Nova Minerals Limited (NVA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Before we begin, please allow me to read the safe harbor statement. This webcast may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1955. All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results as well as other statements about management's future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans or prospects constitute forward-looking statements. Some parts of today's presentation may be prerecorded. Any statements that are not historical facts should also be considered forward-looking. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties.

Hi. I'm Christopher Gerteisen, CEO and Director of Nova Minerals. Coming to you live here today from the Estelle Gold and Critical Minerals project. What we wanted to do today is take those of you who are joining us on a more intimate look, closer look at what we do here at the Estelle project. Today, we'll be looking at the camp, some of our facilities here at the Whiskey Bravo Airstrip, where we're sitting right now. We'll also go up and have a look at some of the drilling operations at our RPM deposit and also go to Stibium. But first, let's go check out the camp. Hop in. Here we've been operating this project for about 6 years. We've only scratched the surface with great success, though. To date, we've defined almost 10 million ounces across 2 deposits, Korbel and RPM. We'll go to RPM today. But in addition to that, we have 20 other known prospects at various stages of advancement, which include gold, copper, silver and highly elevated concentrations of many of the critical minerals. And the big one there is antimony. And we'll have a look at some antimony today for sure. So we're just coming down from the airstrip down to the camp. You can see this is a fully winterized 80-man camp with lots of activities. We're in the high season right now, several drill rigs operating, and we'll go look at some of those today. But in addition, you can see much of it is helicopter-supported. You can see one of our helicopters there. We actually have 2 on site at the moment. Here off to your right is our workshop area. This is our main workshop. We can fix the D6 dozer and large excavators going there, smaller workshop. Here is some of our equipment. We have quite a bit of equipment on site for our earthworks. Every year, we do some improvements here at this camp. Here's our generator Shack. That's what powers the whole place. Let's have a walk-through camp. And we're just going down the main drag here at camp. And you can see on either side, these are our accommodation units, sleepers. These are all sea cans that are custom-made right here in Alaska. All the facilities on site that includes cook and mess hall, professional kitchen, laundry facilities, even a gym for the guys to work out and the ladies. So at this camp, every year, we make some improvements and continue to build it out as we move forward and the project continues to expand, particularly with the discovery -- significant discoveries of antimony at the site. And here now, we've arrived at the main geology office. This is really the command center where we manage the field programs and do all the planning. Just outside, we have our rock sample table, and there's some very exciting rocks here. You can see -- we mentioned the antimony. Here's a piece of massive stibnite. This is, of course, the primary ore mineral for antimony, and we find these massive stibnite veins at the Stibium prospect as well as at the Styx prospect. And here's another piece. And you can see that silver color. This is massive stibnite. So very exciting in terms of the antimony potential here at Estelle. In addition to that, numerous rocks from numerous prospects for gold, pick a few up here. Here's one. In this one particular sample, you can see a very high-grade arsenopyrite, that's an indicator for gold. And this one, we set in for assay. This one is running 28.8 grams per tonne there from the Trumpet prospect in particular. What else we got here? Here's one, a nice piece of intrusive. This one comes from Korbel. This is a Korbel sample. So this is intrusive. What we're after here in terms of the gold are what they call intrusive-related gold systems and very typical here in this Tintina Gold province in Alaska, which has been one of the most prolific belts. This particular sample is running 6.98 grams per tonne. And there's numerous more I could go on and on because, of course, not only do we have the deposits at Korbel and RPM, but as I said, 20 other known prospects at various stages of advancement and a whole host of different rock samples. So very exciting. Let's step inside the geology office, and I'll run you through some maps and what we're going to look at today in the field. So here on this map, this is an outline of our claim block. They're all state of Alaska mining claims. So there's no federal land or native corporation land here. It's all state of Alaska land, which is quite a bonus for the project in terms of permitting. That's a much more streamlined permitting process. But what you're looking at over 200 square miles of claims up north, we have the Korbel area. Down south, we have the RPM, and we're going to go there today and have a look at some of the drilling operations. In addition to that, the 20 other known prospects, some to point out here is, of course, Stibium for antimony and gold and then the Styx prospect is out here to the west. So what we're going to look at today is we're going to go to RPM, and we're also going to go to Stibium and have a look around, and we'll get some lookouts there and be able to look over to some of the other prospects. On the maps behind me, we have RPM. So we'll go there today again here shortly. And we are currently drilling there. We have 2 drill rigs working on the resource drilling there to continue to prove up and expand that deposit. This is really the jewel in the crown in terms of the gold at Estelle. And what you see here, in addition to the hard rock source, which we're drilling now, you can see this red color here. This is a surface soil surface anomaly. And that's 1.7 kilometers strike length. This is eroded material that's coming off of the main deposit that's filling into that valley. And we've also drilled that this year and put the first drill holes into that to test that material because it's all crushed up, ready to dig up and big potential resource upside. In addition to that, there's numerous drill-ready targets along this ridge, which we -- all present upside for RPM. And then we'll also go to the Stibium prospect today, which is this map. And you can see here the drilling program that we have planned, all these drill traces that we have planned out. So we hope to -- we are well advanced and we've applied for U.S. government grant funding to be able to fast-track this project to bring antimony online for domestic production of antimony and Nova Minerals at Estelle here. We've really been a first mover in that space. And we're at the center of that effort to bring that antimony production back to the U.S.A. Antimony is such a key critical mineral for munitions, clean tech, green tech, solar panels, batteries, it really goes on and on, semiconductors. And so we're hoping to be the first mover there and bring that production back to the United States based right here in Alaska. And so with that introduction, let's -- we'll go up to the Core Shack here in a little bit. But first, let's go to Hans out there at the RPM deposit and see what's going on out there.

Thanks, Chris. Welcome to RPM. We're on our Pad 24-1 from last year where we did our RC drilling, and we're kind of situated between the original Pad 1 where we had our initial discovery and Pad 23-1, which is up above us. Talk about these pads for a minute. I got to give credit to our [indiscernible] pad builders, Alex, Billy, Brian, Kaden, John. These guys are really our unsung heroes and the tip of the spear when it comes to setting up these drilling operations. They're dropped off on these ridges with nothing but a pick and a shovel and slowly cut themselves in with a helicopter LZ and set up their shelter and then slowly just start cutting back into the mountain and crib stacking 8x8, so we get a nice platform like this. This one is a little smaller than we typically use with the diamond rigs since we're orienting different azimuths. Those ones up there are usually like 40x 40. But everything you see here has been flown in by helicopter. We've got some great pilots from Salloy, Dion, John, Sam. They're highly skilled operators and everything you see here comes in on a hook and brought to the drillers, they assemble the rig and then all their ancillary equipment, heaters, shelters, light plants are all brought in, fuel tanks, more safety shelters. Up above, we've got a Ruin's LF70 with Howard and Chance. They're drilling basically right under our feet in a kind of a window we have in our data. We're bringing some inferred resources up to measured and indicated. They're on a 335 azimuth and minus 65 dip. And then down below, we've got Ruin's LF70 rig #6 with Rob and Cole, and they're actually drilling under the glacier at 260 minus 50 and they're kind of chasing this contact that we hit from the northern pad that is like the granodiorite intrusion and hornfels meet just pretty much right under my feet. And we're starting to see it extend out under the glacier. So it's been pretty exciting. I think each rig is -- one's drilled 6 holes out here this year, the other one 5 holes, and it's August -- early August right now. So we'll see how much time Mother Nature gives us, but we're planning to just go through the rest of the season here. A little bit about the drilling operations are diamond core rigs. They bring a core up in a tube, place it on a tray. They orient the core, so we know which way all the structures are oriented and space here. It's placed in a core box, and that's put in the basket and hooked back up to the helicopter and flown back to camp at the Core Shack, where Chris is at now.

Thanks, Hans. That was a quick look at the RPM drilling operations. We'll go back up there and take a more detailed look. But it's really all about the drilling operations. Everything here is to support that in our effort to define gold and antimony resources. So what happens is the drilling operations occur out on the claims at various prospects. And then all of that drill core is brought down here to the Whiskey Bravo Airstrip sample processing facility. And what you're seeing here is boxes and boxes of drill core that's been coming down off the mountain. So the first step here, bring it down. And then, of course, it gets logged by our geologists. And so here's one of our logging here. And you can see if you have a look inside, we're currently logging, some of the latest drill core from RPM and Stibium, very comprehensive logging. We do geology, mineralization, geotechnical. And here's Sam, one of our geologists. So very exciting rocks coming out in the current drilling program, of course. Also, what happens here is that on a geological basis, the samples get divided up into intervals, which we sample. And generally, that interval is 1.5 meters, but then based on geology, we might change that up a bit. After that, the drill core gets moved over to our cutting shed and the drill core is cut in half. And then half of that core is kept in the in the boxes and stored for future reference. And then the other half is put into sample bags, which you see over here and is brought over to our sample processing facility, which we'll go to now. We can process approximately -- currently, we're processing about 100 to 150 meters a day through all this process of logging, cutting and processing, which we'll see here. Once the samples are bagged up, the half core, that bulk sample weighs about 10 to 12 kilos. And the next step is it comes into our sample processing lab. This is really our pride and joy and brings a lot of efficiencies to the operation. Let's have a look inside. What happens here in the sample prep lab is the samples, those bulk 10-kilo half core samples are dried, crushed and then split for a small sample that then goes to the assay lab. So we're taking 10, 12 kilo samples, crushing and splitting those down to about 300 grams that then gets shipped off to the assay lab. And we use ALS mainly as our main assay lab. And of course, that volume reduction brings a lot of efficiency and cost savings in terms of freight. So that's really the process, and it goes to the lab. And of course, then we eagerly await the assay results, which hopefully will be further discoveries of gold and antimony, copper, silver, some of these other elements that we're after. I want to show you something quite special. Here, we always generally keep this out. What we have laid out here is our discovery hole at RPM. This is drill hole RPM005. And this is really the drill hole that discovered RPM and determined that it is such a high-grade world-class deposit. And you can see if you zoom in, this is a typical intrusive-related gold system. You can see the veining going out throughout the rocks. Here, you see some intrusive. And in this particular hole, what we discovered there was 400 meters at an average grade of 3.5 grams per tonne. Included inside that interval is 132 meters at 10 grams per tonne. So this is just world-class spectacular intercept, and we've repeated that over and over in numerous additional holes at RPM. Very exciting, and we're currently drilling into this zone and further offsets with the current drilling that is happening at RPM right now. So at this stage, I'm going to -- here comes my helicopter. I'm going to send you back up to RPM with Hans to take a more detailed look while I fly up to the Stibium prospect.

All right. Welcome back to RPM. A little bit about this prospect. It was first discovered on a soil traverse, and we quickly developed a drill target, which is right above us and the old remnants of Pad 1 right below us. Somewhat ironically, this deposit here has kind of led us into the glacial till down below. As we're drilling down here, we can see the glacier actively eroding the deposit. And so I thought maybe the glacier spread some of the deposit out in this till. And last year, we sampled all across this and found a specific debris lobe that averaged like a gram per tonne over 60-some samples. So we got our RC rig on there to check the thickness of the till and see if that grade continues on. It's fun to speculate on how large of an area it is and how thick it is, but we'll just have to wait to see what the drill results show. We did drill like hole down to 125 feet, though and 1 to 90. So it does have some decent thickness to it, and we'll just wait for those assays. But we're kind of at the southern end of our claim block. It extends about a mile back to 1.5 miles to the south and about 20 miles to the north. And we've got a pretty dedicated team of geos that have a boots-on-the-ground approach doing base about crop, Talus fine sampling, and that's kind of our main tool that we use to find prospects. We've got Jason, Reilly, Jake, Colin are all like getting pretty worn out this summer because we've been working them hard. Some of the things that we found, we've got a Styx prospect on a peak way back there. It's kind of on the western edge of our claim block, and we've got a pretty awesome stibnite vein there. It's about a meter thick, and we got a good bulk sample out of there last year, and we're grabbing some more out of it this year. We're getting some pretty high percentages of antimony there. From Styx, if we go off a little bit east, you can kind of see the saddle in the background with kind of a reader face, and that's our West Wing prospect. And just behind that, we've kind of done some more detailed soil sampling, trying to delineate this gold anomaly that we got from last year. So that looks promising. Further east from there is the Stoney prospect, which is this tall peak back there. And that's a big like 30-foot-thick polymetallic vein. Good gold numbers, really good silver numbers up to 2,500 grams per tonne, some copper and also some antimony in that as well. From Stoney and a little bit south, we've got that sharp pyramid-looking peak. That's Estelle Mountain. And below that in this way, we've got Trumpet and Train and Shoeshine. Some people are probably familiar with some of the results we've gotten back from there. Shoeshine had that 1,290-gram-per-tonne rock sample. It might have been cherry-picked, but pretty impressive grades, but there's a lot of greater than 10 gram samples there, a couple over 100. And then behind that peak is kind of shadow, Muddy Creek, discovery. Muddy Creek is also really probably one of the most impressive soil anomalies on the claim block. There's just a lot to scratch at here, and we're only -- you can only really see the southern half of the claim block. To the north, we've got the Trundle, Tomahawk, Wombat, Portage Pass and then our way to the north, Cathedral and Korbel deposits. And then our new prospect, Stibium, which is kind of northeast of here, that's where Chris is at now. So I'll pass it back to him.

And we've arrived here at our Stibium prospect. This is one of our main areas where we've discovered significant antimony. We've discovered antimonies, significant showings at both Stibium here and Styx, which is a bit further out. Now just to orient ourselves, we're sitting here about 5 miles from our camp. So we're very close to the camp, which is about 5 miles to the east. So quite easy, quick access to this area here at Stibium. RPMs just to the north of us across that hill there and a bit beyond. And then also something to point out to the west is our Korbel deposit. Significant bulk tonnage gold deposit just up this valley here and to the left, over 6 million ounces are defined there to date. And we continue to drill that and grow that Korbel deposit. In addition to that Korbel, we've made a new discovery just up that valley at a deposit we call Cathedral. So significant upside there as well. But here at Stibium, with the antimony, you can see just in front of me here is one of our drill rigs. And we have put a few holes into this this season, just going after the gold because there's not only antimony here, but also very good gold showings as well. Antimony up to 60% in our surface sampling and gold up to 141 grams per tonne. So we've targeted some short holes early in the season to hopefully come up with a new discovery this year in terms of the gold. Now to continue that drilling and go a bit deeper and go into those antimony targets, we have -- and we're quite advanced with our applications for U.S. government grant funding to fast-track the antimony exploration and resource development and eventual extraction to bring that domestic production of antimony back to the United States. And as said, Nova Minerals has really been at the center of that effort, and we've been a first mover in this space. So we're feeling very positive about that. Now in terms of antimony, what we see here on the surface is massive stibnite veining. And here's a few rocks here, and you can see here's a great example. This here is very good antimony mineralization. Stibnite, typically a very good indicator, the main primary ore mineral for antimony. You can see those needle-like acicular crystals in this particular piece, very nice piece actually, and it's just massive stibnite. And so this is what we intend to extract and then as a first step, process this to create antimony trisulfide, which is basically stibnite is antimony trisulfide. This is the material that is so highly sought after to bring domestic production back for munitions, semiconductors, batteries, solar panels, flame retardants, really the applications for these refined antimony products just go on and on. Here's some more over here. More stibnite. This is a very good stibnite mineralization here at the Stibium prospect. So gold and antimony. Here you can get a really good view of it there. Just beautiful stuff -- beautiful mineral, actually, stibnite is. So that's what we intend to extract and produce here with the first cab off the rank being the Stibnite project, the Stibium project here. Now gold, antimony. We also have -- we see at other prospects around our over 200 square mile project site, elevated concentrations of other critical elements, including yttrium, gallium, scandium, tungsten, and we continue to hone in on those. So in the future, we're really taking a holistic approach on this project, not only going after the primary minerals like gold, copper, antimony, but also looking at taking out some of these other critical elements out of our waste streams to bring that production back to the United States. But that's a good look. Thanks for joining us today. That's a good look. I hope you enjoyed it, and you got a good closer look at the Estelle project. We're here in the high season now, currently drilling. We have a big news flow to follow here for the rest of the year with the drill results, further discoveries and progress on the antimony front as well. So thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.