Verdera Energy Corp. (VUECF) September 24, 2026 Conference Transcript

Hello, everybody. My name is Janet Leigh Sheriff. I am the CEO and a director of Verdera Energy Corp. Thank you for joining us today. Today, we are welcoming our Verdera shareholders for corporate update and also the Encore Energy shareholders for an introduction and update on our company in advance of the plant distribution on September 30th. Today, I am welcoming Bill Sherriff, who is also the Executive Chair of Verdera Energy and Encore Energy Corp. When joining us today, you'll see that there's a Q&A box. Any questions, please type them in. If you're calling in from a phone, you will be able to access this through the online portal. We'll walk through a presentation of Verdera and get into some Q&As. But first, I would ask Bill to give a bit of an introduction, as these assets did come out of the Encore Energy portfolio, and I'd like him to welcome everybody and give a bit of context.

Bill? Thanks, Janet. And thank you all of the Verdera shareholders as well as our Encore shareholders who will be receiving a dividend or a piece of Verdera through their holdings in Encore. The record date is passed. The distribution date will be at the end of this month. And Verdera looks forward to having you on board. Some of the rationale behind this transaction, which has been in the cooker for quite some time now. Encore specializes in production. We built an elite team of production personnel familiar with ISR and its operations, and we're looking forward to having both of those plants, both the Rosita plant and the Alta Mesa plant, back in production at the end of the year. Aside from that, we do not have any specialties in terms of community relations, in terms of Indigenous Affairs. And those are such things that New Mexico brings about as a specific challenge, which is also an opportunity, of course. Viewing this, some time ago, the decision was made by the Encore board to share the opportunity in New Mexico with our shareholders directly, set up a subsidiary, that being Verdera, and offer it to the public. Encore obviously will still maintain a very significant and insider reporting percentage shareholder ownership, as we wish to maintain a good relationship and work closely with Verdera as these projects move their way through the community and the indigenous communications through permitting and ultimately into needing a partner for production. And that would, of course, be where Encore comes back into the picture. It really does highlight the team that's been built, not only at Encore, which I've discussed, but also the one at Verdero, where expertise in community relations, permitting, as well as the very, very strong emphasis on building relationships with the indigenous people of northwest New Mexico, all come into play to unlock really what is the U.S.'s largest resource in uranium. And together we look forward to going on. We want to present the outline today as to what Verdera comprises in terms of its resources and where it's going. It's really a storehouse of value that I think the shareholders of both companies and as of this end of this week, all of the Encore shareholders will directly own a piece of as well. I think it's quite a compelling story And with that, I'll turn it over to Janet again.

Thank you, Bill. For the benefit of all Verdera trades on the TSXV under the symbol V and on the OTCQB under VUECF. We started trading publicly in the beginning of the year and just recently completed our F1 process with the SEC. And I think I'll just walk through some of the recent activities within the company and where we're going. For your information, please do your own due diligence. I may make some forward-looking statements, and this is not anything but an informational update for all. Verdera has about 88 million pounds of known and historic resources. It's the largest uranium endowment for a U.S.-focused public company. All of our assets are in New Mexico. We have 400 square miles in the Grants Mineral Belt. That's the largest uranium district in the U.S. And one of our key assets is the amount of proprietary data that we have. When we acquired the assets from Encore, we acquired all the uranium resources data. Then we purchased the Kermagee database. The Kermagee database is now residing in two offices. It's a huge amount of data. It's all privately held. We have over 200 and 50,000 drill hole logs. We acquired this for access to our projects, but it's also given us about 90% of all the historic uranium data for the state of New Mexico. We're only focused on in situ recovery. You'll see with our projects, that is the only thing that we are focusing on. We've put together a great team. We are actively going through the data and compiling information on our projects, as we also have transacted a few sales. And again, with New Mexico, it's the seventh largest uranium-producing district historically in the world, vast resources. And if you believe that the U.S. is seeking nuclear independence and a nuclear renaissance, this cannot be achieved without New Mexico. The share structure, with the planned distribution, we will have 110 million shares issued and outstanding right now 35 million are planned to be distributed that's in addition to the 38 million sorry the 75 million already out in common shares encore will be holding 15 million of the shares that were provided in the sale on the map what you will see is location of our projects we have crown point nose rock west largo and Ambrosia Lake. We recently sold the tree line project for shares in cash. Also on there, you see the checkerboard lands. Those are every alternating section, which is in green, which is all of our assets, the 400 square miles. We have a very healthy treasury with 23 million shares in the bank. And in addition to the 88 million pounds, a strong, strong portfolio. Board of Directors, you've met Bill. If you're not familiar with myself, I worked, I ran a gold company. I worked with Encore for a number of years. I left and worked with Grants Energy, which I will also discuss during this presentation. Joining me is Kevin Bambro, which many people know from Sprott. John Endahl, retired lawyer out of New Mexico. Greg Hayes is our audit chair. And Mark Poliza with a very strong background in his career in in situ recovery. And he and John have a very lengthy history in New Mexico. I'm not going to go too far into the nuclear renaissance other than to note a few things. There's been some great developments at the federal level. and what you see with domestic production having tapered off to about 2 million pounds a year right now. Historically, in 1986, the U.S. was energy independent for nuclear energy. The world's largest consumer at 50 million pounds, we import 98% of this. The goal to meet domestic production does require New Mexico. There's a great article out. If you go to the Verdera site, you'll see a very good article that was just out yesterday on what New Mexico has and its role in achieving the independence again. The FAST41 system has been something that has really pulled together the federal permitting. And of course, this is optional for any state participation. All of our projects are in the Grants Uranium District, as I mentioned, historically largest, most productive uranium region in the U.S. And a significant amount of the historical production. It's really important that you see what's going on in New Mexico. In addition to our work, there's a project called the Grants Project that's being run by Grants Energy. This is the largest ISR project in the United States, and it's actively going through the permitting process. Grants Energy and Berdera, with the assistance of Encore before the transition, formed the Clean Energy Association of New Mexico. And our goal is to provide education and information within the state on in situ recovery technology. Their only focus, our only focus. And with that, we developed our first conference. We delivered it in April. It was a very well-attended gathering of everybody from utility producers to tribes and community members, and we discussed the future of nuclear within New Mexico. Having a big company like Grants advancing through permitting and working with people that believe in community engagement and helping provide the tools so people will move past some of the historical issues in New Mexico is extremely important. And we're starting to see some of the benefits of this already. Cibola County just last week voted in favor of supporting in situ recovery in its county. And you're starting to see a growing understanding of what the technology is. It's been around for 50 years, but it's not been in New Mexico. There was a original pilot project and that was completed. I'm going to lose the date, but it was mobile oil in the past. And most of our assets that you're seeing here were developed by many of the larger oil and gas companies. I'm going to ask Bill to join me in a second and speak to a bit more information on our portfolio, because all of this did come out of Encore and he has a long history with it. But with that, I'll point out, as I mentioned, Crown Point, Nose Rock, West Largo and Ambrosia Lake. We are currently completing 43-101 on our West Largo project. This is one of the advantages of purchasing all of the data. We found all of the original drill hole logs from this project. So we've spent the past few months scanning those and working with the consultants to move that into the technical report now underway. We also just sold the Treeline project, another great example of the value that the data provides as we were able to provide all the historic data along with that project. Bill, would you like to speak to the projects a bit?

Sure. I'll just briefly touch on them. And if any of the investors have any further interest in digging a little deeper, I'd be glad to talk to them individually as well. I guess the first one to mention is Groundpoint Hostibute. This is, of course, our qualifying transaction to go public. This, almost the entire database was developed by ConocoOil, again, highlighting the quality of the data that each of these projects enjoys. it we do not plan to revise that 43 101 obviously as it's just been done and it does have a number of different cutoffs on it and a very rich endowment it is partially permitted that is under the nrc license that another company holds that formerly owned it but something would need to be done, obviously, to work together on that moving forward with Laramide. The property we're doing our first 43-101 on, and we should say we're going to methodically go through these major deposits and update them. It's been a number of years, typically in the 70s, since any of the resource reports were put out. And of course, with 43-101 and a number of other regulations since then, it's important to update those as well as in terms of their economic cutoffs. Almost all of the remaining projects, that being West Largo, Ambrosia Lake, and Nose Rock, were done with grade cutoffs or grade thickness cutoffs, which is simply grade times thickness of 0.6, which is in essence two to slightly more than two times currently viewed grade thickness cutoffs in the ISR business. These deposits that we'll be doing this on are thought to be ISR amenable. That obviously will be covered in the 43-101 reports. But honing in on West Largo, we're well into that already. We've identified, as Janet mentioned, roughly 1,800 logs that come from Kermagee and Gulf Oil, the two companies that did 99% of the work on this project. These have been scanned individually. They've been gone through and digitized with the resource intervals on a very fine-grained view, calculated, reported, and handed off to WWC, who's doing our 43-101 resource estimate on this. Here again, we'll be looking at a number of grade cutoffs, but certainly they'll be lower than the 0.6. And anytime you reduce your grade thickness cutoff, you're going to increase your pounds, and you'll also have obviously a a corresponding decrease in the grade. But what you're looking at is the total pounds you can economically cover at a favorable rate. And so I think it's safe to say that you're going to see each one of these resources that I've just mentioned come out with significantly more pounds at a lower grade. The grade is not as big of an issue here as you might think, especially in typical hard rock mining. 16.9 million pounds at 0.30 pounds per ton is very high grade. It would make it the highest grade ISR deposit in the US, I believe. And even if you reduce that grade somewhat and increase the number of pounds to be extracted, it'll be very economic. Right now, each share of Ardara represents roughly 0.8 pounds of uranium in the ground. I think you'll see that move upward. And of course, our goal will be conserving cash and moving diligently forward to get that up over a pound per share. And I think that's certainly within reach based upon what we see at this point, although we'll be waiting on the 43-101s to give us those exact numbers. With that, I think you're going to see a very similar move, just to highlight who's done the work primarily. I'd mentioned Crown Point House to Butte was primarily Conoco. Nose Rock was almost entirely done by Phillips Petroleum. Again, we have all of the data, and we're already starting to pull the logs on that in preparation for one of the next 243-101s, which will commence towards the end of this year or first part of next year. At Ambrosia Lake, almost the entirety of the data was done by Kerr-McGee, and we do have the Kerr-McGee New Mexico database. So once again, we're chock-a-block full of data on these. We also have a geologist that's methodically going through the deposits in New Mexico that are not listed here. I believe Janet mentioned we have over 400 square miles of patented or private mineral rights throughout the state. And you can, for those of you that have been familiar with Newmont's successes in Nevada, there are some correlations between the Santa Fe Railroad Checkerboard through northern Nevada being very gold rich in terms of its mineral holdings and the various different well, St. Louis and San Francisco, as well as the Santa Fe checkerboards that combine to give us our 400 square miles. A real endowment of mineral resources there. So there are other smaller resources or other resources yet to be pulled from the database that will augment this as we move forward. Any of the significant ones we'll pursue ourselves. Again, looking to get them permitted, and hopefully teaming up with Encore as we move forward into eventual production. In addition, there will be a number of smaller opportunities for joint venture, which will help the company. And those are obviously the projects that we don't see having the 20 or 30 million pound potential. So all in all, a wealth of opportunities in this, and we've just started, So it should be proved to be a very, very good next two to three years on this full of news developments and increasing resources.

Thank you, Bill. With that, I'll just go back to a slide that I think is important as it shows the historical influence of New Mexico in uranium production and the drop off when everything stopped in New Mexico. As I mentioned, that there are historical issues and legacy issues that the communities have been working through from conventional mining. We have been working on the ISR potential and believe that these address many of the issues while bringing economic benefits to the state and really filling a gap that's needed in the United States when it comes to domestic uranium, which is needed for a multitude of reasons, including cost-effective and clean energy and military purposes. Just a quick comparison to our peers. When you see our uranium endowment versus other U.S. uranium explorers, we can't come out on top, and our EV per pound is very modest. um with that i'll just do a quick summary um as i mentioned focus on new mexico essential to the u.s energy grid uh 88 million pounds of known and historic resources only focused on isr if you believe in in the nuclear thesis new mexico is important to that thesis and uh with that verdera is a big part of the known 500 million pounds that are in new mexico and the state estimates that are also published by UPA of another 500 million pounds. So putting New Mexico at a significant resource that doesn't compare to any other state. A great team. We keep associating ourselves with Encore. As we develop our projects, they're a great partner to have that can look at production and have the skills to take us there. Our focus is on community engagement, permitting and advancing the projects to that point where we will make that decision. And with a healthy treasury and a strong shareholder with Encore with 15 million shares, we believe Verdera and New Mexico's time is really coming. With that, I'm going to open it up for questions. We have a few coming in, Bill, if you just want to come back on camera. There's one coming in for Encore that I think we should deal with right away. this is a Verdera update from the assets from Encore. So we did get a question on Encore. The question is the distribution rate on the shares. I believe that was announced in an Encore news release.

It was. I believe it's also in the Verdera news release. So rather than quote something to the four decimal points, I think I'll refer the reader to that or the inquiry to that. I'd also mention that while we have limited time on here, if there are further questions on Encore, please go to info, send your questions to info at EncoreUranium.com, and we'll definitely get back to you on those.

Thank you. Yeah, I have a few questions on the recent ETF activity with Encore. Bill, unless you wanted to ask anything, I just ask people to contact Encore. at?

Yeah, that's right. And we've obviously just done a very generic answer here, but certainly glad to take it up further on individual inquiries or inquiries through the normal channels. But essentially, there were no changes in fundamentals at Encore other than some movement in a positive direction on our permitting, which we're glad to have. Outside of that, things remain as they did at the end of the second quarter, which was seven or eight weeks ago. Obviously, we've cut our drill rigs back as we've got leach fields or well fields ready to turn on. So we're ahead of ourselves in terms of drilling due to the minor setback we had on permitting. But all that seems to be on the right track and look forward to some very promising returns, as I mentioned earlier, both plants into production at the end of the year or first part of next. So once again, that huge volume that we saw was largely driven by the ETFs, both initially on the Tuesday of the week and then again on Friday, which was, you know, reallocation within the other ETFs. So they might not also have noticed that for those that didn't catch it, you know, between, you know, our family purchased roughly a quarter of a million dollars worth of stock. So I think that would show some definite encouragement. But in any of it, this is not on course thing, but glad to answer any of the questions. So please follow up with an info at, or as you find on most of the press releases, my contact number.

Thank you, Bill. I'd also let people know that you recently did a Crux interview. It's available online and probably on the Encore website. And there's a lot of information that you provided there. There's a good question on what's the working relationship between Encore and Verdera. At this time, Verdera and Encore are completely separate companies. That said, Encore does have the production capabilities and capacity once Verdera moves into that stage of its life. So I think we'll keep in touch. They are holding 15 million shares. And there's a couple of questions on how they're managing those. And I would, again, direct those to Encore. Current spend for this year and next. Obviously, we have a very healthy treasury. We are spending most of our capital on permitting. We had budgeted $5 million for drilling. Finding the original drill logs has altered that. So we'll move forward and determine how much of that we actually have to do. We are looking at the potential to do some test projects as well. So I think we've got a significant capital to last us for a couple of years on the current trajectory. Meaningful revenue and profitable. Well, we're in a development stage, so that would depend on the acquisition of permits for production. it's a three to five year process depending on whether you are going through a restart or a brand new permit it's about five years to go through the permitting process you have to go through the nrc the epa and the state there has been some great coordination of late through the fast 41 at the federal level the state level we're closely watching how grants energy is moving through that to determine our timelines. There's a number of questions I'm going to leave about Encore. Bill, we have one question for you if you would like to come back on.

Sure.

It is your time allocation between Verdera and Encore.

My time is roughly 80% on Encore, and that's obviously my day job, if you will, and where I focus the bulk of my attention. There are a number of opportunities that do overlap on the technical side, you know, advice. Obviously, those projects have been with Encore and with companies. I've been with going back to the early 2000s in some instances. So that plus not only the databases that Verdera has, but also the databases that I own that have been available to both Encore and Verdera. So, obviously, my time is overlapped somewhat, but Encore remains my main day job. And I would also mention that currently, just because it does affect Verdera instantly and the shareholders that are on the line and the potential future shareholders, Encore has no intentions at the moment to change its holdings in Verdera. And we do look for a long-term relationship with Verdera. So those those shares should stay where they are for the foreseeable future.

Thank you, Bill. Unless anybody has any further questions, I'm going to wrap up with this last question. Very good one. With the recent three to two Cibola County Commission votes supporting in situ recovery in its county. Are we seeing a broader shift in local sentiment towards modern uranium development? And what does that mean for Verdera? Going back into a little bit of history, the conventional mining practices of the past that existed prior to current day legislation and regulatory bodies did leave legacy issues that related to health and the environment. and that is something that the communities have had to deal with and is something that we respect and we acknowledge that has tainted historically the interest in seeing further uranium exploration and production. That said we have introduced in situ recovery into the state which has not been utilized for production and it is something that is 60% of all global uranium is from in situ recovery. So between ourselves and Grants Energy and the Clean Energy Association and its new members, we have been working to provide a lot of education and awareness, necessary information for good decision making. It takes time. I've been in the state now doing this for two years, well in advance of taking over this position as CEO of Verdera. And we are seeing people very open to the education and the information. We've conducted site visits, taking people to ISR operations. We've brought in experts. We've held conferences. We've held community meetings. And we are seeing that people are open to the discussion and they are open to the technology. Energy bills are rising. There's challenges with where the sources of uranium are coming from. And people see it. When you have an increase in oil and gas, if it doubled, you feel it in your utility bill. If uranium doubles, you have a minor percentage in your utility bill. So people are starting to realize that nuclear energy is safe, it's clean, and the technology of in situ is environmentally more responsible. It utilizes less water than conventional mining, and it is much safer historically for the worker. So, yes, we are seeing it. It's not a straight line, and it does take time. as industry was very quiet for a long time. And what we're trying to do right now is really bring out the economic case, the benefits of the community and the technology and change the conversation. So it's showing what value and benefits can be brought from this instead of all just the historic issues. Industry didn't do itself any favors by staying quiet for a long time. I think that's probably it for questions. If you do have any more questions, please do contact us at info at VerderaUranium.com. Again, with Encore, info at EncoreUranium.com. Bill, I'm going to let you have any final comments today.

Thank you. Yes, I think one of the things that for education to our audience that they really might want to key on is there was an article put out in Australia, which is probably the best independent review of the New Mexico situation. And you may, you may well be able to tell them where to see that, but I just came across it this weekend. Thank you. Not sure if it's on your website or not.

Yeah, it'll be up on the website. I think it was from discoveryalert.com. Very lengthy and thorough article on New Mexico. With that, I would also ask people to follow the Clean Energy Association of New Mexico, cleannm.org. and with that I want to thank everybody for their time it is valuable and I appreciate you spending some time with us Bill thank you very much for joining us and again everyone have a wonderful day thank you