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  [Music] welcome to CEO insights I'm Marilyn de Gman with investing news.com I'm speaking with Dre Nelson CEO of innovation mining a gold producer with an Innovative new technology that can be a GameChanger in the gold extraction process welcome DNE hi thanks Marilyn so maybe let's start our conversation with just an overview of the company what's Innovation Mining and what are the key aspects of the company that that you would like investors to know about sure Innovation mining was actually started

as a as a a mining company with very strong uh team with strong mineral background both the executive team and the board of directors and um along the way we determined that uh we wanted to explore further alternatives to cite because we you know we were looking at how do we advance these projects into production quickly it one of the fastest ways of doing that is finding an alternative to Cai um and as you may or may not know 90% of the world's gold is produced using Cyanide and there's really no

alternative so along the way we actually made a discovery we have our own chemistry lab here in Vancouver and we made a discovery of a of a particular formula that is now producing the same results as cyanide same recoveries for the same price but it's non-toxic and so our sh our our Focus shifts from the mining side of the business of course more to the technology side um we um then realized that this Market is$ two billion dollar a year roughly of cyanide being used in Gold Mining and there

really is no alternative so you know we think it's a fairly uh important Discovery you know I think it could be one of the uh the game changers in the industry uh we've spoken with a lot of mining companies we've just completed you know thousands of of of tests using this Solution on various ores tailings even concentrates and are now in discussions with some fairly large siiz miners that are we're doing ongoing testing on the uh uh the big question that everybody seems to come up with is

you know it just sounds too good to be true and and you know we face that on a on a daily basis and the only way that you can really overcome that objection is by um continuing to to validate the technology independently and so we've just completed a whole series of tests with SGS labs and Bank cver um and we were hands-off they did all of the testing in-house and they produced almost identical results of the uh uh the leech kinetics and the recoveries using our solution versus Cyanide and so

that's the initial validation that we're we're now getting back and so that's really changed a lot for us and uh uh the market is immense as I said two billion dollars a year um and our solution offers other benefits it might be the the same price as cide for the product but it tends to be much much more reusable you know the reusability quotient is higher than that of cyanide which helps again Lower the cost um but there's a lot of ancillary cost savings the cost of insurance for an operating

mine using cyanide is extensive um the cost of shipping handling um monitoring testing and then of course there's the site remediation that follows um there's a lot of reasons why economic reasons why the mines would be shifting from cyanite to our product but the other side of it is of course ESG you know social license you know uh offering an environmentally friendly alternative you know um we believe that um there are many countries around the world that are currently uh prohibiting the use of Cyanide and by providing an

an alternate it can really unlock the value of those deposits in countries where you're not allowed to use cyanide or in certain minerals such as copper gold complexes where cyanide is not effective sulfide ores or cyanide is not effective uh arop pyite based um concentrates you know so there's a lot of reasons why we feel the industry will adopt this uh U this disruptive new technology so let's break this down a little bit maybe for investors that would not want to know more want to know

more about this technology could you provide sort of the science the chemical uh why is it non-toxic like talk about a little bit more about this technology yeah what's really interesting is we stumbled across this this chemistry that actually mimics the chemical properties of Cyanide and I don't want to get too Tech too technical but essentially what happens when you're using cyanide or our solution is it creates a cide gold complex uh ours creates a very similar very stable complex and then it's recovered using

carbon the same way and that's again from a um an infrastructure or integration standpoint it's important to understand that our solution can be swapped out for Cyanide without the necessity for massive infrastructure changes that you know other Alternatives might uh might face they um from a chemical standpoint it is um very it's very stable and I think of the other important aspects of it is the fact that it's stable long term like not only is the the gold complex we produ stable but

just leaving the material the the solution sitting outside is much more stable cide tends to U in natural conditions or in in conditions where you're getting rain if if the cyanide uh solution drops below a pH of 9.3 you tend to off gas so you're losing a lot of sin so it becomes unstable ours is much more stable in in a natural environment as well so in a in um you know an application in a mining application could you talk about the scale you've said um you've done some um tests uh and have had received some

results on that what about uh scale like how are you addressing um its application you know as you scale the mining operation yeah that's the interesting part is that all that we're dealing with is water soluble salts the same way cyanide is water soluble or or table salt is water soluble and so any water-based chemistry like that um is is that is highly soluble is undoubtedly uh scalable so if it works you know five grams per liter in one liter it doesn't matter if that's one liter or a million

liters it's still five grams per liter so the scalability should not be an issue and we're not seeing that we we've gone from uh Beaker to 1 kilo column test to 100 kilo column test to 250 kilo uh that Leach tests um so we're not seeing any any uh change in the um the the the chemical composition or degradation or any changes in the recovery on scale of course the next big step is um to test it at a mind sight in a in a 100 ton uh test side by side against cite and so those are the sorts

of things that we hope to do after our IPO in in May June of this year is to push out for commercial scale testing later later in this year good so what's um uh you know let's talk about that what's the strategy then so you're testing this are you testing this in your own um production Minds how are you what's your strategy for commercialization what we're doing now is we have about 20 different Minds that have sent us samples and we're we're testing all the samples and we will be

determining one or more of those samples as uh as a candidate for an on-site pilot test and so what we'll do is we will have a an outside certification lab work with us on site and we will do those 100 T side by-side tests at that particular mine location and then that gives us the ability to um Talk the world about the uh commercial application of this of this this chemical so I'm just curious like with all the um you know the talk about the toxicity of cyanide why has there been any alternative done and has there been

any alternative that's been perced and why have they not um succeeded a lot of people have been trying to find an alternative cyanide for a long time for it's been around for over 200 years um there's been a lot of attempts there's really only you know five chemical compounds that can really dissolve gold um most of them are highly oxidated you've got bromine chlorine iodine um then you've got the Tho sulfates thoras and so on um and the biggest problem with them is that they tend to to

operate in an accelerated oxidated state which means they'll dissolve gold but they dissolve everything else so what about the economic uh benefits the economic potential of your the alternative that you're uh you know presenting to the market can you talk about the economics uh in that regard yeah it's a lot of people don't understand that you know 90% of the world's C is produced using cyanide um and as we made clear there's really no uh viable Alternatives except for what

we have what we have developed and we are developing and and trying to commercialize but there's two billion dollar worth of site and shown every year and you know and I hate to to use Market penetration numbers but a 2% Market penetration would yield some 75 million Us in in Revenue per year and with pretty healthy margins as well so um there's definitely a a need for this and there's definitely a um a business Market model that that makes a lot of sense are there any other upcoming cand

lists that our investors uh should know about we have an IPO coming out in Q2 of this year you know we've raised over $4 million ourselves um I would urge everybody to go to our website have a look at our team we just a tremendous team with lots of successes under our belt um the ipo's coming out we think that uh uh the Market's ready for this the timing is good you know we're starting to see some life come back into the markets in Canada we you think it's time for a clean tech alternative you

know I believe that um based on the minds that we've spoken to there will be a rapid adoption of of this product for new mins but also those existing mines that are out there uh so we see uh the IPO coming up we see uh a lot of relationship Development coming up we're seeing certification coming up uh and then we're also working with a number of chemical manufacturers and I think once we've determined who are um manufacturer distributor Partners is going to be that's going to be another big milestone

and any other type of certification or Pilot scale testing coming up in the next 12 months to 20 certainly a new technology to watch for sure thanks again Dwayne for taking the time to speak with me today thank you so much I really appreciate it and thanks everyone for watching join us again next time for another edition of CEO insights [Music]