Kodiak Copper Corp. (KDK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hey, everybody, just waiting for just admitted everybody, and we're waiting for everyone to connect properly. Just a reminder, I'll say this again, but please let Pete turn off your mics, turn off your cameras, right? Let's not have 1 of those Zoom conferences. Let's help us be as as smooth as it can, please. But I'll just give other couple of seconds here, just to make everybody make sure everyone is in the room, and we'll be off to the races here in just a second. So welcome, everybody. My name is Matthew. I host the junior resource investing podcast. I'm excited this is going to be a fun live webinar here today. I'm posting Kodiak Copper today. The purpose of this webinar is to try to dig a little deeper into Kodiak's 2023 drill campaign through the use of contextualizing visuals and maybe try to help connect the dots on it for investors in terms of just what it is Kodiak is setting out to accomplish. But before we get to the good stuff, right, that always tells keeping analysis, let me get this out of the way. So we're all on the same page. First of all, like I said, please, please, please, Mike cameras off. Let's not turn this into 1 of those moments. If I -- if it's been a chronic issue, we'll probably end up booting you. It's no -- don't take Secondly, this is being recorded. It's currently being recorded right now. I hope to get published this Friday morning. So if you miss it or you want to see it again, just to see you know that will be out within 48 hours. Third, reminder that there is an interactive section to this webinar. I really encourage that you get your questions into the chat. We're going to carve out 10 or 15 minutes for your questions at the end. Lots of questions are sent in, we'll hit those first with any luck we'll have time for some more live off-the-cuff questions from you in the chat today, the get them into the chat and we'll see if we can get to them. And fourth and most importantly, right, please understand all standard disclaimers apply here, right? There's going to be forward-looking statements. Nothing that you hear today's financial advice, we're not your financial advisers. You have to meet with your own financial adviser to make your own investment decisions that are right for you, right? So this is just for entertainment purposes only. But as I say, with all that out of the way, I'm excited it's my pleasure to introduce Kodiak's CEO, Claudia Tornquist; and Chairman, Chris Taylor. Chris -- Claudia and Chris, welcome, and thank you both for joining here today. I'm looking forward to this conversation. How are you?

Doing great Matthew, how are you doing on this mine afternoon it is now?

Yes. It's beautiful day. I'm doing well. Chris and Claudia, how are you?

Very good. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Yes. Excellent. And thank you both for taking the time to be here today. Looking forward to this. Why don't we just jump right into it, right? No more time for me to talk. Our goal is to help people gain an understanding of what Kodiak is accomplishing and building on more of a macro level than maybe your typical news release. So why don't we just start us off. Claudia, why don't you just get us caught up to speed on your MPD project and the work that you've got on it to date. My understanding is that there's a lot of advantages and benefits that are kind of baked into the [Porphyry] MPD,and it's probably worth that starting a conversation there.

Yes. Happy to do so. Before we start, please, everybody, keep in mind that we will be making forward-looking statements until be able to find the relevant guidance on our website. But to dive right into MPD, I'll just start with a quick overview of the key points. One is the location with you're probably familiar with, but just to quickly highlight, we are in an existing mining district in Southern British Colombia, less than a 3 hour drive from Vancouver with big mines, copper and gold mines around us, and I cannot highlight enough what big of an advantage that is. At this stage, of course, it makes our exploration dollars grow a lot further than they would in other places because we have all the infrastructure work force everything just right there. And in the future, this will be even more of an advantage when it comes to building a mine, running a mine, it will be really a big difference maker where we are with MPD. Another important point.

Claudia apologies -- do you have a slide show that you want to share with us?

Is it not up?

No.

Then one moment.

I do enjoy looking at my face steering back.

It should be up, sorry. If for whatever reason the slide share then went away. One moment, please. The wonders of Zoom?

Yes. We had this nailed in the pre conference room here for just so everybody know.

So here's the Map I was speaking to. And let me move on to the next slide. Important thing to keep in mind is that MPD is not a greenfield project, not at all. It had lots and lots of historic work, 50,000 meters of drilling, 400 historic fill holes. This map shows the project as it was before we started our work. And obviously, this previous work, we now benefit off greatly. The main reason why nobody before us could make the project work was that all of this previous work was always on smaller land packages, and we now are for the first time in a position to have the consolidated land package and we are able to exploit it -- explore it to the fullest. Other point to highlight is just the footprint. these black dots here on the map are historic drill holes and the entire area over which already historically gold and copper has been well proven is 14 square kilometer. So big area, big footprint, which told us that this is a system that has real size potential. And then lastly, Important to keep in mind all of this historic drilling was relatively shallow, mostly less than 200 meters in depth. And that's where we took a different approach. Our interpretation was that the higher-grade zones are likely deeper than what the historic drilling reached. So we drill deeper and it worked by the way. We made a discovery in our maiden drill program and discovered the gate zone, which was a real pivotal moment for the company. So that is now almost 3 years ago that we announced the first hole, the discovery hole -- high-grade discovery hole from the Gate Zone. And that led to a big rally in our share price, we were able to raise $12.7 million at the time, and that really gave us momentum. And that enabled us for the last 3 years now to execute big exploration programs with 20,000 meters plus of drilling every year and really push the project forward. And what did we find at the Gate Zone?-- we -- Our discovery hole was a nice, big, long hole of 535 meters of 0.49% copper and 0.29 grams gold for a nice long highway hole. And over the 2 years following the discovery in '21 and '22, we drilled in total 48,000 meters, almost all on the Gate Zone. And in that time, drilled it out to a kilometer in length down to a depth of 900 meters and about 350 meters in width, nice continuity. So we now have, at the Gate Zone, a nice, sizable high-grade porphyry center. Matthew, over to you.

Yes. I mean I think what you're referencing here is something that people always want to see, right, is that you have this working geological model, this exploration thesis that you can then apply and you get those reproducible, repeatable results, right? And that's what exploration is all about. So maybe -- and Chris, this one's for you then. Could you maybe just -- just expand on that concept, right? Can you tell us more about your exploration mall that underpins your work? Maybe could you mind elaborating on details and methods that went into building it? And then actually, maybe if you don't mind just discussing its actual application as well.

Sure, Matthew. I'm happy to talk about it. So it's a little bit on me in a sense because it was by casting that around through some of my contacts that I came across the availability of the MPD project, well, several years ago now. And it's around the time that we changed Kodiak's focus to be mostly on copper. And this was -- I was looking for the potential for a project that could, if we made a major discovery, could conceivably be in the right jurisdiction to go all the way through to like a production type scenario. And it's the same philosophy that I had with my partner, Bob Singh in when we were looking at putting a project in then, we all know how that one ended. Well, this one here, the MPD project, as it's called, this is in, the Cornell belt in Central South British Columbia. And the reason that I was attracted to this is because I used to work at a mine in Central British Columbia called Mount Polley, and this was a copper porphyry mine. And I've done drilling on porphyries like different places in the world. And I was thinking about the overall model at the time that we did the acquisition of this project. And I put up some slides here. And to be honest, Matthew, I had fun doing this. It's been a while since I've done one of these webinar things. because it's 2 years since [indiscernible] got bought basically. So when I put this together, I thought, well, let's let everybody know what I was thinking about. And I was thinking about the [indiscernible] and copper porphyries. And I'm not saying, and I'll say this is forward-looking statements, the endowment of MPD is not equivalent to the Indian or for endowment across the entire chain. I would not say or imply that being the case. But I did put a picture together of a few hundred kilometers. And I got this from a paper about control or porphyry and placement. And it's by -- 1 of the authors on this is somebody that taught me about porphyries back in the day, 20-plus years ago when I was in school. And if you think about it, how do you get these Magma with all the metal up to the area where you're going to make a deposit, -- you have to have big breaks in the earth's crust. You pour a loss of water on a granite countertop, you're going to get a puddle of water on the top of a granite countertop. So if you want to get the water to go through it, you got to break it. So we look for patterns of large-scale structural breaks and the images on the left of the screen here show you predictable sets of deep-seated structures go across the [indiscernible] these are much younger volcanics. So sort of everything is rebut you can extend this pattern way back 200 million years ago to the rocks that we're dealing with at MPD. It's the same kind of controls because the same planet, same controls on the movement of fluids and ore eventually. So if you look at that image, you can see on the left that that's not colored on the background, there's blue fault, screen, faults, red faults. And you see, basically, there's contrasting intersecting fault networks. And if you look on the image on the bottom, you can see how Magma makes it way upwards from deep in her and forms these lines of in placement and particularly where you have intersections in the structures, you get the most dilation, you get the Magma ascending and forming these ore deposits porphyry centers, these volcanic centers. So I put a bunch of figures together. And then on the right the screen kind of top right, I guess. You can see a map that we put out from the MPD project and low on this property, which is of the reasons I was interested in it, as you can see on regional magnetic data, stuff by explorers and the government over the years that there's major structural trends going north-south. And just like you see on the NBN map, you have intersecting structural trends going northwest to southeast. So basically, across in structural set in 2 areas. That's where our claims are localized, and that's where we have what we found around the gate zone was up in the northern 1 and the results that we put out recently like the West zone, they're coming from the one in the South. So you can see that porphyry centers cluster in these areas where the come up along these big structures. And with that, we go on the next slide. And I thought I'd show a picture of what this looks like. So porphyries, you've got a bunch of metals sitting deep in the ground, some intrusions, Well, what these are is effectively volcanos. So the top rate image is at the same scale as the left image. So the map of the project where you see our volcanic -- sorry, all of our porphyry centers. If you look on the top right, you can see images of volcanos from the [indiscernible] today, nicely exposed. There's no vegetation cover up there. But you can see the red circles I drew are the same size on the image on the right and on the left. And what you can see there is that what we have is it looks like the claims are covering areas where we would have had $200 million roughly a year old volcanic centers and these would have had a number of different Magma pulses that pulse out under them as volcanos grow over time, and you get the segregation of the metal rich fluids and they form the ore bodies or the mineralization bodies in these 2 different areas. So you can see on our project why we're so interested in it that it's like we've taken 2 of these [indiscernible] stratovolcano centers, and we've got 2 of them that we've got the claims over here on the property right now, and that's where these porphyries cluster. The bottom right image shows ZTEM data, this is a passive EM airborne method that we've had flown over the property. And you can see actually, that's a cross-section and it shows you over 1 kilometer down at depth you can see that there is some sort of body that's being defined, which is actually located in the the Prime, Dillard and [indiscernible] targets on that graph. So you probably have a deep-seated intrusion and the mineralization that we're getting on the surface above that is where those fluids are working their way to surface or closer to today's surface and making those deposits. So that's what I wanted to show here and we can go to the next slide. And this is an example, again, macroscopic structure, these are super important for us and our exploration models. So on the top of the right of the picture. You've got our projects showing some of these based on the Airborne geophysics and other data that we've collected, you can see that there's major structures intersecting on the property, like I showed on the other slide. And then if you look on the bottom right image that's at Copper Mountain, the mine that was bought by Hudbay, which is just a long trend from us. And you can see it's the same sort of playing intersecting structure. So no surprise where do you get these volcanic centers developed while you got them developed at these major structural intersections. And you can see on the top left image some of the intercepts that are defined at Copper Mountain. That's the Ingerbelle long section. So we can talk about that a little bit more later if you want. So next slide, And this is what done a lot of work in porphyries drilling different parts of the world -- this is a very standard porphyry model. This thing is about 50 years old now. And what I'm talking about the concentric predictable zones in a porphyry, which I'll do in a little bit, you can see that it grades from outward pro propylitic alteration down to potassic alteration sort of near your high grade. And you can see on the right part of the image goes from having a lot of pyrite in the outside part of the system to having the chalcopyrite and bornite in this sort of concentric shelf near the center. So this is really what we're looking for. As we do the drilling, it's not often this tidy in real life you see variations in how those minerals and alteration are distributed. But whether it's like I've worked at Red Chris, I've worked at Mount Polley, I've worked at Porphyries in Alaska, Mexico have looked at them in South America. You do get a general repetition of this pattern, and that's the same kind of thing we're seeing on our property here at MPD. So next slide.

Chris, you've hit a couple of points there. I think as ceilings and why I wanted to have this conversation in the first place. I mean the reputation of a porphyry and predictability of a porphyry system. I mean this is a reliable repeatable exploration thesis just combined with the classic modern exploration thesis of going under cover rate. And so that when you're working from 1 normal start to the next, but ultimately, it means that you do have a really good understanding of what is there. But even if you haven't necessarily drill to depth, right, you know it's just a matter of grades at what comes up. And so I mean that's when I speak personally, something that really catches my eye with Kodiak that, again, this repeatable high conviction exploration thesis, right? But -- why don't we -- we've covered MPD as a project, right? And Claudia discussed is all sort of the intangible and qualitative approach of benefits to it. You established Chris, the exploration model. Why don't we then just transition a bit and then talk about the actual application of that model in terms of this year's exploration program. Claudia, do you mind just kind of walking through what you've done this year and what you've accomplished?

Yes. We have a big drill program -- exploration program underway. Actually, we're just getting to the end of it. We started drilling in April and has approximately will have approximately 20,000 meters of drilling at the end of it. So similar-sized program to the last 2 years, but very different in many ways because the last 2 years, we built primarily on Gate on our first discovery. And this year, we are not drilling on Gate anymore, but take the same model and apply it to 5 new targets. So deeper drilling below historic drilling, with the aim to find more high-grade zones and really prove the scale of the system we have at MPD. On this map, you see the targets that we have prioritized for drilling this year. West here in the southern part of the property is where we started in April. We then started a second drill in the northern part of the property at Man and have been telling now in total 5 targets. in addition to those 2, we also have filed South 1516 and Bayer this year. And on top of that, a big geophysical and regional exploration program. So very, very busy year. As I said, we started at West and have the first results from there and just today announced the first results from the Man target. Let me talk about the West Zone first and what we see there. That's here in the in-set, you see where it's located, southern part of the property. It is a previously drilled target that had shallow historic drilling. And like at the Gate Zone, we drill deeper and we're successful, got nice long intercepts of mineralization down to almost a kilometer and also significant higher-grade zones. At the bottom here, you see our best intercepts so far from the Gate Zone, 941 meters of mineralization starting right from surface and within that, a nice long zone of 254 meters of 0.58% copper equivalent. So certainly very pleased with those initial results. We have 9 holes so far from the West zone this year. And with that drilling and of course, the historic drilling, we've now proven mineralization over 650 meters in length across some 350 meters and down to almost a kilometer. So starting to look quite sizable, nice high grade in the West zone and certainly still open to extension and lot more drilling to be done. We also saw some interesting geological features at the West zone, in particular, a new Breccia zone that we discovered at depth, and Chris can speak more to the significance of that.

Yes. And that's exactly what I -- Chris, that's exactly how I do want you to talk about [indiscernible] I mean, maybe my question for you specifically, right? I mean, obviously, discovery of Breccia depth will perk people's ears. But what is the significance that Claudia says, but then maybe again, maybe the question that I'm trying to always view this towards kind of geological topics, right? But how does it affirm or augment or alter your existing geological understanding and at right? Is this discovery potential evidence for higher-grade zones?

Yes, I would say in a nutshell, these sort of high-energy fragmented Breccias are a feature that weren't expected on this property, which is by the past operators anyway. So I spent a fair bit of my time at the Mount Polley mine. This is nearly 20 years ago, oh my God, time flies, 20 years ago now. And 1 of the key controls on mineralization there, and it's a similar type of alkali-type porphyry system and this one in the same belt rock is the preparation of the rock mass to receive those impregnated metal bearing fluids, right? So I look at this, and these are up on the screen in front of us right now, there's some very metal rich. In this case, pyrite with secondary Chalcopyrite You can actually see that, that's moly -- molybdenum in the picture, the gray material in there, so we get some of that characteristic as well. And you can see that this is high energy Breccia which has been now hit at various levels. I know we talk about hitting it at depth. But to be honest, we've seen this throughout the drill at various elevations as we drill through it. And what it really means is that there was a lot of energy in this system. There is a -- in order to get just the Geology 101 view on this is that if your magma is going to make a porphyry deposit, you want to -- as the crystals cool, the fluids and the gas segregate out because you can't incorporate fluid and gas into a solid mineral crystal. So as the Magna Chamber cools the gas and the fluid and the metals, importantly, they end up concentrating in the residual liquids. When they do that and you concentrate enough fluid and gas together in the liquid at the top of the chamber, it actually blows up like an atom bomb into the overlying rock mass. And that massive explosion that high energy explosion is what prepares the rock to receive the fluids and really lets you develop great. If you think about porphyries and you've seen them at other deposits, you think of these little veins that have metal in them. When you generate these high-energy explosive hydrothermal branches, you can prepare amount of rock mass, and it can absorb a lot of fluid and a lot of metal at the same time. And this is the kind of stuff that we're seeing in here. So it gets me really excited because where there's some, there's more and we can predict based on the type of mineral species that we're seeing within the porphyry model, which is in-set here at the bottom right. where we sit within this material. You can see when you've got -- if you're looking at this, you can see the pyrite shell label that 10% pyrite. You're looking at this hydrothermal Breccia here and you're with within my interpretation would be that you're within the pyrite shell adjacent where you would get better mineralization. So of course, when you're drilling from surface and you're going down to hundreds of meters depth. You can't predict where you're going to hit within these concentric shells exactly. But we use the observations that we see like the amount of pyrite, the amount of Brecciation, other alteration minerals to figure out where we need to go to vector into the better grades. And that's the information we're collecting now. What's important is that because we see these high energy Breccias, we know it has the capacity to absorb a lot of metal, and that's super important. So I think I had a few more slides about this as well. So these are some pictures and these are my old notes. The 2 pictures on the top are from West zone Breccias. that we saw hydrothermal Breccias. You can see if you look at those images that those Breccia are formed of different rock fragments. So that means it was very energetic. The rock exploded and those fragments of we brought upwards by the strength in that explosion and it mixes the different rock types together. And then the mineralization basically concentrates sometimes within the class. You can see on the top left one that was actually a porphyry style mineralized class with Chalcopyrite that was brought up and in place in the Breccia body. So it means there's more of that kind of stuff at depth. And if you look at the bottom images, those are similar type branches that I was logging at Mount Polley back in the day. And we found something called the Northeast zone, which is now the white pit. And it was a discovery of this kind of high-grade stock sitting in the near surface. So high-grade at the white pit high grade now that on the MPD project like we found at the West zone and other areas that we're drilling. If you can find near surface, high grade, these are the kind of things that can jump-start a project because you're looking for high-value material to put through a mill at the early stage. And now something like the West zone drilling that we see it has got the right type of rocks, the right Breccia signature is showing us that we have a highly energetic system that has the capacity to be heavily mineralized, but importantly for us, written in your surface as well. And we see the same kind of things. I know from experience that when you find can be transformational for a project. That's what got Mount Polley going again in 2005 when I -- when I was working there and living there. And now we're seeing these kind of features at the MPD project as well. So next slide. And then here's -- I'm going to beat the dead horse here, Matthew. So the image on the left is that white pit and the Northeast Zone at Mount Polley, this is the high grade at surface hydrothermal Breccia discovery that we made that was -- that actually jump-started the mine again. And it's at the same scale. as the image on the right. And the image on the right is geophysics and it's showing the West Zone target. You can see the drill traces from the work that we've done this year that have been published so far. And you can see that these are roughly the same size in terms of their physical dimensionality on footprint. The Northeast zone, unfortunately, for us at the time at Mount Polley, it's segregated separated by a bunch of intersecting faults that came in after mineralization. So it kind of had no route in a way. The West zone looks to be intact. which is great. So we were able to drill down like 900 meters in a shot plus like basically almost 2 a kilometer, and it was in the same mineralized system the whole way. So that shows you the size, potential and a comparison between those 2 important features. I think the next slide has some stuff on it too. And of course, as you're drilling through these hydrothermal Breccia systems, the image on right is from some high-grade copper gold material that we found, which is on the East flank of the West Zone, and we expect to see these within these hydrothermal Breccia systems. If you out a big area of hundreds of meters of Breccia it's usually going to be a corner of it that gets more mineralized because for whatever reason, it has more fluid penetration, a lot of your metal drops out there. And when you look at stuff like this, which is like I believe that's about 1% copper plus gold endowment, silver endowment and such. That is high -- very high-grade material, like comparable in grade to what we found at Mount Polley. And that's something that we found recently at the West Zone too, which makes sense given the strength of the rock fragmentation and other features that we see.

I find that really interesting, right. I mean repeating myself this real outin-based model that you have that you've built with your own career and just applying it in a new setting rates and taking that knowledge and reproducing results. And the fact, I mean, I'm just going to -- this is my own forward-looking statement, right? But I mean if you I mean talking about jump starting a project. If you could somehow find actual grade tonnage to strap to MPD's bulk tonnage program project. I mean that's -- like you said, it could fundamentally change the potential moving forward. But why don't we move on, and I think this is again a good transition here, a good segue here. Let's talk about me, you had it news out today, right? I mean, you first is results from Man zone, pardon me, are out today, I thought they were positive, right? I mean how much additional mineralization they actually seem to confirm, right? That you have new lengths of previously unconfirmed mineralization that now exists. But of course, I don't think I'm telling anybody secret here this market is absolutely merciless right now if you're not pulling up 40 grams per ton of gold or ever, right? But maybe, Claudia, if you just want to talk through what your results were today and their significance for what you're trying to build here?

Yes. So today, we had the first 2 holes from Man zone, results of those, and we're pleased with them, mineralization right from surface and a couple of mineralized zones down to a depth of 995 meters. So I think that's the deepest we have drilled mineralization anywhere in the property and hold ending in mineralization, there's certainly more potential at that. What's important to keep in mind is that Man zone is close to Gate. Like from center to center of the 2 zones it's about 2 kilometers, but the southern edge of Gate to the northern edge of Man, that's less than a kilometer. So that's -- and of course, a long trend. So this area between those 2 zones is certainly an area we will look at closer going forward. And the hole we got from Man, nylon Intercept, respectable grades slightly less high grade than what we see at Gate and West. But we had, for example, 116 meters of 0.45% copper equivalent, and that's certainly encouraging. Here's an image that shows what it looks like in 3D. On the left, the Gate Zone and here on the right is Man. At the bottom of our new reserve, it still looks rather skinny that zone, we call it the hotdog because obviously, only 2 holes so far. And that's why for now, it's relatively skinny zone, but down to almost a kilometer and obviously, more drilling to come. So encouraging start, but you also could see very well on this image is the near surface mineralization at Man, we have between the historic drilling and our drilling now quite a significant amount of near surface mineralization and you see the red zones there. Some of them also with quite respectable and high grade. So that's where we got to so far at Man. Chris can speak a little bit more about the model and the geology behind it.

Yes. I like those -- I mean, this image has been up on your website first, been using news releases for a while. I like seeing that hotdog added too. That's a nice addition. Yes. Sorry, Claudia, not to step on your toes. Chris, like what she just said, right? I mean how did you target that Man, right? And did the drilling confirm the [indiscernible] geometries and the geophysical data. And again, I guess, as a follow-up, I mean, is it fair to call these results further validation. I mean, how important are these results to the validation of your current working model?

Sure. Yes, we have some slides about that. Just to talk about how the model came together. And I guess maybe I answer the last part of the question first. Yes, it's basically worked again. So we've got a pretty good feel based on the information like Claudia said, we've been drilling 20,000 meters a year for a few years, and we had quite a bit of drilling beforehand, like hundreds of shallow holes. So -- and historically, geophysics, the geophysics we're doing and what we're seeing, like kind of the features that we look for. We want to see a copper anomaly in the soil on surface, and then we want to see coincident resistivity because a lot of the mineralized systems that we're seeing tend to be resistive. And you also want to see them that they're chargeable as well. So if you put an electric current in there, it will hold the current and bleed it out over time, which is also very important for figuring out where the zones are going to be developed because that's a function of the sulfide content in there. right. So -- and the sulfides that were carried in the metals. So on the left of this image, we can see that we've got the red outline that you see on the left is basically the same data that you see on the right. So that is chargeability, and the background information that you see is the resistivity. So you can see based on the -- on the left part of the image, you can see it's coincident chargeability and resistivity, that's what we like to see when we're doing a bunch of this drilling because we can see that at Gate, we could see that here. And before we did the deep drilling at Man, initially, Man was thought to be a relatively constrained like a smaller zone and we thought we saw this on the geo business going down like over a kilometer. We thought mill must be that Man is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg because that's what we see on the other project. The other porphyries on the projects. So we've put a couple of holes into it and lo and behold, it's as you would expect, we saw a much larger mineralized system. And we like Man as a target, not because it's the highest grade target on the project. It definitely isn't, but it is mineralization. And there's a lot of deep high-grade mineralization at the Gate Zone, and there actually is shallower mineralization at Gate Zone and I'll get on to that. But we are looking for shallow copper in this area. So finding that we have a big mineralized system here at Man as well. We know that we have copper in the surface important for us for the future, we think, in the future. If the project continues advancing, it eventually gets to a development stage, that proximity of these 2 things could be very important. And as Claudia said, edge to edge, they're less than a kilometer apart. You can see looking at where this would fit into a porphyry model. Again, there's quite a bit of pyrite here, but we see Bornite as well. We see some potassic alteration. So -- and we see in this area, some phyllic alteration over printing the other types. So when we did the drilling, we could tell that we were sort of looking at the type of porphyry system where we were and where the grade should be distributed and match the model that we have. And here are some examples of core from the Man zone. And as we mentioned, Lake, it's -- you have a very good interval like 0.4% 5% copper equivalent or in this case, I think there's 0.3% copper over a number of these. This is what that looks like when you get into the higher-grade portions within that. The core on the left you can see there is a very nicely developed Chalcopyrite. The core on the right, you can see a few features in there. You can see the [indiscernible] is from [indiscernible] alteration. And you can see there's Chalcopyrite , which is the yellowish minerals and the ones within those, the dark ones are actually Bornite as well, which is an even higher grade mineral copper-bearing mineral. So those are both pieces of core from the Man Zone.

So I think this is a -- I mean we've done a decent job here, right? We talked about the historic exploration. We talked about your model. We talked about this season, this campaign. Maybe should we just talk about what's yet to come? And I guess, maybe -- let me pause here. Again, I see some good questions coming in. Please keep them coming. We're just about to the Q&A. -- maybe what's -- do you want -- should -- shall we discuss what is to come, maybe, right? And Claudia, do you want to just point us towards the catalyst that maybe investors can expect over the next 0 to 6, 12 months or so?

Yes. So we are just wrapping up our exploration program. and have so far 9 holes out of some 30 plus for which we have results already. So what that means lots more results to come. That's obviously not under our control. But the timing of that is, but I'm quite confident we get some more this year and then the rest in the new year. So a lot more results to come from our drilling. And then, of course, also from our sizable geochemical, geophysical programs, prospecting and so on. In terms of what's on the card next year in terms of exploration, we'll be doing a lot of work over the winter to plan that and figure out all those details. I can say a couple of general things about what to expect. We call it a mix of exciting boring and the somewhat provocative questions on there. We've been drilling for years. Surely, we should just focus on resource definition work going forward, and that is not what we will be doing. The reason is simply that resource definition that's what you do when you really know the scale and the scope of your project. And if you look at our property, we have numerous targets and have only drilled a handful of them already. So at this stage, we don't know whether we've drilled the best targets, the highest grade targets. We simply have to test these other targets that we still have on the property, and that will be an important and exciting part of our work going forward because that's really about discovery again. And of those targets, there are a couple like in the southern part, for example, added Ohio, for example, those are targets that have been historically drilled. So we know already there is copper and gold near surface well proven and those will be tested deeper. And then we have a number of other targets, new targets that came off our -- out of our regional exploration work that we have been advancing to drill readiness, and those will certainly also be on our list for testing. And then not to forget, with our geophysical and soil sampling with this year, there is a good chance that more target areas will emerge. Then includes boring part of our work. There will certainly be also as part of our work some more infill-type drilling with the Gate Zone here as an example, where we have a lot of higher grade mineralization at depth starting from 200 meters and deeper and have some mineralization near surface but we'll certainly going forward to more drilling near surface to really see what more near surface mineralization we can find there. And so that type of drilling will certainly also be part of next year's or future years work. So lots more potential to be unlocked. We're looking forward to more results from this year. work and then lots more drilling and discovery potential for our shareholders in the next year and the years to come.

Yes, lots of copper to be added. And I think that is -- if I'm not mistaken Claudia, Chris, that is the end of our programming. And so there just for the last 5 or 10 minutes, I'll try to just to be fair to everybody. I apologize if I don't get to your question in particular. But the 1 that I want to ask off the bat and Claudia, maybe I'll give it back to you because you had referenced it yourself, right? No resource, and I think that makes sense, right? There's always a debate of maiden resource or not. When do you do it, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to work from Cormark, right? Cormark has you pegged at, I think, GBP 3 billion of copper. If I'm not mistaken, kind of a rule of thumb sort of general understanding of Tier 1 periphery copper deposit is GBP 10 billion. Can you provide any color or just discussion? I don't want to ask you a pointed question and get you a hot water with [indiscernible] Can you just maybe just provide some context to those numbers for us?

Yes. As I said, we are not defining a resource yet, simply because the earlier define resource, the smaller, it will be by definition. And we don't know yet what we have at all these other targets on our properties. So that's still some time in the future. Now having said that, with the Gate Zone, we have a nice sizable popery center. You referenced the Cormark model, and that's probably the best sort of public figure in terms of just the size of what we have here. Our interpretation is that with the Gate Zone, we are not yet there what in terms of visibility for really a big major system, that $10 billion -- GBP 10 billion of copper in the ground is always a number that's sort of in the industry for a big [indiscernible] really of interest to major companies. And with Gate Zone, I don't think we're there yet. But this year, we have added the West one. We have found extensive deep into at the Man zone. So we are building critical mass really with the aim to demonstrate the real scale and size potential of MPD.

No, excellent. And so I'm going to -- this one for you, Chris, and I'll give a shot at here to know the lights on CEO. He had a bunch of great questions, and this is actually one that I see popping up in the live questions here. Just a question around, I guess, the source, right? Given -- earlier in the MPD exploration process, there was evidence potentially of a feeder zone or a potential cause of intrusion. Is there any update? I mean, is that something you're chasing? Is that something that's kind of on your tools to chase? I mean to me, it seems almost crazy to ask a company you're already drilling a kilometer down to keep going deeper. But I mean what's your approach to trying to find that cause of intrusion?

Yes, the cost of intrusion, like these will occur sort of a Magma chamber below any volcanic complex, right? So they're all going to have them at some depth. The mineralized zones tend to actually occur above that Magma chamber. So it's not like the -- it shows up as a big growing target on his -- but generally, you've got to get the fluids up to a shallower level and then they start coming out for pressure temperature reasons, fluid mixing reasons, other stuff. So I think that's a cause of intrusion, for instance, up around the Gate Zone, Dillard, Man and these guys underneath, but that wouldn't be a primary exploration target. At the future, I'd love to put into it, but I mean it's a much lower priority on the scheme of things than actually figuring out how much we have in like a future sort of potentially economically interesting way, right? How many porphyry centers are there? What's the great distribution? What's the total tonnage going to ultimately look like. And that's all important to do than drilling a 1.7, 1.8 kilometers hole down to a target like that. I think the way this is what we're going to have is we bunch of different porphyry magmas that have come up in different areas, and they're going to have porphyry zones developed around them. That's what you'd see in a major deposit like in Australia, you've got Cadia Ridgeway system. which was like a massive discovery here we're talking over 20 years ago. And there, you tend to have like structural controls as you get magmas that come up and then something that they call them pencil porphyries, generally quite good grade, and these would be similar in geometry to some of the stuff we're drilling now at like West Zone, Man and stuff like that. And these targets like there could be any number of these on the project, especially in the areas where we see these clusters of intrusions. And remember that Gate was not known despite it being a kilometer long and hundreds of meters wide, it was not known before we did the work here. So how many of those are sitting on the project. I couldn't tell you right now we do the drill testing on them. And I always think that I got the same advice with Great Bear early on, like why aren't you just doing -- you've made the discovery, -- why don't you do resource definition on the [indiscernible] zone. -- why don't you do it on the [indiscernible] zone. And in the end, the LP fault was the biggest one that we found, right? So it reminds me a little bit like that at Kodiak right now. We've made a series of really good discoveries. I really like the Gates Zone discovery. It's a great discovery. -- we've only begun to test the project. At some point, you've got to rein it in and then start being resource definition, but we're still in that additive phase right now with the company.

Excellent. And so Claudia, I'll bounce this one back to you. [indiscernible] question here just a network, right? He's asking about recovery rates, et cetera. My understanding is that you are using Copper Mountain's recovery rates, you can correct me if I at factor on. But he's just asking, is there a network being done at this stage? Or in that vein, how much has been done, when might we expect a sort of thing? And then maybe what sort of based on that, what sort of recovery rates are you anticipating?

Well, at this stage, we haven't done any metallurgical work that would be very early to do metallurgy. And you would only do it if there was any reason for concern, which we certainly don't have. We have, as you said, Copper Mountain next door to us, which has very similar geology. And they have a nice clean concentrate, good recoveries, no deleterious elements or anything that would really worry you -- and we certainly look very closely at all our assay results for any such elements, and there isn't anything that would give us reason to worry. So for now, there's no need to do early metallurgy, we'll do that at the right time later on.

I would add to that. I haven't seen anything in the minerals that we've seen in the rock so far that would make it have a red flag in my mind of any kind.

Okay. Excellent. And so I'm going to -- I'm just going to ask 1 or 2 more questions. I want to be cognizant of the time and sensitive to the fact that we don't want to stretch this on too much. I will say -- I will keep your questions, and maybe I'll fire them off to Chris and Claudia afterwards and try to get a written Q&A done just to clean them up. But -- maybe just 1 or 2 more just because there's a couple of questions around Gate in 15, 16. Maybe just -- I'll just ask 1 or 2, I can say. Just -- yes, so I guess, Chris, I'll ask you this thoughts on 15, 16. What is coming out of the ground there compared to your more advanced targets? Is it the same? Is it different? What are you seeing anything noteworthy to comment on?

I couldn't give an update here prior to having a news release about Gate -- but that was always the question that Gate is, is it another porphyry center. We saw in data that we published so far you can see that it has the soil geochemistry that's consistent with an underlying porphyry. So in that sense, it sort of matches what we've seen before. There's some interesting zonation in the porphyry, like in the soil data, like there's a moly signature at Gate, which is quite interesting in soils.

Did you mean 15? 16.

15, 16, sorry I said the wrong thing. Yes, sorry. I meant 15, 16. So -- that's what that's going to get some follow-up here with the drill rig and you end up having to drill it. The way that 15, 16 is arranged is like you'll have to put a few along different setups along target because there's different signatures in the soil data along, say, like about a 2-kilometer area. It's a big target actually. So I'd say what we see in the public data we've got out so far is consistent with another porphyry center, what's unusual for -- compared to the other ones in the project is like the presence of moly, molybdenum and just the [indiscernible] of that sale target over a distance as well.

And then final one here. I think this because I hope is going to be a relatively short question. But just Dillard, right? So in light of all of your improving and evolving understanding of what you have got going on, is there a -- and this is Claudia, to you. Any discussion about revisiting Dillard. Or is that still on a back burner loan priority?

We will certainly, at some point, go back to Dillard. At this time, I would say there are higher priority targets on our list that we'll probably drill first. but Dillard is certainly still on the list, and we'll see more work at some point in the future.

Perfect. Well, I think I'll call it there. Thank you Yes, Claudia and Chris, thank you for your time. Final thoughts, anyone of you two screening thoughts you want to get off your chest before we leave?

I appreciate, go ahead Claudia.

It's been a pleasure. I'm not sure I have any screening thoughts otherwise.

Mine always relates to geology. And in this sense, like you see so many of the same features that I've seen at other porphyry deposits in districts in the world it's really gratifying to see them developing so nicely here at MPD. And it's nice that it validates that original thesis, big structural control, it doesn't matter how old the rock is. Nature repeats those patterns, and we're using all that information to our advantage. That's why we're able to drill so many good holes in really a short period of time.

Well said. And well said to both of you, and yes, I will call out here. Thank you for your time. Everybody who is here. Thank you for tuning in. And like I say, maybe we'll see a little bit of a written Q&A follow-up here. We'll see if I can get on their good sites more. But Yes, thank you both, Chris and Claudia announcing the background. Thank with us and thanks for doing everybody, and have a good day.