would start mining in a district but now you have a payback pit such as aurora this could be a year 30 or 40 of mil feed also importantly we have got one hole into deep areas of the deposit underneath the the main deposit area, and we have started, we think, to snug onto high-grade feeder zones. So there could be a higher-grade deposit here or an extension to depth of higher grade below the known deposit. There is a lot more drilling to be done here. As an example of another discovery, this is the twins sulfide system. This is another new Greenfields largely covered discovery, just like Aurora was. This sulfide system is eight and a half square kilometers along its axis from northwest to southeast you can fit the whole of the commerce mining trend in here that i just showed you in an earlier slide and indeed the whole of red chris this is this is a very extensive target it is a geophysically disco driven discovery initially we put in eight widely spaced drill holes they were up to about a kilometer and a half apart they were relatively short six out of eight of those drill holes hit porphyry style alteration and mineralization and you can see indicated here that they also hit between 0.1 and 0.2 grams per ton gold now that may not be of very significant interest to many people listening in here but for exploration geologists we know that we could be within proximity to a productive porphyry system, an economic productive porphyry system with those type of indications. So we'll look at a cross section here, A prime. And you can see here on the left hand slide, the cross section, hole 20. This was one of those early stage shallow drill holes. You can see that we hit some anomalous copper and we hit a couple of hundred meters in the range of 0.14 grams per tonne gold. So knowing we could be close to a productive porphyry system, we stepped back, we drilled below it, we hit increased grade. So we stepped back again with hole 106 and we drilled to depth and we have hit grade. It's getting towards a gram of gold and half a percent copper over very decent widths. Remember what I said on the earlier slide that some of these deposits in these systems long trends can happen at depth some of them can be mined successfully underground some of them can occur in the near surface environment we have to explore this now to see if there is an underground deposit we can develop but in other areas of the twin system we have indications that the porphyry deposits may be closer to surface a lot of drilling to be done here but a very very exciting discovery so at joy the jewel in the crown is the new aurora high grade near surface porphyry copper gold deposit which is very gold enriched it is the key to unlocking the potential of the joy district where we have many other assets developing, but also we feel that it is the catalyst to a very significant emerging copper, gold, porphyry district in the Tutorgon. We have changed the exploration thesis in the Tutorgon and I think there's a lot more to come out of this district. We will be out working with our partners, Freeport, on the ground this summer, continuing our drilling and the planning for that is well underway as is the planning with Boliden at our Duke deposit. There will be many catalysts to come from AMOC over the following year and we'll keep you well up to date. So thank you ladies and gentlemen for your time and attention today. As always it's greatly appreciated.