Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have U.S. Gold Corp, trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol USAU. It's a publicly traded U.S.-focused gold and copper exploration and development company and has a portfolio of exploration properties. Happy to welcome Executive Chairman Luke Norman. Welcome to the conference today, Luke. The floor is yours. Call me back when you're ready for some questions. Will do, and thank you, Anna, and thank you everyone out there watching today. As mentioned, I am the chairman of U.S. Gold Corp. I'm also a co-founder of the company. We have got a very exciting advanced-stage asset, in particular, that I'll focus most of my time on today. It's called CK or the Copper King project just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Again, the company, as mentioned, publicly listed, trading on Nasdaq. USAU is our trading symbol. Forward-looking statements, of course, please visit our website for more disclosures. Three projects in the portfolio, CK, Keystone, and Chalice. I will focus in primarily on CK today. I think it's the most compelling and exciting part of our portfolio right now. We've got a longstanding, very well-heeled board of directors. I think it's an important thing. One of the most important reasons for me to join this industry, to come over from the brokerage side to running public companies, was a lack of faith in quality of management of the public companies I was investing in. That's always been a very important piece of the puzzle to me, is the strength of management. We understand value creation, we understand how to get to the end game, and as you'll see through this presentation, we've managed to do so very well again. Relative to our peers, we have a very tight share structure. Just about 16 and a half million shares outstanding. Traditionally, these companies are hosted on one of the Canadian exchanges, like the TSX or the Venture Exchange, and generally have a lot more shares outstanding. Again, testament to our management and directors, we've managed to be extremely stingy on our share issuances. How is that important? Why is that important? Of course, we're all investors in the company, and anyone who's a shareholder of our company or considering becoming a shareholder of our company should wish and hope that we don't have reckless abandon with printing stock. Very few shares out. We are covered. You'll see down in the bottom corner, I'm not sure if people can see my cursor or not, but in the bottom left corner, there is a list of the analysts that cover our company. Again, this website is on our front page of our website, of course, usgoldcorp.com. Our most recent news of real formation around the company has been our definitive feasibility study. What a definitive feasibility study is it takes the last five years of work that's gone into this project and culminates it all into one final push ahead to now develop and go into production. The last five years, what am I referring to there? Our CEO, George Bee, who was on two previous slides, was a very large mine builder for Barrick Gold Corp. He worked for Barrick for 16 years on and off, mainly building big gold mines all around the world. When he came in and took the helm of U.S. Gold Corp in 2020, we set out with a plan to take a very loosely defined resource at CK, challenged resource actually, and pull it all together, get it into some sort of feasibility, a pre-feasibility study, and ultimately get that permitted. The fact that we managed to do that in a little under five years is quite remarkable. Again, it is testament to the quality of management within this company. We have now got a very highly economic project from our perspective, or from actually not from our perspective, from the numbers stacking up to it. You can see 3,250 gold, which there's a lot of space between here and 3,250 gold currently. The numbers here, an NPV upwards of $630 million after taxes. Look, we've got a market cap somewhere in the realm of $260 million right now, so there's a lot of untapped value in this company. One other thing I didn't mention on our previous slide, is cash in hand. We have 30 million U.S. cash in hand currently, but ultimately, this project's going to require about $400 million to build. That traditionally, it's very normal course, that is going to be done predominantly by way of debt, this project lends itself very nicely to debt. Again, securing and minimizing the amount of equity dilution that the company is an ongoing focus for us. We're very confident, very comfortable, confident that we can build this project without blowing up the stock and the structure. Right. The project why are the economics so robust on it? It is really largely due to the location of the asset. This map here that you see, this is the bottom, the southeast corner of Wyoming. Just to the south of the map lines is Colorado. The I-25 highway running north-south here through Cheyenne would have you in Denver in about an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and 20 minutes. We're very close to Denver, Colorado. Fortunately, when I say fortunately, we are on the Wyoming side of that equation, because if we were in Colorado, there would be no holes getting dug. The project is located directly 20 miles due west of Cheyenne. It's located right off paved roads. It is two and a half miles north of the I-80. The I-80 is a highway, of course, that runs from Chicago all the way through to San Francisco. It is also paralleled by Union Pacific Rail. Logistically, you could not get a better spot to build a project like this. It's on flat ground. The winters are not intense cold, but certainly not heavy in terms of wind or, sorry, snow. There's plenty of wind. Logistically, it is a tremendous spot because you're not building man camps, you don't need backup storage equipment because of the logistics from all the location that lends you. Having 120,000-person township means the employees are going home at night. If you need any specialty personnel, electrical engineer, for example, they can come in on contract, basically gig employment. That is so important for a project like this. If it was being built up in Alaska, you'd have to house all these employees and have people on backup and equipment on backup. It's a very good location. Very simple form of mining. It is an open pit. Basically, we blast the rock, we extract it at a very low strip ratio, about 0.8, 0.9:1. We grind the ore into a very fine sand. We run it through a flotation cycle, then it is basically turned into a concentrate and trucked offsite. There's no smeltering or any of that on-site. Very small footprint of an operation. If I just take you to this map, I know it can be a bit confusing. For us, we've seen it many a time, but I'll explain you through it. There's basically 2 sq mi you see there. The top left corner is the proposed pit. That's within the reserve calc as we have it right now. Then the processing facility's here. Our haul road for the concentrate to be trucked out and equipment to be brought in, and ultimately, this is our tailings. Interesting little fact around this project that's not accounted for in the definitive feasibility study is it turns out our waste material, our waste rock, we did a whole bunch of studies on it to see if it was usable within the construction of the project. What we found out is it is, in fact, a very high-spec aggregate. If I pop you back to our locations map. I mentioned here the I-80 corridor. Well, right to our south here is Martin Marietta Materials. They are a $50-plus billion U.S. conglomerate that specialize in, aside many other things, aggregates. That's one of their quarries there. The demand for aggregate in this area, particularly into Colorado, even out to California, is massive. In Colorado, you can't dig a hole, basically, same as California, but the amount of infrastructure and building that is going on within Wyoming and within Colorado is huge. Anything from data centers to even the nuclear silos within Wyoming are slated for a 50-year upgrade. They've got to put in new nuke silos. Our waste material is actually worth somewhere around $20- 25 a ton. We're currently working on a method to monetize that as well. A lot of exciting little side notes going on around the company currently. Another important little side piece on CK is the fact that the deposit, the reserve that we're taking into production right now, it's 1.6 million ounces of gold equivalents. How we just combine the value of the copper and the gold is the long story short there. That's 1 million ounces of gold and about 260 million pounds of copper. That's just defined within a reserve. You can see in the center here, there is a light outline of a pit and then, of course, continuation mineralization beyond that. Well, that pit shell, that's the 1.6 million ounces, but we know it's drill-tested and proven that the mineralization continues to depth beyond what's contained in the reserve. We think there's upshot of another one to 1.2 million ounces of gold there and additional gold discoveries to be made within our land package. There was a press release that went out on the company today just explaining about that and our intent to go in and go ahead and explore and add even more mineral inventory to an already very valuable project. Why is this opportunity compelling? We are fully permitted. This project is one of the only fully permitted deposits in North America in a junior's hands. We have a wonderful team that know how to build and extract these materials. We've got a lot of other value metrics coming into it from the aggregate potential to also the upside of the resources and even additional recovery methods that we're constantly working on. We're optimizing this as we go into project financing, and that is the next step for the company now. We're in discussion with numerous entities to have the $400 million required to build this. We are getting lots of offers for debt in that regard, so exciting times for us as a company. It's a win-win for the state of Wyoming, of course. It creates all sorts of economic benefits and beyond that, post-production, actually, the pit, our open pit, will be used as an extension to the state park as a water reservoir. You don't hear that very often where you're getting into a mining opportunity that's ultimately going to be an environmental benefit to the community and to the surrounding state. A very unique project in that regard. We've spoken about the upside potential. I won't drone on. I think there's going to be some questions to come in anyway, but yeah, we've got plenty of upside beyond and I think our current valuation markers are very, very not representative of the opportunity. I think we've got a lot of upside value. The Lassonde curve was actually, I didn't speak to it, but it was in one of the earlier slides and we're in the exciting time of the Lassonde curve now. We are fully permitted. We've completed all the advanced engineering. We're completing aggregate studies now and looking to bring that into the scope of the project as well. We're really now just looking at financing and we're ready for construction. Very briefly, I will touch on a good reason also to own this company as we have a standout exploration asset in Nevada. It sits next to Barrick Gold Mine's largest endowment of gold on the planet, which is the Cortez Complex. We have all the same rocks, all the same geology. We have 20 square miles or so, and we sit right across the valley from them. Keep in mind, the Cortez Complex itself has created somewhere in the realm of about $60 billion worth of growth and wealth to Barrick. I'm not implying that we're going to have the same amount of mineral endowment, but we have the exact same rock packages. Very much identical geology and the same intrusive package that leads to these styles of Carlin-type gold deposits. At some point that will either be explored under our banner or highly likely spun out of the company. Exciting times to be a U.S. Gold shareholder and I will hand the mic back to you. Great, Luke. Thank you so much. Talk a little bit about your timeline to production. Certainly. It's an 18-month timeline. One of the longest lead items really is just the 16 miles of power transmission that's going to be run into the project. That comes by way of Black Hills Energy. It's amortized into the project at about $0.0740 a kilowatt hour and it just gets run in through here. The rest of it is pretty much off-the-shelf equipment. As I said, it's not a highly technical method of mining to go and crush, grind, and ultimately float. Perfect. The next catalyst for investors to look forward to, what might they be? Project financing, I imagine. That's assuming somebody doesn't come in and scoop us up beforehand. Of course, you can imagine there are a lot of eyeballs on a fresh project ready to go, fully permitted in this copper and gold environment. I mean, heck, copper is a critical mineral. You've got gold on everyone's lips right now, even with the recent market correction. I would say project financing, assuming we don't somehow get taken out along the way. Considering the lack of fully permitted and economically robust, do you believe there is an imminent exit for investors? I wouldn't say imminent. There's a very high probability that somebody's going to want to come and swoop in and develop this for themselves and that could be really, really beneficial to shareholders and investors, clearly. Based on our value markets right now, okay, let's look at a $260 million market cap. With this thing built, add another $400 million. We won't talk about it as dilution here, but we'll say, okay, as an enterprise value, add another $400 to that. Let's say seven or $700 million worth of shareholder equity. This project's worth well over a billion and probably a billion and a half asset built. Our prime motivation is, as I said, to create value for the stock, for the shareholders and ultimately that's the win for us. If somebody comes in, they better make a generous offer, I guess, is what I'm getting to. What are the biggest differences between the latest feasibility study and earlier economic studies? Well, the earlier economic studies were not quite as engineered, I guess. Really what we were trying to do was understand, get a handle on the economic potential of the project. That was very, very important. We also need a credible mine method so that we could take it to the state and go through the permit process. It was a little lighter on engineering and some of the more defined aspects of the project. Plus, there were things that we noticed along the way that needed to be optimized or changed. The final definitive feasibility study is where we brought in two very well-recognized, well-known engineering groups out of Toronto. You hand over all the data, all the information, and they get to work. They basically piece together the puzzle and give you the value or the cost, sorry, of building it. Project costs went up as in the previous pre-feasibility study had an estimate of around $280 million. This has come in at $400 million. $400 million is absolutely doable. That's got a contingency of about 17% already built into it. We think there's plenty of runway to be able to build it for that or less. How sensitive is the project's NPV to a $100 increase in gold prices? It goes hockey stick. Very good question. Every time the price of gold is high, again, all our economics are based off $3,250 gold. If you run the model at $4,500, it gets pretty exciting. We're loving this high gold price environment. Obviously, there's a bit of a correction phase going on in the sector right now. Look, that's an opportunity for buying too, and people need to sometimes recognize that. Our 52-week high was around $23, and at last glance today we're trading around $14. To me, that's opportunity, and I think people should be recognizing that for sure. Talk about the upside. How much upside remains from resource expansion around the existing pit design? Yeah. You take that 1.6 million ounces of reserve and we can see about another 1.2 million ounces of gold standing below the pit. We did some very recent, it's so recent it was just press released today, geophysics that we see other target areas laterally away from the deposit also. I think there's a huge opportunity for additional ounces here, not just below the preexisting reserve. We're going to get going at those because that all adds value for the shareholders. What would be considered the project's break-even gold price? Gosh. Okay. Now you're going to make me actually look here. I believe it is somewhere down around $2,000. Yeah. Lots of runway. Perfect. Okay. What percent age of project financing do you expect to come from debt versus equity? Well, that's the advantage of this current cycle and where there's a huge amount of capital on the sidelines looking to invest in opportunities like this and a very limited amount of opportunities like this. Because jurisdictionally, you can't beat the U.S. in a state like Wyoming. We have been looking at term sheets with as much as 80% debt and 20% equity, which is way off the old 50/50 or 60/40 ratio that previously existed. I think we're going to find a package somewhere in that 80% debt range. What is management's estimate of the project's after-tax NPV using current commodity prices? Okay. Again, we've got it actually on the slide here. When we run the number in around $4,500, it starts to get very spicy. Obviously, you're up well into the billion-dollar range. Again, that doesn't account for additional ounces that we're going to be bringing in. It doesn't account for potentially doing something with the aggregate with a partner. Yeah, a lot of upside. Great. Which major permits remain outstanding, if you can talk about that? Yeah. That's the surprise about this. It's a good question because I always say we're fully permitted. The assumption is always, well, there's got to be a couple of outliers. We are actually currently actively under our permit to mine. Just by beginning the construction of our haul road, we have triggered our permit to mine. We are fully permitted. All right. There you go. Have there been any significant permitting challenges or opposition groups, if you can talk about that? No. I will say surprisingly, there are active NGO groups in the state of Wyoming who are working or pushing against a lot of the uranium development stuff. That's mainly focused up in the northwest, down close to Cheyenne. We already have an active quarry right next door to us, like I mentioned, Martin Marietta. They are basically open pit, but just an aggregates pit, of course. No, we had no formal objections to the multitude of permits that we went through along the way, including an industrial siting permit. All of that, it was made public through local newspapers and other sources for people to be able to come in and object, and we got no objection. Great. The timeline to a construction decision, what would that be? The decision's been made. We're funding and we are going to go ahead and construct this. Again, unless somebody comes in and takes us out before we get a chance to build it or maybe a good merger candidate, too. We're always open for discussion and opportunity. How does Wyoming compare to Nevada, Arizona, and Idaho from a permitting perspective, and how supportive have state and local stakeholders been? Okay. We're even more unique than just saying Wyoming. Wyoming. Wyoming is a resource state, you're going to get a permit in Wyoming. There is still BLM and forestry land within the state of Wyoming. Now, we were extremely fortunate that CK falls right on state ground. We didn't deal with any federal agencies whatsoever. There was no Waters of the United States because it's a dry project. The state of Wyoming, it was still an arduous process. We had to do all the archaeological and environmental and air quality, wind quality, noise, everything, traffic studies. We were not dealing with federal bureaucracies at the other end. We were dealing with the state, and it flowed tremendously well. Perfect. How important is copper to overall project economics? It's about 30% of the economics currently. We've seen a bit of a shift. I know copper hit about 660 the other day, and I'm pretty sure we ran our numbers at sub $5 copper. That's a huge shift. The impact on it if we reran the numbers right now with the current copper price would be significantly even more robust. What about exploration potential outside the current mine plan? We are looking at some of the surrounding areas that, again, was a press release we put out today within our current land package. Ultimately, if we really want to get exploring, we will get down into Keystone at some point. Perfect. All right. Thank you so much, Luke, for this thorough presentation. We appreciate your time, and we would love to have you back in the future. Same goes. Thank you very much, Anna. All right, everyone, we'll be right back
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