$4.6B Copper Project in BC, But Can the Capex Be Funded? | Surge Copper CEO Interview

**Leif Nilsson** (0:00)
This video is sponsored by Terrahutton, who makes the invisible, investible. Today on the CEO BBQ, Copper and Molybdenum Development in Central British Columbia, together with Surge Copper. But if you're short on time, subscribe to our free newsletter, and once a week, we'll send you a five-minute summary of all interviews we put out, resourcetalks.com for a free weekly newsletter. Now, although this company has paid us for the production of this video, you should still understand that we are not financial advisors, and this is not intended as financial advice. It is a broad, general, and in-personal piece of information intended only for those who know and understand the risks of junior mining, of which there are many. Before moving on, read the company's official filings on SitterPlus.ca and do your own due diligence. Pause the screen and read all the disclaimers I've shown you because your capital is at risk. If this isn't clear, go to the last section of this video for a longer explanation of risks and biases and do not consume this content if you don't agree with everything said therein. Moving on, this is not Surge's first time on the CEO BBQ. Leif's been on multiple times over the last couple of years. So if it's your first time hearing about the company, I'm going to post a link to a playlist containing all those previous interviews. Please watch those first. If you haven't, they contain the basic smell test, the basic grilling and all that, which we're not going to be repeating here today. Although there's going to be at least a little bit of grilling, this is the CEO BBQ after all. In a nutshell though, Surge Copper's flagship acid is the Berg Copper Project, a Copper Mali Project actually in West Central British Columbia. It's roughly 100 kilometers north west of the town of Smitters. Berg is a porphyry. It's actually a alkyl alkane porphyry.
It's got mostly copper and molybdenum in it, but it also has some silver byproducts and a little bit of gold in it as well.
It does have a lot of copper and a lot of moly though, and they recently did a PFS on it. A pre-fusibility study was published about two weeks ago, showing a rather large NPV as well. This is a $4.6 billion asset with a 24 percent IRR. Any payback of just under three years under the assumption of 475 copper, $20 moly, $45 silver, and $3,500 gold. Twenty-eight year mine life sees close to nine billion pounds of copper coming out of there, and the first five years are actually averaging a lot of it too. They're averaging 416 million pounds per annum with a C1 cash cost at under $2 per pound of copper equivalent. Mine's that big, don't come cheap though. The initial capex to build this thing here is $4.7 billion, and the sustaining is $1.7 billion for a 120,000 TPD concentrator as well as a bunch of other stuff, of course. The connection to the BC Hydro grid and the conveyor to the processing plan and so on and so forth. We'll talk about that later on, hopefully. Following the release of that PFS, they're now preparing the 2026 field program that includes some geotechnical and drilling as well as some resource conversion drilling along with environmental baseline work to support permitting, of course. Which we'll definitely talk about that later on in the conversation. Briefly though, not unimportantly, Surge also holds the UTSA property. It's not only Berg in their portfolio. UTSA has several porphyry deposits on it located adjacent to the past producing Huckleberry Mine.
But that asset, so UTSA hasn't really seen all that much material work in recent years as obviously all the efforts have been directed at advancing Berg. But maybe that's changing or maybe not. I don't know. I do intend to figure out later on because it's been a while since we've gotten an update on what the plans are there.
A bit of the details here and some of the numbers, Surge is listed as well Surge but without an E. So S-U-R-G on the TSX-V in Canada, where the average trading volume over the last three months has been close to a million units.
Although that's actually changed a little bit over the last 10 days, where the average volume has been 2 million units. Market cap is almost exactly $201 million, and with 386 million shares outstanding, today this is a 52-cent stock. This is actually a good point for me to shut up because I do have a question about that but first of all, Leif, thank you for being here today.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:20)
Yeah, thanks very much. It's great to be back.