today we get into the copper industry we discuss the biggest macro factors impacting price we look at the fact that the world already consumes 28 million tons of copper per year and almost every forecast adds another 10 million tons within the next 10 years how are we going to meet that demand and realize our renewable decarbonized future we can't do it without more copper today we discuss whether or not that's a possibility enjoy this interview I'm glad you came in and I'm excited to catch up with you cuz we haven't sat down in like 6 months or so but I am quite certain that right now we are witnessing the early Innings of a true Global race for copper when I look at the activities of the majors right some of the bids being put in the marketplace right now and uh some of the capital and how it's being allocated uh um I feel like there's a few people in the industry who have been watching this very closely for a long time you're one of them Rick rule Ross Bey a few others that have been talking about this Cliff coming to the Copper sector and it's here now in terms of what we have and what we need in the decade moving forward so I want to talk about that with you today I want to talk about copper macro and what you're paying attention to obviously we got to talk about capern and what you're building what you've been building for 10 years and what you're about to bring to the market it's super exciting so there's lots of stuff for us to cover but let's begin with your your macro take uh you know Copper's making headlines in every major press these days like there were two more headlines in Bloomberg this morning what are you paying attention to Ian copper macro fundamentals right now sure yeah well copper was um probably one of the most easiest markets to understand it generally goes with the economy that's been the traditional pathway for copper Dr copper um the the whole game changed with the electrification of the planet and this modern climate change initiative and you know there's no shortage of copper in the world I just want to make that very clear but there is a shortage of quality copper and what I mean by that there's plenty of lowgrade huge volumes of copper there's probably copper in your backyard and in my backyard but economic copper that you could actually mine that's going to be an economic grade or something you could Finance with infrastructure nearby in in quantities or volumes that are needed to meet this big copper demand that's been growing since the EV kind of world took off that's the challenge it's quality copper discoveries and I say that out loud because a lot of the critics will say hey there's copper everywhere and and they'll Point towards lower grade copper mines that could come online and I agree with that there there there will be long-term Supply benefits from copper coming on at a lower grade but the problem there is you can't produce faster you can just produce more copper in general over time so there's still a slow pace of Supply um what changed the the whole world's copper Outlook recently out out side of the the recent demand that's been growing from EVS is the Cobra Panama shutting down that mine in Panama we're now in Copper deficit um speaking with one of my directors Keenan Jennings who's formerly recently with BHP he had I had asked him when he came over in January to our board I said what was bhp's outlook on copper and he said I would assume a 450 by year end okay so we're ahead of schedule which is great um you know I spent nine years waiting for an asset cultivating an asset in the space it's great to be a Visionary it's great to think ahead um but I look for something that makes money in all commodity markets not in this commodity Market I just knew at some point we were going to get this lift and I would love to take credit for my perfect timing but in this case this actually timed us um but we would have been happy with 325 copper had that been where it is in said where it is today I love how you can work on a project for 10 years and then say perfect timing you know again like I had uh I had Ross on my show a couple weeks ago and we were just talking about like how do you get to a place in your career where you've delivered you know 14 10 Baggers like 14 10 extra turns what was the was there ever an aha moments and he's like there was there was never one there was no magic there was no aha moment I just kept working until eventually happened backing up to to the the supply so I think we consume about like 26 million tons per year right now and everyone's got their own forecast for sure but consensus lands somewhere around increasing consumption by another 10 million tons by by 2035 right and so the question everybody's asking is obviously where's going to come from you shared a bit of light on that it reminds me of the Rick rule quote about uranium that he's been tting for like 10 years either the price goes up or the lights go out one of those two things has to happen and we know which you know which would make more sense and obviously the price is going up and and that's becoming realized right now and I I honestly feel like and I don't think this is Sensational at all that we're in that same place right now with copper when you look at the demand forecast when you look at the time and money it takes to put new mines into production and you look at the activity that the majors are undertaking they're not they understand how long it's going to take to put new mines into production so they're focused on buying existing production because they just want to capitalize on what will eventually become Rising prices because either the price goes up or we we just shut the economy down and which one of those two things is more likely yeah on that point that's a great Point uh 20 to 30 years for a new copper Discovery to make it to Market and in the top 10 major copper mins in the world three of them are going to expire in the next 15 years so as much as we're excited about to find new copper Supply or to go down and grade to look at lower value copper there's going to be three major Minds shutting down the next decade as we're moving into this copper crunch which really makes it even more compelling and more of an exciting sector to go into uh Rick's comment is is really really smart one you know if you either fix price or you or you you shut out the lights right I think that's brilliant um as far as the way way I see it is the length of time is one thing but the scarcity is the other and you've got to go into tough parts of the world if you want to find the big ones and they exist you can go to South America Peru Chile Ecuador these are very prominent areas but there's geopolitical risk permits take time there's a lot of hurdles to get through down there and we've earned the right now to take a big swing at a Peruvian major Discovery you can go to the which are very challenging there's a lot of endowment there as well and that that challenge gets worse when prices go up in a lot of these countries um in Keegan my first company we went from zero we found 5 million ounces of gold in Ghana stock went from 10 cents to $9 per share um I think we went from a million to $900 million valuation and in that process we put out a a feasibility study but during the feasibility study the Ganan government as gold was running in late 2011 they changed their royalties and their tax rules so they were taking a 10% carried interest they had a 3 and a half% NR that jumped to 55% NSR and they raised the corporate taxes from 20 to 30% that crushed our feasibility we still built the mine and it's producing today a quarter million ounces a year but governments get greedy when prices go up some places will nationalize some places won't so it's not as easy as let's go get production it's waiting for us or let's go take a discovery through it's waiting for us the new e G initiatives and the new world we all live in is is compoundly different than it was before in terms of the Hoops the hurdles and what you have to do and and we pride ourselves on what we've done in South America we'll get to that in a moment but I look at this as an industry that's much harder than it's ever been before to find things to bring things online and you have a population that's doubled since the 80s on the planet and that exponential growth of the population the need for development the need for electrification it's the one sector that I think the world hasn't paid enough attention to because other markets were were taking all the attention in crypto or cannabis all these other markets and so it's the most ignored sector probably by far the most undervalued sector that's probably the most needed sector and that's the compounding effect of the perfect storm that we're s sitting with today right and when we look at the major activity so obviously last week BHP made a bid for Anglo they offered 39 billion Anglo rejected it as they should I think BHP probably knew it would get rejected and they're going to come back with a more competitive offer interesting that they remember they debated making a bid like five years ago on Ango and they really just wanted the copper assets but I think at the time the idea of dismantling the rest of Anglo just to get access to the Copper was too much of a headache but fast forward 5 years to today now that headache's worth it to get access to those copper assets a tech resources recently sold off their metallurgical coal assets to glencore for $8 billion they're turning around and investing that cash into a variety of things including copper including you guys so uh Tech is purchasing 99.9% of capero I want you to walk me through their strategy of capital allocation what they see in capero and what they're up to with you guys sure uh it's a great comment and uh you remember Newmont Bine gold Corp not long ago so you saw the gold guys do it first gold ran and now you see the copper guys positioning for the Big Crunch that's coming in Copper definitely um you know we we had a handful of Majors that have been on this project since 2018 when we kind of started to see the evidence that there was a lot of probability behind Sombrero our Flagship asset and you know to hold on to a project for 9 years that's a lot of perseverance that's a lot of personal Capital investing into the company um I'm into the investment for about $6 million I was buying Orin from1 to $4 per share before we the proceeding company that you cernic out so cernic spun out of or so that's where I made the first bet the first half of that check was for a gold asset called committee Bay the second half of that check was for some bro because we we finally learned it and when we spun it out um you know it it took a real big left turn we had some local presidents of communities and mayors that were were really farle anti- mining so we had a couple years of challenging up until November of last year we we finally got social access and you you take a lot of critique when you do a spin Co and people wanted to trade the next hour and the next day and they want permits in a in a record time frame and I wanted to deliver that because I'm very well aligned with shareholders but at the same time um you know it was was a long path to a great outcome and the project was a big enough swing with enough probability and the thing that drove me and kept me going to hold on to this for nine years for this whole length was the interest from Majors Tech and about four other of the larger mining companies in the world they all came to it they recognized it and I kept getting the core card of this is a top five asset you know globally it meets all the check marks of an opportunity that could develop into something substantial and the analog for capern for somero is the first Target is is a direct analog to Las bombas this is the eighth largest copper mine in the world we have or grade metalization on Surface potential or grade when you say direct analog just for people to understand you're looks like you're in the same copper belt and minerals look very similar great question so this belt improv it's called the and wild Yari belt it has about seven or eight of the larger copper mines in production or been found that that will go into production in the world the most notorious one is Las bombas it sold for $7 billion in 2014 at 325 copper it was 5.8 billion plus money spent Glen core sold it to MMG at the time it's been producing since it had a few interruptions along the way as any good major mine will have but it's running very smooth smoothly today as I sit here with you in our world um the Western half of this belt had a thin layer of volcanic cover a volcano erupted and it covered the Western half of the belt with volcanic ash which is kind of masked the opport opportunity and if you look at the name of our project it's called SoMo which means hat in Spanish and there's a few holes in the Hat and that's where a gentleman by the name of Miguel cardoo who is credit with the discovery of yanana coocha a 61 million ounce gold deposit that's now mine that's operated by new m in Peru he had the vision that this belt extended and just because it was covered it wasn't there you know the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence as is famously known in the exploration World um we got on to it with some some young geologists from Newmont and we we had two years to really go and explore this this project we were getting over 200 meters of5 a half% copper that's that's a a very good grade on Surface in this world of of copper deposits and we had some that was running almost a percent over 100 MERS so we had these small windows we started to see that kind of enrichment on Surface not enrichment but grade on Surface we thought it could be in Richmond until we found some drill holes right underneath that which from surface they went down 110 M of the same grade or slightly better and this gave us a third dimension and and that's exciting from an exploring perspective you see it on Surface you see it in the third dimension but what really moved us and I think all the major mining companies that eventually led to this investment from Tech was that that first Target we're going to drill is 10 kilometers long with various Windows of copper and gold on surface that are replicating similar grades that give us the potential to find something really really huge and that's something that that really grabbed everybody we don't know how deep it goes but we know it's at least 400 m from surface but when you look at 10 km of continuous targets and mineralization on Surface with drill holes on the end of it we use electrical currents and magnetic currents to shape what could be beneath the service and now we're all left to do is drill it so we we were in conversations with the major mining companies and they all had significant interest um Keenan Jennings was the BP of exploration from BHP he actually was the one who told me to spin out capero or SoMo from ore resources and we didn't have social access agreements in time until he actually retired from BHP a few months later last fall I reached out to him and you know as an Explorer aggressive spir aist I want the mindset of a BHP on my board level making decisions with me helping me strategize not only how to explore it but how to monetize it intelligently and you know what pace to go at and how to scale systematically scale a major Discovery it brought our level of technical expertise up a level uh we do have another director from BHP on the board who was an executive running the VP of geosciences which is quality control his name is Antonio Rebus so we've kept the quality of what we're doing doing really high we found so many similarities and analogues to the mines next door from the exact same Rock packages of all those mines the same style of mineralization and most importantly they were formed at the same time in the eocen era when the Earth was creating major discoveries as certain eras major Minds were formed and one of them was 40 million years ago and that's when the intrusions or the event was occurring that formed this mineralization so we spoke to a lot of the majors and I got a chance to bring Keenan onto the board he wrote a check he invested into the company which you don't see often with geologists but it's a big compliment a thirdparty validation more on the internal side and then we sat down with tech and uh they had obviously recognized the opportunity early on and we discussed what kind of capital would be needed to get that first answer and what that would look like and we all came up with about a $15 million minimum which would give us about 8 to 10,000 M of drilling and that would give us about 8 months of work in capital we could drill it three times in three different areas and really identify that this system is working or that thesis that this could be the next Los bombas could be potentially coming true and you have to measure that and ask what if they're getting on to another Los bombas scale Discovery what if the grade is around half a percent. 6% which is the grade of Los bombas what could that be worth today in a 450 copper Market that's projected by many to be going into the 5 to $7 range and that's where it gets really exciting for us as shareholders and as explorers and you know getting through the social axess I talked about some areas are tougher we went down there and through Christian Rios our SVP of corporate development we brought agriculture into the Andes um finding a mine is is extremely gratifying financially it's like winning a lottery basically in a sense as an investor if you get it right my first company as I said 10 cents to $9 per share that's a big win in the case of um that company the first mine we found you look back on it you've spent the money money comes and goes we all know that but the 8,000 people we impacted are still being impacted today in a very positive sustainable way and that's something that we carry on as management as aboard that we could leave a very very positive footprint in southern Peru you get down to um to to areas that are fairly remote not not with infrastructure we have amazing infrastructure we have power water roads towns nearby but with people that understand Mining and we asked like what can we do here to leave a very sustainable positive footprint and we took the long road and we took the expensive road because the probability of the project is quite high and so we decided we treat this like it's going to be a huge mine one day and we brought in nutrition at the Andes there isn't much red meat there's an iron deficiency we brought in French cows Australian Lambs we brought in Fish Farms ways to cultivate their meat um we've put in about half a million dollars in total where we sponsor these agricultural programs we are the first Junior to do this in South America at least to this extent and many are following suit with what we've done the grant that we would achieve from the government also gets an investment from the community which makes it very sustainable so whether we find a mine or not these communities should be able to benefit with agriculture in the Andes for multi- decades multi-generations to come we have $4 million us of additional agricultural programs applying for grants for for not just our main Community but the neighboring communities as well and that just sums up the the most important facets of of a mine is the people impacted by it and the investors and our investors to date have contributed towards this and now you know if we find a mine it has to benefit this community even more over time and I think you'll see a theme of a lot more participation between the communities and the major mines that are being found or operated and that's the way it should be we're big fans of that but uh we're very proud that we're able to do that and and now we're going to get a chance to drill some of the most exciting holes in my 25 years of of being in the sector when copper is about to take off in price okay so first of all congratulations on the agriculture program because I did look into that I couldn't pronounce the name of it how do you pronounce this Agro Diaz Agro Diaz yeah yeah all right leave it to the guy who spends a lot of time in Peru but anyways like phenomenal project Ian yeah very commendable um and yeah half a million dollars invested thus far and uh path to scale up to 4 million um lots of resources provided to the local community laying the groundwork for a successful project right that's how you're thinking about this that we're here for the long term we know what this can become so we're laying the groundwork today to get to put ourselves in the right place and support the community and on board support of our project which is so important in this industry you mentioned Keenan Jennings and I just want to spend a minute on him because when you brought him onto the board I looked into the guy like fascinating human being and yes he was the VP of metal exploration at BHP and found two discoveries I think brought them two discoveries right one in South Australia one in Arizona and then he worked with uh with Rio right in China and Mongolia he ran o Togo for Rio Tinto that's right one of the biggest copper and gold mines in the world uh running resource strategy and then like at least 20 years in Chile in Peru with Ango and BHP so in terms of like the guy that you want on your project like that's him right uh phenomenal experience probably helped bring in some major interest I don't know but I could speculate that was likely the case yeah so um look it's uh there's two types of people you can have on your board people that make it look good and people that make your company really good and Keenan is one of those people that contribute to make our company really good um you know I've I started my career following a guy named Dr Roman skena he found six major Minds in the world and this was my teacher of all geology and then I worked with Dan McCoy where we found this assay deposit in Keegan my first company and the Assets in Mexico that led to Kaden success and I learned so much from Dan and from Roman and I raised probably around 750 million as needed for companies I've been involved in that's the kind of capital raises been part of and from that you know you've learned how to do things well and you've learned how to do things better and when I met Kenan I think in the first three months of getting to know him about 6 hours of time with him on the phone and listening to his perspective about how to approach expiration this was probably the most important last 10% that I was looking to learn of my entire 25 years of exploring and looking for things and there's no magic formula that he gave me but he has an MBA as well as he's a geologist so the commercial mind of geologist is Paramount especially for junior expiration or any kind of expiration because you have to think about what things cost and what things mean and how they mean to share holders and so he's really enhanced that our VP of expiration is a gentleman by the name of Tim Kingsley who I met a year and a half ago and this is a pretty interesting Dynamic so we had a couple guys from Newmont and and I like to say the project outlasted the geologist and but they referred this gentleman Tim Kingsley to me came in and we told them how great the project was we showed them all the data told them all the major mining companies were were paying a lot of attention to this asset and the first thing Tim Kingsley said to me when I asked him what he thought of it he said I'm I'm sorry I can't I can't tell you till I I go see it I like but but every company likes this asset and it's so obvious it has so many analoges he goes look it's just who I am and so I walked out of the boardroom and I was like wow this is hard to to digest but it's awesome this geologist is a very very measured prudent guy that needs to see touch and feel and he doesn't believe easy and that's the best person you can have at the head of the project working with myself Keenan and everyone else and a skeptic yes well a skeptic a realist I think is the word there and um you know it's very easy to get excited about the Rocks especially when you look at them from a long time so we got fresh perspective out of Tim Kingsley we got fresh perspective out of Keenan Jennings uh they both went to the project two weeks ago and so did Christian real our SVP of corporate development he's a proving geologist as well and I'm asking each one of them what was your thought what was your thought what's the takeaway and I kept getting back ma huge system very robust model independently from all three of them and that just supports the thesis of this could be something in the top 10 or 20 in the world in the copper sense where it would actually potentially have the grade that makes sense and this would be worth the nine years and then some if we get it right um it will take three holes to make this discovery real and to feel it with every shareholder in the capital Marketplace and it'll take two to three years to find out that it's not there so that's the scope of how big it is there's so many targets that are in the pipeline that add to the first ones I've spoken of it's a multigenerational exploration project in a part of Peru that we're the first to really get social access here and open up this entire District where we have 100,000 hectares of prospective ground that we're going to explore um you know you get to two phases when you're exploring you can I monetize it because I'm a shareholder first and I'm a CEO second and that's a real serious commitment I've had since they steep foot into this industry the share price has to perform second one is is it going to be big enough or worth enough for somebody else to buy it because we're not minors and that's not where we're going with it our job is to go and find explore drisk enough of it to create enough value for our shareholders before a major minor takes it and having been through the selling of a company I sold Kaden back in 2014 having been through purchasing companies as well with Orin and when I spun out the companies I I know both sides of m&a reasonably well and I would say that this is probably one of the most coveted assets I've seen with an audience of buyers that could potentially buy this if this thing starts to work out and it's matching perfect time so very high corporate attention um very happy Tech came on board because of the attention we we get with them and the and the alignment with the view of the project and can't wait to drill you know the next 8 9,000 m and see if this thing really goes the next level but uh yeah it's it's in a very exciting time for us so so Tech is newly on board newmont's already been on board you're filling up the treasury right now you've got drill permits in hand and you've got a reputation in this business for running very expansive exploration programs which I love and you walked us through your initial plan here for the next 8 to 10,000 meters so for prospective shareholders who are looking at the company right now looking at capern and saying okay what can I expect from a news flow standpoint for the next four to six months what would you tell them keep adding more projects to the pipeline there's areas we have access to now we did not have access to earlier so you're going to hear about more and more opportunities that come up as we're drilling the first four or five opportunities around the big system that we've identified to date it's going to be a combination of very probable areas and very mysterious areas where we can't see and touch the rocks that we're targeting there's a thin 5 to 20 M thick of volcanic covers over some of those areas and so the surprises could be massive you know this is a a huge system is it 300 M wide on average is it 100 meters wide on average is the grade half a percent is it 1% you know it's a scar scarns are known to be very variable and they're known to be really rich and great and we see evidence of both but we also see width occurring on Surface where the scar mineralization exists um scar is a geological term if I was to give you a a metaphor an analogy for it if you think about you cut your finger and you're bleeding when the scab forms that's a crusty scab that's basically the scarn underground volcanoes coming to surface when it interacts with various rocks that are not part of what this intruding underground volcano if it's mineralized a crust forms which is like the scarn and that crust becomes the richest part of the system and why that forms is because the underground lava or the intrusion or volcanoes come into surface it chemically reacts with limestones and sediments and it's like a baking soda and vinegar event where it just explodes with copper and gold that's what we're looking for we're looking for the contact and we have 10 kmers of that contact to explore around the major system and again scarns notoriously have fairly good grade everything we're Drilling in this first 15 to 24 months is going to be from surface to the top 300 M we're going after the low hanging fruit the open piit potential there are Targets in this system that go down for 800 me a th000 meters from surface they're huge we're going to drill those twoo but but not right away we want to get a handle on the system we want to create the performance in the share price give ourselves a chance to raise more Capital if needed and keep keep the project moving forward so that there's no Financial pressure down the road and there's a lot of results that can come out before we say the f word again which is financing yeah right right you're going to go back to the market with some questions answered right yeah Mission critical if you look at that in three three phases of drilling that we would do you have enough money to drill two more times after the first time you drill got it and if you hit you don't need to take money on that that hit you can wait if you don't hit you got two more swings of the bat for that home run before you do so that's the best we can do for shareholders is create an environment where and the project gives us this opportunity there's a lot of longevity of expiration there's a lot of ways to win there's a lot of ways to miss and I'm not afraid to miss at all but I just want keep swinging for something big for a very long time and that's what this project represents I get it man look I I love how you think long term I love how you can keep your head down on a project for nine years put 35 million to work and then say Oh I got lucky with timing with the copper Market I love that and it's a real treat to get you in the studio today and chat with me and I'll be keeping my eyes on it I'd love to have you back like uh you know Midway through this program maybe six months or so we'll get the update yeah thank you uh I've been lucky three times in my career I've uh found a mine it's a producing mine I've delivered a great shareholder return to investors uh we got to sell a mine during the the finding of the mine after the first 100 holes and then the third time was to get behind an asset of this magnitude um you often look for these things if you love exploration that could be the bigger ones on the planet but you never get a chance to take a shot at them and so far we found the opportunity that was the first lucky part the second one was getting the social access and the drill permits and the third one we'll wait and see hopefully it's it's the big Discovery we've been we've been looking for for our career so we'll see we will wait and see yes all right thanks appreciate your time to appreciate it thank you appreciate it