Notes from ARTEMIS Interview with Liam - 14 Feb 2022

[DipSard]

Notes from ARTEMIS Interview with Liam - 14 Feb 2022

Interview: https://youtu.be/UV2DB6iItSY

* 13 mins in after general chat and Carlow focused discussion:
How did Artemis obtain the tenement areas around Havieron and was it part of the attractiveness in deciding to join?
- 100% absolutely, in exploration you have to be prepared to fail and plenty of naysayers in the industry
- Signposted opportunity to Artemis director before working there, they listened and beat Rio Tinto by 20 minutes in applying for the ground.

* You now have Apollo, Atlas, Nimitz and all these little areas/pockets of interest. While awaiting results of your exploration activities your team posted a picture recently of some of the cores, are you able to say how excited you are about what you’ve seen?
- Firstly no assays to hand so all commentary is caveated through that
- Exploration is a journey, fishing not catching and Havieron for example had a dozen holes from Newcrest in it before hitting the absolute barrel (Had05 being one of the great drill holes from the last 20 years)
- On the same journey and objective is to make a discovery with least amount of drill holes and using ‘vectoring’ to ascertain prospectivity under 400m of cover
- Back to the core pics, sections of those ‘nicer looking bits’ are kind of what they’re looking for in advance of having data
- Not saying they have a HAD005 with 275m interval but excited because it’s the first hole into that area and when considering the odds of hitting something with gold in it or proximal to it is very slim and plan to drill straight back into there
- Really excited by what they saw, liked temperature of alterations and assemblage of sulphides and just waiting to see what they give them
- Looked next door to Havieron as ‘Great Gold Systems, Great Gold’, get asked a lot what a gold camp is? Kalgoorlie is the best one discovered by an Irishman 150 years ago pushing a wheelbarrow.
- Interesting thing about that entire area is the multiple gold systems even in the Super Pit that produced around 70MoZ so far holds 3 distinct mineralisation styles and looked at individually at each, you wouldn’t think the other 2 would be anywhere around there
- Got to look at the clues from what everyone else is doing while keeping mind open to other possibilities
- Looking at the monster discovery next door (Havieron) it’s got this sulphide crescent with the grades etc. we all salivate over, that very much defined the bulls eye target and could have been the constraining limits of what was there. What was exciting and always going to be out thesis and borne out in fact (from publicly available data) is that there are other mineralisation styles there
- We look at that and the Breccia’s look good too but they don’t have that geophysical signature etc.
- Important to keeping mind open when a major discovery under cover has been made to what is possible, pretty stoked with what we’ve got and not claiming we have a HAD05 but the next hole after could perhaps be a HAD05

* Start of a new chapter of your very own story perhaps, what investors don’t always see is that you could spend a year on a drill program and all you might get is data for next year’s program and it could take 3 to 4 years of honing in to that pocket of gold because you don’t know how big the area is, is that a fair assessment?
- Fair assessment of the industry, from a risk/reward basis for him as a director/investor in the company and what he really likes about the region is two-fold, looking for bigger targets means a higher percentage of hitting them and they are looking for largish targets near an already large target.
- Going through a risk matrix and where they want to spend exploration funds, it’s important to know when to call it or not go chasing rainbows either
- And with chasing big targets, what was reported in GRC007 in December 2020 is evidence they may have hit a big target or part of one. Always nice when you have one of the largest gold companies in the world drilling a couple of hundred meters away from you but that doesn’t guarantee success but everyone’s science is moving in the same direction with all the limited data they have
- Reiterates looking for big targets, got those structurally, geophysically and geochemically mapped out and know where they’re drilling in the next 2 years, don’t see it as a program that’s going to ‘wander’ aimlessly off into nothing
- Thankfully got heritage in place now, coming out of a relatively dry ‘wet season’ and got all year to drill in an ordered manner, got phase 1 and 2 targets lined up and going to take all of this year at least.

* How long roughly does it take to drill a hole, say roughly of 1000m depth?
- Every hole changes, pretty darn hot drillers (DDH1 and also being used next door by Newcrest/GGP)
- 400m of cover there but quite soft vs the expected hard rock that can take weeks to drill through, runs from limestone type rock to actual running sand but that can pose its own challenges
- Lost a hole last year due to running sand as sand can fall down and choke the rods, getting through the cover surface should only take about 5-6 days and actually have to case it with a degradable casing under the regulations
- Then as you get to the top of the target found it quite predictable as guys been knocking out 30m a shift, sometimes quicker and sometimes you get into breccias (broken ground) where it can get trickier
- Usually use HQ diamond core (96mm diameter with internal hollow core of 63.5mm) and if gets a bit tricker can use smaller NQ core (75.7/47.6mm) and really looking at under 3 weeks, around 2 weeks and 2 days perhaps.

* Have you been out there yet, is it as wet and hot as you expect it to be as well?
- Last time out there (near region) was in the 90’s and can’t get into W.Australia right now but planning to be out there soon
- Cooked is the word the team often use, it really is hot and understand shareholders want everything as fast as possible. Pushed really late into last year into December (in regards to weather conditions allowing work to take place) with average daily temperatures around 48C which borders on dangerous requiring A/C pods for people to cool down. You can die out there of heat stroke in 10 minutes so have to be very careful and won’t push that late again as more time now.

* Looking forward, now listed on AIM, what do you see ahead in 2022?
- Corporate plans are to drill, drill and drill!
- Carlow of itself is a company maker
- At Patersons, had 2 rigs running out there until xMas and be back out there with 2 rigs soon if weather allows (could have issues such as flash floods still), pandemic and supply crunch in regards to resources also factor in but touch wood thinks it’s looking good
- First hole will be at Apollo and a few more to do there and Atlas so allow them some time and progress before they can claim discoveries
- Also want to get to Juno and Voyager in the north, done some extra geophysical work on those and really like to look of those 2 targets and then almost come around the clock face and swing around to Nimitz and Enterprise targets in the south
- Everyone always asks what my favourite target is and it’s usually the one I’ve just made a discovery on but in all seriousness we look at the geo intel and the access issues with unique challenges presented by the long parallel sand dunes but Enterprise is a real priority target
- Phase 1 is Atlas and Apollo and halfway through it with second phase to complete.

* In regards to the geology in Paterson’s, over hundreds of millions of years events have happened and forced all this rock to the surface and then somehow been another event and had more come up and this causes different layers and different breccia’s?
- Basic Geology 101, you’ve got a host sequence and mineralisation sequence with a variety of ways it can happen
- In simplistic terms got a lot of folded sandstones laid down zillions of years ago in lovely folds (looks like the Dorset Coast), rocks from a lot deeper have intruded into that sequence and these came up from the mantle, very hot, magma’s effectively and within the magma or the host rock or indeed both there has been an unusual enrichment in rare and valuable metals , in this case gold and copper.
- The intrusion that’s sort of come in like a hot balloon coming into these other rocks can either contain or remobilise the metal or often do both. By remobilize, means there there’s a huge source of heat in rocks i.e fluids and the heat volatilizes those fluids creating circulatory patterns into those fluids which are diluted or dissolved into the metals that we're after. They're remobilized or mobilized in the first place and it can happen, it can be like a pump, it can do it once or it can do it multiple times and then the question is well that's all well and good but where are those concentrations, where have those metals been placed in concentrations that are economic?
- That can often be false because faults basically just create a conduit or what I call plumbing and those fluids race along the plumbing, they cool and slow down and can have chemical reactions like potentially the sulphide crescent zone and they're deposited out
- It provides a space for those either chemically or physically or both, so that's actually what we're after, so there's clearly a big heat engine somewhere around Havieron , it's quite deep and probably about 3-4 km down. There seem to be some granitoids down there that are probably providing this heat engine, our thesis has always been that you know everyone's favourite dolerite dyke, you know it’s observable from space that bad-boy or certainly geophysically anyway
- Now that dyke doesn't have any gold in it because that dyke came in later but there was clearly a big plane of weakness otherwise known as a fault, so that fault has been at least one causative effect or positive or plumbing effect of Havieron because it is no surprise that the dolerite dyke goes right through the middle of it
- That would be quite a big coincidence would it not, so maybe that had something to do with it, it doesn't have to be and again probably digressing a little bit it doesn't all have to be one incident. It could be (as you did allude to) it could be multiple events, it could then get hot again it can be another magma can come up, so this is why you can have multiple mineralisation styles all in the same place. Not like well, that’s a red car and that's a blue car, you can have all the different colours in the same car park so your general theory is correct

* A side note, to the southeast you've got this huge crack or looks like a crack or crevice when you look at it from space, could that be remotely related to everything that's happened over the billions of years?
- That’s a regional thrust fault, it's actually called the Havieron Thrust, that's a major crustal feature and then going oblique to that or due north to that is the secondary feature that I've been banging on about.
- That is gold 101, a major crustal feature with a secondary splay coming off it, what can be interesting and again this is all sort of broad brushed geology just to be clear, this is just making general comments, big crustal features can go down deep deep deep into the earth and that's what we call mantle tapping features
- Now Havieron Thrust may or may not be a major tapping feature but it's certainly in the scale it could be, that can be it's almost like a leak, could be the thing that got these rocks from way down deep to way up much closer to the earth because if I that's provided the pathway on that sense and then you've got the secondary splay where it's perhaps been remobilized along with a smaller bit of plumbing
- But great thing about being a geologist is you can arm wave like this can't you and you can make stories to fit your narrative but when we present these stories, these are based on looking at other gold deposits around the world and you know geologists aren't all waving at maps and making up stories
- Geology is a great science in that it is a closed science, we don't have massive gaps in understanding geology, both of how the earth works and how mineralisation does, there's always new things to learn but you can apply these basic techniques whether you're in W.Australia or W.Africa or the Tensyan mountains or up in Greenland. We apply those same models and lo and behold, very often you find gold in those same settings.
 
* And that's where the geologists get excited because by bringing up live drill cores, they're able to have a look at what's under the ground because it's not like you can just cut a whole section out and look at it like it's those cliffs in Devon that you mentioned, and then they're able to read, to look at them and see what flows have happened over the years and then that's how they would suggest where their next drill should go?
- It is kind of how it works, we look at the rock type first you know when a bit of core comes up or you know you hand a rock to a geologist and the first thing he does, he looks at what he thinks the rock is and we've got all these classifications for rocks, a whole scale often based on magnesium and iron content and that's just the way it's done. You go through the felsic through the mafic through the ultramafic, they’re the sort of 3 types from an igneous rock perspective cluster that we're looking at, we have a look at that and we go right well we think that rock was basically that, we then look within the rock so we identify the rock, so we say right that's a gabbro, okay within that rock we then look for sort of the pathfinders to what could be in there.
- So, you've got a couple of layers for that first of whether you can see any structures and often you've seen pictures of core with sharp lines going with little micro faults or breccia faults where all the rock's been cracked so you can come up with a sort of textural generic description of that rock, you then have a look at what we call alteration.
- So what is alteration. Alteration is that that rock has been or…..in its perfect world it would be born like ‘this’, it's then been subject to fluid flow or temperature or pressure or all of the above at the same time and that creates, that then changes the minerals within it and we have all these little things we learn at university where we can recognize those new minerals and then conclude what the old ones probably were and we look for leaching, bleaching, chloride, all words you've seen in and around all the geology around the Paterson.
- Chlorite biotite actinide alteration, what that means is that some fluid heat and pressure has changed the mineral composition and that is interesting because that starts to tell you you're heading towards some heat and fluid and all those good things. Then you look for the shiny stuff which was I only ever good enough to recognize, all the other stuff is too hard and that's the sulphides and that's where it gets good, so you look for your sulphide species. These are all the brassy goldy silvery coloured things that we all like to see, minerals we like to see and they're typically metal sulphides. Now a large number of them are iron sulphides which in and of themselves have no economic value per se and we then have a whole range of copper sulphides etc., when you've got chalcopyrite you know there's some copper there etc. but it doesn't mean that it’s economic
- Why is this important for gold is because gold in a simple sense likes to hang out with those minerals, it gets scavenged by and is deposited aside or within, not always and again because there's always such a huge broad brush stroke in geology but gold lives alongside and within the crystals of some of those, it could be chalcopyrite, it could be pyrite - Fool's Gold. Fool's Gold can have gold in it, it's not gold but there are a lot of gold mines where the gold is contained within crystals of pyrite and pyrrhotite which can be magnetic sometimes.
- We look for all of those sulphide minerals, now we know that at Havieron in some areas there's some really good sulphide content, the sulphide crescent being the most obvious one and that core just looks sexy as hell, but what's really interesting is there's a whole range of other mineralisation styles and we're just starting to get a good look at that on the recent updates you're starting to see.
- Some of these breccias don't seem to have a very high sulphide content, they will have sulphides in them but they're not what we call massive sulphide lenses, now that's where it gets interesting because if I’m being absolutely frank that's kind of what we're looking for, we don't think we'll find a sulphide crescent because we don't have that bullseye magnetic target.
- But that doesn't mean - you know give me that breccia all day long baby because you know that is of interest to us, we also encountered some sulfidic diorites, I don't think those diorites in and of themselves have contained gold within them, they do contain sulphides which is unusual, we do need to get some chemical assays on that and understand what it means, whether it was a source or a host or blah blah blah but where we got really interested about hitting those diorites is because from the pictures that I’ve seen publicly available and the presentations done by Newcrest those diorites seem to form a bit of a core at the centre of Havieron.
- So, I don't understand what the significance of that is you know, it forms a crowning or I’m not sure but you know these are all just small things you're doing, clues on the way to telling you where to drill that next hole because that was the original question you asked me and the way around that is to put all that together - and that's what tells you where the next hole is.

* Just sitting and listening to you I can tell how excited you are just about the whole process, that's without actually then having your Eureka! moment of the potential of something coming up of massive significance that that then actually benefits the companies and shareholders along the way.
- I'll be absolutely clear and this is a sales pitch to myself as a salesperson and if you told me 5 10 15 20 years ago that I'd be drilling in - just to be clear - in W. Australia next to a 20 plus million ounce discovery I would have laughed at you. You don't get opportunities, first of all, we didn't think there were many 20 million ounces left to be found if any but then to be in a position where we have the ground next to it, because I do remind people when they look at those tenement maps right (because I’m going to go on to a couple questions I know you're dying to ask me!) but those, most of those tenement boundaries were drawn up 15-20 years ago
- It wasn't drawn like that because they thought only Havieron was there and the rest was all rubbish, we're all just fools to fate in history right, so when people go well you know or they've cut that out so there's obviously nothing here there, well these were decisions made well before anyone knew there's anything there, but I think what's really interesting is that opportunity to drill in in W.Australia is that we're not taking any sovereign risk
- There's a lot of countries I wouldn’t invest my money in, I certainly wouldn't invite anyone else to invest their money there either, you know to have that opportunity, that leverage is well I would never get it again - it won't happen again, I wish it would but it probably won't and from that sense I think people have misunderstood what we've done you know
- I've been involved with some great teams, we've done huge drill outs in Africa and things like that and that was all great but I'm in W.Australia, I can raise the money at good prices to go drill our targets, there's nothing wrong with doing deals with majors by the way, the deal that Greatland did with Newcrest was a cracking deal and it was the right deal
- As you know I was a shareholder and I supported it ,I think we were top five shareholders and supported it. It was a great perfect thing to do but I can leverage off the benefit of you know Shaun, Callum and Gervaise’s work now because there's a mine under construction nearby, so I can go and find my resources and work out what I want to do with it
- So I think people go ‘oh well you haven't done a joint venture’, why would you do a joint venture, we haven't, we've only just started drilling it, you know me contracting DDH1, you know there's some really smart people in all these companies you know from Newcrest to Greatland, I could pay to get the same drill rigs to drill the holes where I want to drill , doing a deal with a major does not guarantee success, they do not have x-ray eyes that none of us have you know, we have specifically kept 100% of our ground because we love our ground, because we think we're going to make a discovery and I could afford to and we take no political risk in doing so.
- We go out and do the work and that is an unfathomable and i think people have misinterpreted the fact that we haven't done a joint venture as somehow a reflection of our ground. I mean nothing could be further, the exact opposite is the truth and that isn't me being smug or arrogant, that is just being realistic and as I said earlier, let being able to have the luxury that people before me didn't have and in that sense, you know it doesn't get any better than this.

* No not at all, I guess from your perspective it's and please do stop me if I’m not right here is actually if and obviously it's a massive if, if the company chose to go down the route of a venture with somebody else further along the line you would actually have more information, more data and more stuff to present to them to say THIS is what we have?
- 100%, look I’ve been involved in some decent-sized M&A in the mining sector and here’s a couple of things that don't happen, I wish they did, trust me I wish I really wish they did but big companies don't come along and write junior companies massive cheques for unproven ideas - it doesn't happen, if you're running a 40 billion gold company you have board processes etc that mean you have to base your valuation on something.
- I think we're seeing a good example of this at the minute but I’ll stick with my story, you have to create some value there you know, you can do a joint venture and let them take some exploration risk but I can't think of some circumstances under which we would do that before we've drilled a decent amount of holes and made a discovery, why would I? So the point is , so yes to burst a few bubbles you know big companies do not come along and write billion dollar cheques for companies that have some interesting ground and some ideas, you've got to put some meat on the bone.
- I'll give you a great example, when we said Kalahari and I was a director of extract at the top, we did a hundred million dollars’ worth of drilling to drill that project out, we already had Rio Tinto as a major shareholder and a Toshi group etc, but funnily enough you have to allow people to be able to - if you want to sell you have to allow them to be able to buy you - so you have to create some value, you can't just expect them to come and write a blank billion dollar cheque for some ground, it doesn't work that way.
- So our plan is really really simple , make a discovery, keep drilling, drill it drill it drill it, make it bigger, make it bigger, make it bigger and then you can sit down and have a grown-up discussion in real corporate land where people say well I can pay X for a reserve ounce, Y for a resource ounce, because I’ve got a good reserve and resource, I can pay Z for your exploration.
- You can sit down there, you can come up with your model and I’m sure we know of a company that's probably doing something like this right now over a certain five percent stake and you know that's how you create value and so you know, I'm a huge fan of the team for Greatland because that's exactly what they're doing, and so that's our plan and that's what we're going to execute.

* Which is what I’m really excited for it , just to watch it all happen and unfold and as we mentioned earlier writing your own story and writing your own chapters in the book which is just fantastic. Well, unfortunately as fast as that time went, that is our time, we are now all out of time so I would love to thank you very much for your time this morning on this Artemis Resource’s presentation.