Precious Metals Summit - NOVAGOLD RESOURCES INC

Thanks to Precious Metals for the invitation to present here in Zurich. It's great to be here. So Falcon is an ASX-listed company. We're based in Melbourne, and I'll be talking to you today about two exploration projects we have that are very exciting, and we've been getting some amazing results in the last 12 months. The first of this is the Blue Moon project, which is our flagship asset. This is the northern extension of the 22-million-ounce Bendigo Goldfield. It's an extraordinary opportunity because it had basically never been drilled before, despite being north of a 22 million ounce ore body. So some amazing things happening there. And we've just started drilling our Erobiti gold project in WA, which is an exciting emerging new gold district in WA. You might have heard of the Glenberg deposit that Ben's have been working on. And we have just done our first drill holes there ever. And we hit bedrock mineralisation from the get-go. So that will form the basis of the talk today. I won't talk about our Pyramid Hill gold project. That's a very regional land package up sort of north and west of Blue Moon, and that'll be sort of generating new targets over the next year or two. And we just put out some results recently at the Corfu Reef, which is an emerging new prospect as well. So that's one to watch out for, but I won't be talking about that today. A quick corporate snapshot. I think we've got a very strong register for a pre-resource exploration company. Some of the best gold funds in the business are backing our projects and our team. We've got 1832, Ixios, Jupiter, Franklin, so a very strong institutional register, which I think speaks for itself. Share price is around 40 cents. Cash, very strong cash balance. We've Got 38 million Australian cash in the bank at the end of September, which is a nice bit of money to do what we need to do. And the market cap was just over 100 million. Very strong board. I think that speaks for yourself as well. We've GOT a couple of directors that have had some tremendous success in Australia discovering major raw bodies. is Mark Bennett, famous for discovering the Nova Bollinger nickel deposit, and Alex Dorch from Chalice discovered the Gonville deposit in Western Australia, and that's a massive polymetallic ore body. So we are looking for major discoveries and I think we've got the team to do it. And I'll also point out Doug Windsor there on the far right. He's our Bendigo born and bred exploration manager, and he is driven to find the next big discovery, and he's put his foot both on the Blue Moon deposit and our Erebiti deposit, and is a fabulous operator, so we have a very strong technical team. So on to Blue Moon. There's a drill rig. We've got three diamond rigs operating 24-7 at the northern extension of Bendigo. So you can see one of the rigs up on screen there. So we are drilling a lot of metres at Bendigo and there's a picture on the right of some of the visible gold we hit last year and that's the hit that really got things moving for us and that is what Bendigo is famous for. So for those of you who don't know much about Bendigo, the Bendigo zone is a world-class gold province. It's home to several massive world- class deposits that are very high-grade. The most famous of which, obviously, is Bendigo itself. That was 22 million ounces at 15 grams. It really did put Victoria on the map when it was discovered. It was 1851 when it was first, when they first hit gold there. For the next 65 years straight, the Bendigo gold mine produced more than 200,000 ounces a year. So that's an extraordinary, this is an extraordinary bit of geology. And 25 kilometres away to the east, we have the Fosterville gold mine. And this is also another bit of an extraordinary geology. So when Agnico Eagle discovered the Swan Zone just under 10 years ago, that gold mine became one of the best gold mines in the world and they were pumping out $1 billion of free cash a year in 2020-2021 and it's still going strong today. And Agnco have also been talking publicly about really spending a lot of money on the ground at Fosterville and their big regional package. So it's great to have a company of the size and reputation of Agnoco Eagle as a big brother next door. So onto Blue Moon. So you can see it there. It is the northern extension of Bendigo. You can see below it there's that 22 million ounce gold field, which hasn't been mined for some time. We basically have the northern extinction of that. My exploration manager believed that it had never been drilled before. So we came along and stuck in our first hole in July last year and hit those tremendous grades. You Can see they're right from the get-go. So this confirmed that Bendigo keeps going to the north. And we have, this is a large scale project. This is six kilometres of strike and up to 10 reefs east-west. So this has potential to be a very large project indeed. So just zooming in a bit more on Bloomin' itself, you can see there those purple lines, they're the reefs that made up that 22 million-ounce oil body at Bendigo, and you can say we have the northern continuation of that. When we got this granted in 2023, we did a full data review. We got a hold of a 3D reconstruction of all the underground workings and all the drilling at the Bendigo mine, and that gave us a lot of information about where to line our first drill hole. We chose the Garden Gully line of reef. That was a 5.2 million ounce line of roof and you'll see that in the short fly-through I have which explains it beautifully. And the high-grade shafts went right up to our tenement boundary. We just stuck our first hole in and hey presto, hit gold from the get-go. And our data review also confirmed this northern extension of Bendigo had never previously been drilled before which is the most extraordinary thing about this story. And the reason it was never drilled before is through this long, you can see this long section. So on the left, we have the Bendigo Mine. And just to be clear, we don't own the Bendago Mine. You can see there's a whole sea of shafts. I've only highlighted the 10 best shafts and as you go to the north, you can see that yellow zone, which is where the high-grade reefs occur. You can see it starts to plunge and get deeper. And the other side of the tenement boundary, where we are, those historical shafts never got deep enough to get into the good zone. So people just assumed that Bendigo didn't keep going. So we've come along, we drilled that first hole there in the red, and the rest is history. We hit high-grade visible gold right from the start. We've now defined 850 metres of strike on that garden gully line. We have got five stacked structures and what we are seeing is classic Bendigo mineralisation. Multiple stacked reefs, very continuous along strike. These reefs go for kilometres and high- grade coarse gold. So we have only just started this journey. We only draw 850 metres or so. We still have kilometres left to test and that is what we are doing right now and this is only one of the reefs. There are nine and other reefs to see if we can do the same thing. This fly-through just puts it all into perspective. We have a very large ground holding in Victoria, so right all in the Bendigo Zone, or most of it in the Mendigo Zone. There's the Bendugo gold deposit in the middle there with the blue reefs. They're the historical reefs that were mined. Our tenement wraps around those reefs. And as it zooms in, you'll see surface geology peel away, and then you'll say, you'll all the underground workings. So Bendigo was truly an astonishing mine. This was a subterranean world of shafts and drives. You can see some of those shafts are more than a kilometre deep. So it really did produce a lot of gold and was very prolific for a very long period of time. The garden gullies in the green, that's the one we targeted first. So that's a 10-kilometre-long reef. It produced 5.2 million ounces. And they're the interpreted quartz structures. You can just see how continuous they are along strike. Once you hit one, you can just follow it for many kilometres. Now, as you get to our tenement boundary, you can see that it starts to plunge and get deeper. And then you have our drilling. And you can see there, our reefs line up exactly with the historical ones. And importantly, we've got all this drilling still to come. So we're doing 200-metre step-out lines. We want to demonstrate scale here before we go back and look at infill drilling. So this is all about demonstrating scale. And as I said before, this is only one of the reefs. Now, this map here is from 1903. So they've known about these structures for more than 100 years. They're all mapped. They all outcrop. We don't have to discover the anticlines. It's just a matter of systematically drilling them to the north. and that's what we're doing. So we've started on the garden gully line with two rigs. We've got one rig on the paddies gullyline, so we'll have hopefully a second reef up and running, and then we've got drill approvals to do a whole lot more. So this will be a very systematic drill-out, stepping out, demonstrating the scale of the Bendigo Gold system. And there's some photos of some visible gold, so we get some very nice specimens from the drilling. Now, I'll draw your attention to that bit of core in the middle. That was over 500 grams. When we cut it in half, we had the half core left over. We sent it to the university for CT micro-scanning, and it came up with a pretty amazing result. So basically, they animate the results. These are slices through the core, and it picks out where the gold is. So you peel away the quartz, and then you peel off the shale, and then we're just left with the gold. So this is what made Bendigo famous. You know, coarse, visible gold. Very nuggety, but very rich, and obviously I don't think we're going to have too many issues with the metallurgy at Blue Moon should it get into development. So Blue Moon is very much a scale play. We have to demonstrate this is multi-million ounces. We're off to a flying start. We're doing this 200-metre step-out drilling. This is on the Garden Gully line, so we want to replicate this on some of the other reefs. We've got lots of approvals in place, so there shouldn't be anything that stops us from keeping on stepping out as long as the gold still continues. And we like to say at the moment we're no longer approving the system. We're testing how big this system is. We've confirmed it keeps going. How far does it keep going? And if it keeps going, it could be a multimillion-ounce ore body of very high grade. Right. The Erebidi Gold Project. So this is a new project. We've only just started drilling it. It's located at the very north of the Yulgan. So we specifically went looking for craton margin gold plays. And there's some recent examples of these. These are sort of a relatively new type of deposit. Only in the last few decades that they've been finding these monster ore bodies like Tropicana and Kalawinda, both run by multibillion-dollar companies. So these are great, very large targets. My exploration manager was drawn to that Erebidi zone at the northern end of the Yilgarn. He saw that there was a junior explorer that was looking for lithium in the Pilbara, and they had this permit with a gold anomaly on it that they weren't working on. So two years ago, we approached them to do a joint venture, and they agreed, so up and away. So we're running up to 70%. We just recently announced that we've reached the 51% milestone, and we just started drilling and our first drill holes hit bedrock mineralisation. So I'll just have another drink. So the target that we started drilling is called the Olson Well Prospect. This is a nearly six kilometre long soil anomaly. When we did the joint venture it was only three kilometres. The more soil sampling we did, the bigger the anomaly got. By the end of that program we were getting up to one gram in soils which is very unusual. and we were getting up to 6.4 grams in rock chips. So this is a very compelling target to drill and it had never been drilled before. This is the first drilling ever in this target. And importantly, if you look 35 kilometres to the north-west, you can see the Glenberg deposit. That's owned by a company called Benz Mining. They're now a $1.5 billion company and they recently put out a 10 to 12 million ounce exploration target and they call this area a vast new gold district. I certainly hope they're right because we've got a very big chunk of that vast new Gold District. and we've just started, as I said, we've just started our drilling, got off to a flying start had a very good hit from the first hole so we increased the size of the RC program to 7,500 metres and importantly we also got some government co-funding so it's always good to spend other people's money on your project. This is what it looks like, you can see there the soil anomaly, a very large soil anomaly that's nearly 6km long we're doing RC drilling we started on the south east corner there, very first hole we got 12 metres at 2.8 from surface straight into fresh rock, there's no weathering here and then 240 metres away to the east we got 16 metres at 2.2 from 8 metres also in fresh rock so straight away there's a 240 metres of interpreted strike extent there, it's early days we've only had a few results returned, we've done a lot of drilling since then, I think we've got more than 50 holes where we're waiting on assays we don't have a dip extent, we don'T have any idea of scale yet, that'll all come from the assays so if we do get a dip extent, and some of these drill holes do come in, you can imagine quite quickly this will turn into a project of interest, especially given we're only 35 kilometres away from a 10 to 12 million ounce exploration target. So that's it. We've got high-grade visible gold at Blue Moon, a potentially large-scale project where it's just a systematic drill-out, and we've got the Olsen Well discovery, which obviously early days, but that could quite quickly turn into something of interest and importantly we've Got the cash to do it, $38 million in the bank, and a very strong team. So thanks very much. Well, thank you, Tim. We definitely have time for a question or two, if there's any from the audience. Oh, there's one there. Just wait for the microphone, please. What is going to be the ratio of your expenditures on the two projects? Sure. So Blue Moon is 90%. This Eribidi program is the first ever drilling. It's sort of a one-off program depending on result, and we got quite a lot of government co-funding. so that's only going to cost a few hundred thousand dollars. All up, we're spending about $1.5 million a month on Blue Moon drilling and corporate costs. That doesn't include Eribidi, which, as I said, it's only a couple hundred thousand as a one-off program. If Eribiti turns into something significant, obviously we'll have to reassess our budget, and a lot more of that budget will go into Eribisti, but we're not going to slow down on Blue moon. Well, there's a question there. Thank you for the presentation. What's your budget right now? Well, we're spending $1.5 million a month, all up, so that's our budget. So each drill rig is about $400,000 a month per drill. We've got three drill rigs going, and then there's corporate costs on top of that, so $1,500,000 per month. And that Blue Moon project is a two-year... At the moment, it's a two‑year drill plan. We're planning to do 60,000 metres from last August. Who are your main shareholders, then? So, largest shareholder, Franklin Templeton, with 9%. Jupiter's not far behind. 1832, Commodity Capital, Ixios. Tim Goiter is a substantial shareholder. So, yeah, we've got about 45% of the register is Tim Goitter or large, you know, some of the best gold funds in the business. So, we got very strong backers. Well, I think we've come to the end of time. So Tim, I just want to thank you for the presentation. Good luck on your drilling. I'll certainly be watching. Thank you.