Feasibility study

It's been a very busy few months for Nucor Gold.

In June, you put out a, a pre-feasibility study on your Enchi Gold project in Ghana.

That delivered a $647 million USD after tax, um, net present value at a five percent discount rate, 45% IRR, and that was at a $4,200 per ounce, uh, spot gold price.

Initial CapEx there, about $351 million.

Fair enough.

Let's, uh, look to the future.

You've completed the PFS, you're now working on a feasibility study.

What are some of the key remaining technical work streams that you need to complete to be able to deliver the feasibility study, and what sort of timeline are you looking at to deliver that study?

Okay.

Doing energy audits, feasibility studies, helping folks decide what's the next best step for saving energy, improving bottom line, determine if renewable energy makes sense from solar to wind, digesters, geothermal, and then also helping them figure out is there grant money available, is there incentives through utilities, all that kind of stuff to make it affordable.

Perfect.

I'll probably have you go a little closer with that if you can.

What was this designed to do?

Yeah, the intention of this drilling program was to support the feasibility study and also increase the confidence in the deposit through additional drill results.

And so I imagine you're pretty happy with what you're seeing so far.

Yeah, thus far it's been very encouraging.

So were you looking at one specific area of that? Like tell me sort of the, because I know it's a bit of a widespread area.

So you were looking at certain areas?

The intention of this drilling program was to increase the confidence in the resource as we move into the feasibility study.

So this was intended to fill some of those gaps as well as, like I mentioned, increase the confidence in the deposit.

Now, the reason we made that decision to pivot back is extracts getting excellent results, but it's preliminary and it would require a lot more testing to prove it.

So with cyanide, we can advance to our pre-feasibility study, hopefully before the year end, as we're trying to get that finalized.

And that will allow us to then start the permitting process.

And to reiterate, the permits were never fully shut down after Kinross closed because they never completed a reclamation.

Silver is a critical mineral.

Copper is a critical mineral.

and um there is something called fast 41 which we could apply to but we're too preliminary we're not going to do anything until we get that pre-feasibility study out and we advance to the permitting

so the pfs you're expecting by view four

Ah, the ultimate reality check.

The feasibility study.

This is the non-negotiable quantitative analysis you run before deploying serious capital.

The spreadsheet phase.

So it's about survival.

Yes.

The feasibility study isn't designed to suffocate your spirit.

It's designed to expose the fatal flaws while they are still incredibly cheap to fix on a spreadsheet rather than catastrophic to fix in a courtroom.

I'll be thinking about that until those assays come through.

And those rocks won't even, they're sitting on the ground right now because we have to prioritize the resource holes so the geology can catch up to the feasibility study.

We're essentially done the engineering for the mine.

It's just the geology we need to catch up.

I know you guys have been chomping at the bit for years to get back there, but it makes sense to start with Blueberry because you can drive to it.

As you said, it's easy road access, and then it's important for building out the resource model for...

Going to the feasibility study.

Now there's that middle prong, which is basically stepping out along the trend.

And then on top of that, on the order of another $10 million will be spent this year on pre-feasibility level studies and work.

So metallurgical work, we're doing hydrogeology work, other geotech work on facility locations, the kind of trade-offs that you'd expect to be part of a pre-feasibility study are underway, as well as environmental baseline work.

community engagement, First Nation engagement type work, all the, again, those pieces that are required for the project to enter the EA process.

So let's call it a $30 million budget for this year.

So we basically have mapped it out.

So there's going to be a drill hole through every stope, which is the mined area in our preliminary economic assessment.

And the idea with that is that it should increase the bulk of the ounces in the south zone to the measured category as part of the pre-feasibility study.

We have put out some results like we had a hole just a week ago, this hole 117 that returned 12 grams over just over 12 grams over just over 10 meters.

that are making the demand for contractor and labor availability scarce and definitely a risk that we're monitoring.

I thought I heard in another interview that you had quite a few feasibility studies that were going to be sequenced out as well, too.

What's the reason for those and how many do you have coming up?

Yeah, so in May of last year, of 2025, we published five PEAs on all of our projects in the development plan.

We're also well advanced on the feasibility study for the Cove underground mine.

So that should be coming out, if not this month, sometime in early Q4.

And then we're also advancing feasibility studies on the Archimedes underground, which we intend to publish mid-year next.

And we're working on a pre-feasibility study for the Mineral Point open pit, which is also on that mid-next year timeline.

And we're well underway with the engineering study.

I think we put out that we're about halfway through our pre-feasibility study.

So we've completed the gap analysis.

That is, we've identified areas where we need more information.