[Music] Welcome to CEO insights. I'm Marilyn de Guzman with investingnews.com. I'm speaking with Kyle Mahalik, mining engineer for Grand Priage Resources, which recently released results from an or sorting test work at its new Amalga Gold project in Alaska. Hi Kyle. Good morning. Yes, good to have you. So maybe just to set the stage, can you uh maybe explain to our uh audience uh why you've utilized sensorbased or sorting for this test work and what are the benefits of this type of or sorting


process? Yeah. So sensor based or sorting involves taking the rock coming out of the mine and placing it on a conveyor belt where each individual piece of rock can be scanned by a variety of different sensors to determine if it's goldbearing ore material or if it's unmineralized waste material and the sorder machine will then pass the rock over a bank of air nozzles. The pieces identified as waste get hit with a jet of compressed air that knocks them into a reject bin. And meanwhile the rocks that the sensors


identified as ore are allowed to fall into the product bin and then get sent to the processing facility. So using that maybe talk us through the highlights of the results of the recent or sorting work that you've done at the new amalgamine. So we worked with Steiner which is a major manufacturer of or sorting equipment and conducted test work using material uh core samples from the new amala project. Uh the these core samples contained a mix of both ore and waste material at the proportions that


we would expect to see when mining some of the narrow high-grade veins within the deposit. And the results really exceeded our expectations because the sorder machine was able to identify and reject nearly all of the waste rock that was mixed in with the ore. So the overall grade of the sample was boosted by about 120%. Going from roughly 6 g per ton before sorting to about 13 g per ton afterwards. And meanwhile the waste material that was rejected assayed only at about a half gram of gold per ton. So


clearly very little gold loss. And what was removed is certainly lowgrade waste material containing very little metal. Is that a sorry so that the or sorting at this stage of your project is that a normal um like a sort of traditional or conventional thing to do to do um or sorting at this stage of the project. So at this stage we are really looking at how to optimize our potential production. Uh we have a uh conceptual mine plan that we assembled without using the or sorting. But we really realized that with this type of deposit


and our particular mine configuration with a uh a direct ship setup or sorting could really have a lot of benefits by removing the material that has no value u prior to sending it to an off-site processing facility. The company's CEO Ian Classen has described these results as gamechanging. Can you talk us uh through why this is uh a gamechanging for for for the company? Yeah, because the the new Amalga project strategy is to process the ore offsite utilizing an existing processing plant owned by a third party. And what the ore


sorting does is uh in our particular test work here, the results reduced the volume of the ore sample by 57% with very little loss of metal. So 57% less material that needs to be transported and certainly a huge potential savings for the uh material transport and processing costs. So let's talk about that. You're in your mind uh uh your conceptual mine production plan you're proposing a direct direct ship um mine which takes it to a third processing third party processing as you've


mentioned. Why does that make sense for this particular project as opposed to building your own processing facility on site? So the new Amalga project has a really unique situation which is that it's a a very high-grade resource that's located near Tidewater uh only a few kilometers away from the Pacific coast. And what that does is it creates the opportunity for very coste effective barge transportation to a variety of potential existing processing facilities around the Pacific Rim. And the the benefit


there is uh really twofold. Uh the first is that it's a major potential reduction in capex to get the project started because it avoids the need to build a brand new processing plant on the site. And then the second benefit is that it enables the project to avoid developing a tailings facility because if there's no processing happening on site, it means no tailings need to be stored at the site. And that dramatically reduces the environmental footprint of the project by around 80% compared to a more


conventional setup. And what it does is it really simplifies and derisks the environmental review and permitting process that's necessary to undertake before construction can begin. So um maybe this is a good time to talk about sort of the overview an overview of the project. What makes it compelling and and what where do you go from here after this uh results? Yeah, now that we have these results in hand, we're going to update our conceptual mind plan and production output estimates based on applying the


ORS orderer technology. And that'll give us a a really truly optimized production plan that we can then take around and engage with various third-party processing facilities to determine which one would be the most favorable. And then once a facility is is selected and uh you know an understanding of preliminary costs are in place we can then move forward with preparing for a preliminary economic assessment for the overall project. What's the timeline that you're looking at for when or do


you have sort of a target timeline for when you start production? Um at this point in time there's a lot of planning, engineering and certainly environmental studies to do. So I'm I will avoid stating a specific time frame but what I will say is that we are currently getting started on a variety of baseline environmental studies concurrently happening with the engineering and the mine planning so that we can be ready to very expeditiously move through the regulatory process once we finalize


details like where we're going to be sending the ore for processing. So because we're not processing on site and because it is such a very very small footprint due to the lack of tailing storage, my expectation is that the environmental review process for this project is going to be much much simpler than uh just about any other more conventional mining project that you'd see in this environment. Great. We'll leave it at that. Thanks again, Cal, for taking the time to speak with me today.


Great. Thank you very much. And thanks everyone for watching. Join us again next time for another edition of CEO Insights.